Jeers expected in Astros’ first test vs. Yankees since scandal.
In New York minute, club expects jeers in first series vs. Yankees since sign saga
NEW YORK — Silence arrives for a second, when a crowd gets distracted or does not pay attention to what’s around it. The Astros can relish the brief moments of peace before the ballpark comes back to its senses. One or two people look up and notice an orange jersey in the batter’s box or a navy hat headed toward the dugout. They begin to boo, and the chorus of contempt begins again.
Score, situation and status does not matter. After biding time for four seasons in Houston’s minor league system, Alex De Goti delivered his first major league hit in Seattle last month. Mariners fans flooded him with abuse. Washington native Taylor Jones returned to his roots that same weekend. His hometown crowd roasted him for no reason. Jones and De Goti bounced between Buies Creek and Quad Cities in 2017 while wrongdoing occurred in the big leagues.
“There’s only four or five guys here who were even there when the whole thing happened,” Astros manager Dusty Baker said Sunday. “And so are people booing the person? Are they booing the uniform, or are they booing the organization? Most guys weren’t even here, including myself. What are you going to do? You can’t control what people do. You can only control what you do and how you feel.”
Baker is innocent of any illegal activity. Owner Jim Crane hired him in January 2020 to guide his guilty employees through a grueling
road ahead. The Astros’ signstealing scheme angered almost everyone outside Houston. A pandemic prevented opposing fans from voicing their frustrations in person. They returned this season to prove time does not heal all wounds.
The Astros committed their crime four years ago. Only five players from the 2017 team — Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, Carlos Correa, Yuli Gurriel and Lance McCullers Jr. — remain active with the club, but those unaffiliated with the misconduct must deal with a deluge of criticism. Michael Brantley spent the 2017 season in Cleveland. Myles Straw and Kyle Tucker were teammates at Class AA Corpus Christi. Yordan Alvarez played Class A ball. Martín Maldonado was a Los Angeles Angel.
“We’re getting booed anywhere we’re at,” said Maldonado, now one of the Astros’ most crucial clubhouse leaders. “We, as a team, love it. We enjoy it. I think it gets the best out of us. We go out there, and we feel like we’re playing playoff baseball every game. I don’t see anything different if we go out there and play our game.”
Opposing fans have made life hell on the road for most of the Astros’ season. Two trash cans were tossed onto the field at Angel Stadium during the team’s season-opening road trip to Oakland and Anaheim, drawing the ire of Astros general manager James Click. Meager crowds in Colorado and Tampa Bay still showered the team with invective throughout games.
Yankee Stadium will afford an atmosphere uncomparable to the Astros’ other six road venues. Local restrictions will allow only 20 percent capacity inside the 54,241-seat ballpark.
“I’m sure we’re going to have some chaos, but it’s nothing we haven’t heard this year or in spring training or whatever,” Straw said. “It’s going to be loud. But it seems like whenever crowds are loud and booing us, I feel like that’s when we’ve played our best baseball. You can fire the boys up all you want. We’ll come ready to play. If they want to boo us, they can boo us. Whatever.”
For 14 games away from home, the Astros (15-13) have rallied around the resentful reception. Rarely have any players acknowledged anything yelled at them from the stands. Most keep familiar tendencies — talking to their opponents on the basepaths and tossing baseballs into the stands to fans between innings. Houston is 8-6 on the road thus far but now faces an entirely different environment
Their reception will be rancorous at best and disastrous at worst. Yankee Stadium never welcomes its visitors with open arms, but the Astros are its polarizing pariah — a team still reviled for misdeeds that some claim cost the Yankees the 2017 American League pennant.
The three-game series is Houston’s first trip to New York since the revelation of its sign-stealing scheme during the 2017 and 2018 seasons at Minute Maid Park. The Astros defeated the Yankees in seven games to capture the 2017 American League pennant. All four of Houston’s wins came at home en route to a now-tarnished World Series title.
“You can’t expect to get a very warm welcome,” Baker said. “It will probably be a rather cold welcome, actually.”
The Yankees are averaging 10,020 fans in their first 14 home games — small crowds that remain boisterous during their team’s disappointing start. New York is 14-14. The club lost 10 of its first 16 games. On April 16, the Tampa Bay Rays had to briefly exit the field after fans threw debris to show their displeasure with the Yankees’ terrible play.
Former Astros outfielder Josh Reddick said fans threw bottles and baseballs at him during Game 3 of the 2019 American League Championship Series. The next day, former manager A.J. Hinch threatened to pull his team off the field if fans did it again in Game 4.
“We all know how passionate Yankees fans can be,” utilityman Aledmys Díaz said in Spanish this past week. “This year, everywhere we play (as an away team), fans can make it difficult for us. And it’s important for us to put our focus on what we are doing on the field. We cannot control how people react. We cannot focus on anything we cannot control.
“Our focus is to play baseball. It’s tough, of course, at times to feel that kind of pressure. But we use it as motivation, and our only goal is winning every day and playing the best baseball we can.”
Hinch did not need to take drastic measures during the 2019 ALCS. The team escaped New York unscathed and claimed the pennant on Altuve’s walk-off home run at Minute Maid Park.
Major League Baseball found no evidence of wrongdoing during the 2019 season, but Altuve’s home run remains a controversial topic. Unfounded social media rumors ran rampant that Altuve wore a buzzer to alert him what pitch was coming. Altuve’s insistence that his teammates not remove his jersey during the celebration only furthered the narrative.
Five Astros from the 2017 team vehemently denied anyone on their team wore buzzers. Major League Baseball investigated the claim during its initial probe and said it “found no evidence to substantiate” the claim.
“I think we’re just trying to play our game and trying to win,” Altuve said Sunday. “Sometimes, yes, you hear what the people in the stands say. But once in a while, that kind of encourages me to keep winning games.”
Yankees fans’ hate will still undoubtedly focus on Altuve. He won the 2017 American League Most Valuable Player award over Yankees slugger Aaron Judge. Last February, Judge decried the “weak” punishment delivered to the Astros and revealed he deleted a 3-year-old social media post that congratulated Altuve on his MVP award.
“They cheated,” Judge said. “It didn’t sit well with me, and I just didn’t feel like the post that I did really meant the same anymore.”
Correa has claimed on numerous occasions that Altuve did not approve of or utilize the Astros’ trash can-banging scheme during the 2017 season. In February 2020, Correa said Altuve “is too humble to go out there and say” he did not use the system. Correa described Altuve as “heated” on one occasion when the trash cans were banged during his atbat without his consent.
“I’m going to say it because I was there. I saw it,” Correa said in February 2020. “I saw it with my own eyes. (He) didn’t want it. This Altuve talk about him stealing the MVP, that should be dead. That should be dead after what I said.”
Few opposing fans will offer any sympathy or change their views, especially across the next three days.
“I think sometimes it’s hard (to ignore the boos), but it’s what we need to do to win games,” Altuve said. “We’re learning how to do that. We’re staying together as a team, and that can be the key for us.”