30: Baseball Signs: Visual Literacy at Play

Children attending school often bring with them unique literacies related to their experiences outside of school. These experiences may come from their families, their early schooling (preschool or daycare), or arts, sports, and other activities in which they participate. For children who participate in T-ball or baseball, they may bring to school literacy in the signs and signals of baseball—a creative type of sign language with a “vocabulary” understood only by members of the same team.

Unlike many types of literacies, where the goal is to communicate a message that can be understood by many people, with baseball signs, the goal is for the message to be understood only by a few select people: those who are members of a specific sports team. This sign language is used to communicate from catcher to pitcher, infielder to outfielder, manager to base coach, base coach to base runners, and various other combinations of team members. By using this “secret” visual language, coaches (usually the third base coach) are able to communicate with their players about what they want them to do, from trying to steal a base to hitting a particular pitch in a certain way. For example, the job of the third base coach is to give signals to the batter and the base runners. All of these players must be sure to look at the third base coach so that they know what to do once a pitch is thrown. The team may have many signals for different plays, but there is a “key” or “indicator” signal, and all signals given before this key signal are invalid. Usually, the sign directly following the key signal indicates the play to be made. For example, according to the Baseball Canada web site (http://www.baseball.ca/), the following list shows some possible signals which may exist in a team’s system: