Sadly, end not in sight for baseball’s latest scandal
Baseball loves to call the oral history of its dreary offseasons “The Hot Stove,” but remember that time the stove exploded and blew off the entire back wall of the house, killing the cat and exposing a ton of dirty laundry and various other mortifying incriminations? Yeah, that was this week. For reasons not likely buttressed by logic, I keep thinking of the people ensnared in baseball’s latest scandal — and it’s a doozy — as soulmates with the people inside that fictional North Carolina diner in the truly awful horror film “Maximum Overdrive.”
Inside the diner, and, it turns
out, all over town, inanimate objects of various sizes and purposes have come to life for the express purpose of killing people, which allows the filmmakers to explore their creative interpretation of death by electric knife, bulldozer, hair dryer, lawn mower, chainsaw, vending machine, arcade game ... death by any old thing, really.
It’s based on a short story by Stephen King as he wondered what would happen if all the things we created to help and amuse ourselves suddenly turned on us. Well.
Two baseball managers, one general manager and one manager-in-waiting already have been fired, feeling the real-life destruction of technology run amok, because the rush the 2017 Astros got from devising an electronic sign-stealing scheme obliterated their ethics. They were so thrilled they could do it they didn’t stop to wonder whether they should do it.
I’ve got a name for this movie. “Tub Thumpers.”
After going to all that trouble in Houston, installing a monitor with the live feed from the center-field camera near the Astros dugout, watching the replayroom monitors to decode the catcher’s signs, and getting as many hitters as possible on board in what was no-longer a gentleman’s skullduggery like on-field sign-stealing but a high-tech plot to poison the game, the perps still signaled the hitter via the mindless low-tech action of thumping a trash can with a bat. Geniuses.
For years, the Astros have been swimming in geniuses. On the spectrum of baseball analytics as interpreted by uber-educated decision-makers, no club went as rapturously all-in as Houston. In a game consumed with data, Houston’s four postseason appearances, three hundredwin seasons, two World Series appearances, and one world title were widely seen as the proof that the Astros were the undisputed crunchiest of the numbers crunchers.
Or was it just, you know, one thump for a fastball, two for a breaking ball?
The only smile of the week associated with this story got delivered with the news that the Staten Island Yankees, whose parent club was a likely victim of Astrocrimes in the 2017 postseason, will give out mini trash cans when they play the Houston affiliate this summer.
Thank you so much for that, because we’re going on seven consecutive news cycles in which the sport looks progressively worse with each revelation. At the weekend, baseball was saying it uncovered no evidence the Astros used electronic receptors inside their shirts to go beyond the tub thumping, despite video of Jose Altuve appearing to signal his teammates as he crosses the plate with the winning run in Game 2 of the ALCS. The signal is being interpreted as “remember not to tear at my shirt because I’ve got this electronic receptor taped inside, so I’m going to race into the clubhouse and change before doing the on-field postgame interview with Ken Rosenthal.” Approximately. Despite inspecting “tens of thousands” of emails, conducting 68 interviews, including with 23 current and former Astros players, and compiling nine pages of detailed transgressions, baseball turned up nothing in the way of wearable electronics? Funny. Commissioner Rob Manfred announced one-year suspensions for Astros general manager Jeff “I am not a cheater” Luhnow and contrite field manager AJ Hinch, who were both promptly fired by Houston owner Jim Crane. Crane escaped Manfred’s Silver Hammer, a fact perhaps related to Crane effectively being Manfred’s boss.
The Red Sox then fired manager Alex Cora, who brought sign-stealing experience from the Astros to the
Red Sox in 2018 and — how about that? — won the World Series, just like the Astros a year earlier. Cora was fired by Boston, as was Carlos Beltran, another Houston ex-pat, by the New York Mets before he even managed a game.
Manfred then gagged the other owners and pretty much told everybody else in the game to shut up, as well.
Yankees pitcher C.C. Sabathia, newly retired, saw the opening.
“As everything’s been coming out and the more facts that we get, it’s getting frustrating, man, to sit here and know that late in my career I could’ve had a title, maybe ’17 or maybe ’18,” the big lefty said on Showtime this week. “But we got cheated out of [it by] a team kind of doing something that’s not within the rules of the game.”
Kind of?
Manfred warned all 30 clubs in 2017 against any kind of techno-crime when he fined the Red Sox for using Apple watches to steal signs from Yankees catchers. The Astros did it anyway. A year later, the Red Sox did it anyway. And who else? Nobody? Doubtful.
Happily, remedies are plentiful and remarkably uncomplicated.
The Astros and Red Sox should vacate those titles and surrender those trophies, just like they do in the wonderful worlds of college football and college basketball, where this kind of “culture” is a longstanding tradition.
All such potentially gamealtering technologies, including handheld devices, must be powered off once the game begins.
Death to replay (still and forever more trouble than it’s worth — and now the replay room is at the heart of this scandal).
Finally, anyone seen or heard thumping a tub is immediately ejected.
Beyond that, it’s up to sports fans as a whole to put the ever-tainted 2017 Astros and 2018 Red Sox in their proper place in the game’s history. Somewhere close to infamy would be my suggestion, the home of Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, The Black Sox, the New England Patriots, Pete Rose, Lance Armstrong, Roger Clemens, etc.
You know the list.