EVEN IF ASTROS ARE BEANED AND BOOED, THEY GOT OFF EASY
Commissioner Manfred ’s excuse for not punishing players doesn’t cut the mustard
There is a thing I have wondered since the first revelations last fall of a complicated sign-stealing scheme involving the Houston Astros. It’s a question that I kept coming back to, as the details of the system were filled in, and Major League Baseball stepped in to investigate, and as punishments were levied and even now as the Astros have sheepishly begun their 2020 campaigns by being at turns evasive and indignant about what happened in 2017.
And that is: How did the Astros think this was going to end?
Baseball, like any team sport, has roster turnover. It was a plain fact that someone from the 2017 Houston team would not be there in subsequent years, a number that would only grow over time. The group of ex-astros would also certainly include pitchers; no team keeps an entire rotation and bullpen intact over a period of seasons. Did the Astros players and coaches who devised and executed the scheme imagine that ex-houston pitchers would forever keep quiet about it, even as they were facing a team that had audible trash-can thumping coming from the dugout?
Was there a belief that baseball’s unwritten code would keep things quiet, since no one would break the sanctity of what happens in a particular clubhouse?
If that’s the case, it was quite a gamble, since the Astros themselves were quite obviously flouting rules both unwritten and written with their technology-driven sign-stealing operation. From the moment that Houston players and coaches decided to use their video-replay room to decode signals from catcher to pitcher, they knew they were crossing the boundary of the acceptable sign-stealing attempts that take place on the field of play. In 2011, when there were accusations that the Toronto Blue Jays had deployed someone to signal incoming pitches from the centre-field stands — the now-apocryphal Man in White — it was universally understood that this would be highly improper. If baseball’s code says you don’t rat on teammates, it also says that sign-stealing is acceptable inside the lines but unacceptable once you start involving other employees, technology or, as with the Astros, a combination of the two.
Oakland pitcher Mike Fiers was eventually the guy to divulge the secrets of his former Houston teammates, and since he did, there have been many reports that much of baseball suspected the Astros were up to something shady.
As late as this past World Series, the common take on the Astros as an organization was that they thought they were smarter than everyone else, but it turned out they were more like the cliché of dumb criminals who simply hadn’t yet been caught, the hired muscle who is always getting yelled at by the evil genius.
Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred hasn’t been much better at the forecasting business. The report he issued last month was so obviously designed to pin the blame on the since-departed Astros manager and general manager, while skipping over scrutiny of anyone else, that it might as well have been distributed with brooms attached. Nothing much to see here, please move along. It dealt only with what the Astros did in a broad sense and did not examine the effectiveness of their scheme, even though MLB could easily analyze the whole of Houston’s wrongdoing on a pitch-by-pitch basis. Manfred also decided not to punish players in advance in exchange for interviews, which suggests the commissioner has never watched a single cop show on television. What kind of lousy prosecutor grants blanket immunity up front?
The result of this strategy is now plain to see: the Astros can still claim to have earned their World Series, and the rest of baseball can still claim that the title is unjust and that every one of the players on that 2017 team is a dirty cheat. By not looking too closely at who did what, MLB has ensured that those Astros players will forever be followed by a cloud of unresolved suspicions. Opposing players can lob metaphorical grenades and literal baseballs at them, and everyone on all sides will remain unhappy about it. Booing is not nearly as cathartic as the commissioner seems to think.
Manfred told reporters in Florida on the weekend that labour practices and the collective bargaining agreement made it impossible to levy appealproof punishments on players, so he chose not to pursue them. But if only for reasons of public relations, he should have tried. It would have dragged things out, yes, but at least there would be an element of transparency and accountability to the process, and a sign that MLB wanted to ensure the guiltiest parties suffered some sort of consequence. Instead, the Astros lost a manager and a GM, which teams lose all the time, plus some late draft picks and some money. They kept all of their wins and didn’t lose any of their players to even a single suspended game. In response to one of the biggest cheating scandals in baseball history, the Astros players received lighter punishments than had they ingested an improper cold medication.
The amazing thing about all this is that the Astros really should be the defending World Series champions. They had a
3-2 lead heading home to Minute Maid Park, having outscored Washington 19-3 in three straight wins. They had a tworun lead in the seventh inning of Game 7. If they don’t collapse, they are arriving in Florida as winners of two of the past three championships.
Would Rob Manfred have been willing to let that team, and those players, get by quite so unpunished?