The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Cheating crackdown could help Indians
The Indians and other honest teams could benefit from the MLB sign-stealing scandal, as the Astros and Red Sox will have new managers a month before spring training begins, Jeff Schudel writes.
Terry Francona has lived by one motto as a player and manager that began when he was a 22-year-old outfielder with the Montreal Expos.
“Play the game the right way,” Francona often says in his pregame and postgame news conferences as manager of the Cleveland Indians since 2013. He has also managed the Phillies and Red Sox.
Francona wasn’t talking about using technology to steal signs to get an advantage over opponents as the disgraced Astros did to win the World Series in 2017. Baseball is still investigating the misdeeds of the Red Sox to see how they broke the rules to win the 2018 World Series.
Francona was talking about players playing hard to win games. He never looks back and never looks beyond the game at hand.
All of baseball should be embarrassed. But something good could come out of this for the Indians and other teams that play by the rules: The Astros fired Manager A.J. Hinch and General Manager Jeff Luhnow. The Red Sox fired manager Alex Cora. Both teams are going to suffer on the playing field because of the repercussions that will follow them throughout the 2020 season.
I will take my chances with Francona, even with a team whose payroll is half of what the big spenders pay, if the playing field is otherwise level.
Former Houston pitcher Mike Fiers, now with the Oakland A’s, in a November interview with The Athletic, said the Astros would use a feed from a center field camera and watch it on a television in the dugout to decode a catcher signaling pitchers on what pitch to throw. Once the code was broken, someone would send a signal to the batter by banging on a trash can or making some other pre-arranged loud noise.
“Good old-fashioned sign stealing from your eyeballs, that’s not cheating,” Angels manager Joe Maddon told reporters in December. “It’s just good baseball. When you use electronic cheating, that’s not good. It’s almost tantamount to steroids in regards to an imbalanced playing field.”
At least two majorleague pitchers disagree with Maddon.
“I would rather face a player that was taking steroids than face a player that knew every pitch that was coming,” Dodgers pitcher Alex Wood tweeted Jan. 16.
Former Indians pitcher Trevor Bauer, now with the Reds, tweeted back: “All day, every day for the rest of time.”
Here is the worst of it: The Astros and Red Sox are under the microscope because they got caught. Are the other 28 teams in MLB totally innocent? The Brewers in May 2019 accused the Dodgers of using cameras to steal signs. How many more teams might have been guilty but escaped detection because they did not make the playoffs? We may never know. It could be zero. It could be 15 or 20. Now every team will come under suspicion if it has a 10game winning streak.
The new wrinkle in the investigations is some Astros players are accused of wearing a buzzer taped to their undershirt with a Band-Aid. Maybe one buzz means fastball, two buzzes a curve ball — whatever. Bauer is selling black Tshirts with the word “Houston” in white and a flesh-colored Band-Aid across the word “Houston.” Astros colors are not used, so MLB cannot cry “Foul ball!”
The buzzer-Band-Aid conspiracy is not new. Bauer hinted at it in a tweet from Nov. 18. In the tweet he says he’s going out for “a big card game” and wearing a Band-Aid to get an edge to know what cards his opponents are holding.
Indians pitcher Mike Clevinger added a biting tweet of his own: “They shouldn’t feel comfortable looking at any of us in the eye let alone on the field and any other MLB feel different, they can get it too.”
A total of 6,776 home runs were hit in 2019. That broke the previous record of 6,105 set in 2017 by a 671 homers.
Everybody thought it was because baseballs were juiced. Now we might have the real answer.
Vegas right on Cavs
Those Las Vegas guys sure know their way around a basketball court.
The over-under on the Cavaliers for victories this season was set at 24.5 before the regular season began Oct. 25. Their record when they hit the midway point of the season with a loss to the Clippers in Los Angeles on Jan. 14 was 12-29. That projects to 2458 if the second half goes the same way. The Cavs carried a 12-30 record into their game in Chicago on Jan. 18.
Kevin Love has been a big part of what, for the Cavaliers, has been an acceptable first half. He averaged 17.1 points and 10.3 rebounds while playing in 35 games. That’s already 13 more than he appeared in all of 2018-19 when he was sidelined for much of the season with a foot injury. At his current pace, he will play in 68 games, which would be the most for him since the NBA championship season of 2015-16 when he played in 77 games.
The question is, will Love be with the Cavaliers beyond the Feb. 6 trade deadline? The Cavaliers might want to trade him, but his bulky contract — he is owed $91.5 million over the next three years — makes dealing him difficult. Despite the fact he hasn’t missed more than two straight games this season, his injury history makes teams wary.
Some reports say the Cavaliers would have to include a first-round draft pick to get a team to take Love’s contract. That to me seems counter-productive for a team in a major rebuild, which the Cavaliers clearly are.
Mayfield booster
Browns new head coach Kevin Stefanski will have a different offensive coordinator than Freddie Kitchens had and a different quarterback coach than Kitchens had. That is a good place to start for quarterback Baker Mayfield, who by any measure took a giant step backward in 2019.
Todd Monken, the Browns offensive coordinator last season, on Jan. 17 was hired as offensive coordinator at the University of Georgia. Ryan Lindley, one-and-done as Browns quarterback coach, is looking for work.
“(Quarterbacks) come in all shapes and sizes,” Stefanski said at his introductory news conference. “There are different styles. I will just tell you the skillset that our quarterback has is legit. He’s as accurate as they come.
“I think there are plenty of things that we will do schematically to, hopefully, make life easier on him, and looking forward to the jump that this kid will take. He is such a young player and the guys I’ve been around, when they put their mind to it and they start to grind on this thing and understand the whys and the concepts that we are teaching. I really think this kid has a chance to take off.”
Salvaging Mayfield has to be Stefanski’s No. 1 project. Here are statistical comparisons from Mayfield as a rookie in 2018 and Mayfield in 2019.
Games started: 13 in 2018, 16 in 2019.
Completion percentage: 310 of 486 (63.8 percent) in 2018, 317 of 534 (59.4 percent) in 2019.
Passing yards: 3,735 in 2018, 3,827 in 2019.
Touchdowns: 27 in 2018, 22 in 2019.
Interceptions: 14 in 2018, 21 in 2019.
Times sacked: 25 in 2018, 40 in 2019.
Completions 20-plus yards: 52 in 2018, 57 in 2019.
Passer rating: 93.7 in 2018, 78.8 in 2019.
Stefanski worked directly or indirectly with quarterbacks Brett Favre, Teddy Bridgewater, Sam Bradford, Case Keenum and Kirk Cousins during his time with the Vikings, starting in 2009 when he was the assistant quarterbacks coach.
I didn’t know that
… Until I read my Snapple bottle cap.
French poodles originated in Germany. … The Sahara Desert stretches farther than the distance from New York to California. … Tooth enamel is the hardest substance in the human body. … New York City taxi drivers collectively speak about 60 languages. … Flying fish leap out of the water at 20 mph and can glide over 500 feet. … More than one million earths would fit inside the sun.
“I will just tell you the skillset that our quarterback has is legit.”
Browns coach Kevin Stefanski on QB Baker Mayfield.