‘They cheated’: Nats GM Rizzo unsatisfied by apology
WEST PALM BEACH, FLA. » Count Washington Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo among those not impressed or satisfied by the Houston Astros’ attempts to apologize for — and put behind them — their sign-stealing scandal.
“They cheated. They were found guilty of it. And I haven’t heard it yet,” Rizzo said Friday after Washington’s second formal workout at the spring training complex the team shares with Houston.
“The thing that pains me the most is it puts a black cloud over the sport that I love. And that’s not right. The commissioner did an investigation and found that they cheated in 2017 and 2018. Somebody’s got to say the words over there: ‘cheated.’ And that’s important to me,” Rizzo said. “For the sport to move on, which is what I’m most concerned about, we have to make sure that all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed on this investigation before we end it.”
Rizzo’s NL champ Nationals went into last year’s World Series prepared to deal with against-the-rules actions by the AL champ Astros before beating them in Game 7 for the title.
“I have no proof of what, if anything, they did in 2019,” Rizzo said. “We assumed they were, and we prepared diligently for it.”
World Series MVP Stephen Strasburg said the Nationals used new catcher’s signals and changed them during games, so if Houston had been trying to steal signs in October, there wouldn’t be anything from his past outings that could be relied on.
“Regardless of if there was any funny business going on,” Strasburg said, “we controlled what we could control, we were prepared for it, and we did what was necessary to go out there and make it as even a playing field as possible.”