You’re being watched. Spies are everywhere, monitoring your every move. They go where you go, tap into your private conversations. They try to invade your thoughts and if you’re out of earshot they’ll be reading your lips.

Is it true that there’s no such thing as real privacy? That in the quest to get ahead, to gain a competitive advantage that people will invade your space and, well, your lips? Is someone always cheating, looking for the answers to the test, trying to rig the game, looking for ways to stick it to the man? … Or do the cheaters and spies and totally obsessed lip readers only exist in the NFL and Major League Baseball?

NFL teams are really worried about lip readers. They show the coaches a hundred times a game and they know they’re gonna be on TV so as they call the plays they hold a piece of cardboard up in front of their face to foil the lip readers. Fuckin’ NFL espionage.

The piece of cardboard they hold up has all the plays written on it – so tell me this – if international spies are watching football coaches because knowing the play in advance is the fast track to the SuperBowl, why can’t the professional lip readers just read the plays on the cardboard play sheet that the paranoid coach is holding up in front of his face? The card is all color-coded according to what down it is and by how many yards to gain and what yard line you’re on and the phase of the moon. It’s the motherload of information for the professional spy.

Oh, I know why they can’t do that, the sleuths that are watching NFL coaches can only read lips, not the written word.

So where exactly are these spies that have NFL coaches in so much fear that they won’t expose their lips? Are they right there on the sideline, up in a luxury suite with binoculars, in the blimp with night-vision goggles or are they watching the game on TV from a foreign country with one of those wireless headsets on and then passing on the details via satellite to another communist operative who is at the game?

So the coach calls they play and the enemy reads his lips … and then what? Do you call a timeout? What if the spies see that the play caller then changes the play after the timeout, do you call another timeout? You’re gonna run out of fuckin’ timeouts pretty fast.

Let’s say that you don’t have any timeouts left and your highly-trained lip reader deciphers that the play is going to be a streak to the flanker, how do you tell your defense? Do you start jumping up and down, STREAK, STREAK, STREAK! Do you radio it in to your defensive captain? The fuckin’ clock’s running, how is he supposed to tell the cornerback and safety? Now all of the defensive linemen are standing up wondering why their nutty coach is yelling FREAK, FREAK, FREAK!

If you’re spending Sunday afternoons holding cardboard in front of your face then you don’t have a spy problem, you’ve got a reality problem, that is, you’ve lost touch with it.

♦

There are two outs in the top of the ninth inning and the catcher wants to talk to the pitcher. Before he makes it halfway to the mound the pitcher puts his glove over his mouth and nose. Does he love the smell of leather? Does he think his mitt is an oxygen mask? Does he have bad teeth and wants to hide them from the television close-up?

Nope, it’s the damn lip readers. It’s a fact that more lip readers are employed by professional sports teams than any other occupation.

So the pitcher thinks the batter or someone in close contact with the batter will try to figure out the next pitch by reading his lips as he talks to the catcher. The catcher has on twelve pounds of equipment including a catcher’s mask that completely covers his entire face … you could point the fuckin’ Hubble Telescope at this dude and still not be able to make out what nationality he is. Still, as he approaches the mound he puts his catcher’s glove in front of his face.

These lip readers are really serious and really scary.

So now they talk:
“So this guy can’t hit the curveball.”
“I know.”
“You think I should throw him the curveball?”
“Ya, throw him the curveball.”
“Doesn’t he know I’m gonna throw him the curveball?”
“Ya, but it doesn’t matter because he can’t hit the curveball.”
“So if he can’t hit the curveball why do we have our mitts in front of our faces worried that he’ll see us talking about the curveball … Why didn’t you just yell out, ‘Hey throw this fucker the curveball’?”

While the pitcher and catcher are talking, the firstbase coach is talking to the hitter. Both of them are talking into their jerseys because they’re afraid that counter-spies will try to read their lips as they try to read the pitcher’s lips:
“You know, they’re gonna throw you a curveball.”
“How do you know, did you read this guy’s lips the last time we played them?”
“Well, yeah, but we really didn’t need to … everyone knows you can’t hit a fuckin’ curveball.”

♦

I say fuck the strategy and all that hard work and preparation, today’s game is won by outsmarting the opponent and that means infiltrating his mind and reading his lips.

Photo credit: Melly Kay on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-ND