Astros owner uninterested in real change
As baseball commissioner Rob Manfred continues his investigation of the Red Sox’s alleged sign-stealing cheating in 2018, the fallout from the sister cheating scandal by the Astros in 2017 also continues — with no end in sight.
This is going to be a very difficult and potentially very nasty season coming up for the Astros, and Houston owner Jim Crane’s hiring of
Dusty Baker to a one-year contract to manage the team is only further evidence he has no intention of changing the culture of his organization. Putting the 70-year-old Baker in charge of a team full of cheaters, who are facing payback from fans and opponents all season long, was the absolute right decision on Crane’s part. But giving him only a one-year contract while retaining all of A.J. Hinch’s coaches, some of whom may have been complicit in the 2017 cheating, was like putting a band aid over a gaping wound.
Baker is someone who gives any organization instant credibility, but how far can that credibility go when the players know he’s only going to be there for one year — with no autonomy, no built-in loyalty from his staff, and all the holdover analytics nerds from ousted GM Jeff Luhnow’s staff second-guessing his every move from upstairs?
That’s the message Crane is sending with what amounts to be this “temporary hire” of Baker. That he needed a babysitter for one year, after which it’ll be back to business as normal, with a new manager taking his cues from the analytics department, albeit with a room full of still-toxic players. So far no one from the Astros — Crane included — has demonstrated an ounce of remorse for this scandal which has poisoned baseball forever. Revelations of just how widespread the Astros cheating was keep coming out and it’s infecting the whole game.
A couple of weeks ago, a video began circulating among the baseball clubs of Astros catcher Robinson Chirinos, who signed with the Rangers earlier this month, taking a hard swing during the World Series last year as an object that looked ominously like a buzzer, fell out of his uniform. Chirinos looks down on the ground, sees the object, and hastily scoops it up and puts it in his back pocket.
The video has not been verified, but it’s out there and it’s providing further credence to the charges the Astros — specifically Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman who gave pathetically evasive responses when asked about it at the Astros’ fan fest a couple of weeks ago — were also cheating in 2019 with hidden buzzers.
And then there is the story, which is the talk of baseball now, about the Astros’ fan, Tony Adams, a 54-year-old graphic designer, who took it upon himself to create a computer program in which he was able to listen to and methodically record every pitch to every Astro batter, for which he could find the audio (58 of their home games in 2017).
Adams was able to record the audio of some 8,274 pitches in an attempt to hear the banging noise on the garbage can the Astro players used to signal to their teammates what pitch was coming. The results of his findings were stunning. It’s a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of just who were the biggest cheaters, i.e., the players who heard the most bangs during their at-bats.
No. 1 was Marwin Gonzalez, who last year moved on as a free agent to the Twins, with 147 total bangs, good for 18% of his pitches. Next up was J.D. Davis, who Luhnow traded to the Mets last January, with bangs on 28.6% of his pitches. Bregman got bangs on 16.6% of his pitches, George Springer 14.9% while the good news, if you can call it that, was that Altuve, the American League MVP in 2017, got bangs on only 2.8% of his pitches.
As Adams noted, his data was only compiled from the trash can bangs. Who knows how much more electronic cheating the Astros did with buzzers and whistles? Because he had to grant them immunity in order to get honest answers from them in his investigation, Manfred declined to mete out any punishment to the Astro players themselves. But make no mistake, their remaining stars, Altuve, Bregman and Springer, are forever branded as serial cheaters now and subject to all kinds of retribution this season and beyond.
And players like Gonzalez, Chirinos, Davis and first baseman Tyler White, who was traded by the Astros to the Dodgers last July, they’re going to have to answer a lot of uncomfortable questions from their teammates and the media this spring. The Astros’ cheating plague is being felt everywhere and wait ‘til Manfred completes his Red Sox cheating probe. It may be why the Red Sox have not yet named a new manager. For now, however, nowhere this spring is going to be as uneasy a place as West Palm Beach where Baker will be presiding over the most hated team in baseball.
“Dusty’s a person of high integrity and he’s a respected leader,” said Crane at Baker’s introductory news conference. “He has great baseball experience and he will earn the players’ respect.”
Under Crane’s terms, however, that would be on a short-term basis. Good luck, Dusty.