HOU STILL NEED A GOOD BEATIN’
Virus delays first meeting of Yankees, Astros since cheating scandal
Oh what a weekend it could have been. After a spring of bitter barbs, calling the Astros cheaters and basically saying their 2017 World Series title is a fraud, according to the original 2020 MLB schedule, the Yankees were supposed to be opening a series in Houston Friday night.
Of course, that schedule has been ripped up and the season thrown into uncertainty by the national coronavirus crisis. As MLB and the players union meet and try to negotiate the health, safety and financial groundwork for a shortened 2020 season, the heat of that controversy has faded a bit.
Still, Friday night would have been the first time the Yankees would have seen Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman and the rest of the Astros since they were officially unmasked by MLB as cheaters. It also would have been interesting with former Astros ace Gerrit Cole coming back to MinuteMaid Park for the first time as a Yankee.
Thursday, Brian Cashman admitted it was not easy getting over the idea that the Astros cheated the Yankees out of a World Series appearance. In January, MLB confirmed what most of baseball had suspected for some time.
“There is a little bit of frustration with the fact that after the fact that [Jimmy O’Brien] Jomboy for instance put out a video decoding, clarifying what the Oakland A’s Mike Fiers kind of revealed what was transpiring. He went into the archives and found the video of how the scheme was working. There’s frustration of, Wow, we knew something was going on and we complained about it. But we didn’t have the facts of what it specifically was,” Cashman said on a Zoom call Thursday benefiting the Family Center of Stamford (Conn.). “Once you saw it playing out, decoding it, how could we not have figured that out? But we tried every which way. They’re doing something, we don’t know what they’re doing, we don’t know how they’re getting the signals. But it’s clear as day; the whole industry knew about it. And we weren’t the only team complaining about it, everybody was. We just could not figure out, you know, the intercept, so to speak. So yeah, they clearly benefited from it.”
The Astros were illegally using electronics to steal the signs of opposing catchers and relaying them in real-time to hitters during their 2017 World Series season and into 2018. They were initially using a garbage can in the dugout to audibly signal the hitter, but most in baseball suspect they went on to make that system more sophisticated. MLB’s report largely just confirmed what had been reported in the media.
Commissioner Rob Manfred fined the Astros $5 million, a meager amount (but the maximum allowed by the league), docked them two years of draft picks and suspended manager A.J. Hinch and GM Jeff Luhnow from the game for a year. Owner Jim Crane fired them within an hour of the report going public.
Since MLB had given the players immunity in exchange for their testimony about the scam, the punishment and the findings in the report left most of baseball feeling cheated.
Especially the Yankees, who lost to the Astros in Game 7 of the 2017 American League Championship Series and in
Game 6 of the 2019 ALCS. The Yankees players were vocal that they thought the Astros cheated to get Houston’s only World Series title in 2017.
“I just don’t think it holds any value. If you cheated … you didn’t earn it,” Aaron Judge said when asked if the Astros should have been stripped of their World Series title. “The biggest thing about competition is [to] lay it all on the line and whoever’s the better player, better person … just lay it out there and now to know that another team had an advantage that you can’t really guard against that.
“I just don’t feel like that is earned.”
And no one in the Yankees clubhouse felt that the Astros suddenly stopped before their former pitcher, Fiers, dropped the dime on them in a November 2019 article in the Athletic.
“Yeah, for sure. I mean, if you cheat in 2017 and you won, why you don’t do it the next year? And then next year too,” Gleyber Torres said. “I mean, it’s for sure. I don’t know, I don’t see the news, I don’t see anything. But personally, just talking like my personal thing, if I want to [use] the example. If I played video games with you and we face the TV, but I saw your control and I know what is coming, and I hit really well, I win. If you tell me we’re playing again, I’ll do the same thing because we win. It’s true.
“And they do ’17 for sure. They do ’18 and they do ’19. It’s really easy.”
Two months ago, those emotions in the Yankees spring training clubhouse were heated and real. The world has changed as the country grapples with catastrophic death and sickness from COVID-19, but whenever baseball resumes, those feeling will resurface the first time these teams meet.