Cheating Astros have spineless leaders
Team owner Jim Crane needed to step up; he cowered instead
This world, sports department included, desperately needs more good leaders.
By that, I mean people of strength and integrity. People possessing qualities such as honesty, humility, accountability and fortitude. People who inspire. People who will admit a wrong. People we would tell our children to emulate.
Instead, we often get this when trouble starts these days …
I didn’t do it.
I did it, but so did he.
I did it, but it wasn’t that bad, and you can’t stop me from doing it again.
When did so many “leaders” start to sound like siblings in timeout?
I could point to a lot of places for examples of pitiful leadership. I’ll stick to sports, where the Houston Astros just can’t bring themselves to accept full responsibility for what they did, which
was cheat their way to the 2017 World Series title by way of an elaborate signstealing system.
We still don’t know how much cheating the Astros have done since. They say none. Why should we believe them?
Let’s start at the top. Team owner Jim Crane spoke Thursday, addressing the scandal for the first time. He’s the boss, and the boss creates the culture in any organization. If something bad happens on his or her watch, that person needs to set an example. Fess up. Apologize. Lead, for goodness sake. Crane cowered.
“Our opinion is, [the cheating] didn’t impact the game,” he said.
OK, Jim. So it’s a coincidence the Astros batted like Babe Ruth at home and Brian Bixler on the road during the 2017 postseason?
It’s a coincidence they made one of the more ridiculous offensive turnarounds in baseball history that year?
Crane your neck this way, Jim, and check out Jayson Stark’s report from The Athletic:
“In 2016, Astros hitters struck out 1,452 times, the eighth-highest total in the history of baseball. In 2017, they didn’t just strike out less — or even a lot less. They struck out so much less, it’s fair to use the word ‘historic’ to describe it. They cut their strikeouts by 365. They went from punching out 1,452 times in 2016 to a mere 1,087 in 2017, which meant they transformed themselves from a team that was striking out at one of the highest rates in history to a team that struck out less than any team in baseball that season.”
Amazing how that happened. Crane seemed to indicate, as the news conference progressed, that yeah they broke the rules and maybe it helped, BUT IT WASN’T MY FAULT.
“I don’t think I should be held accountable,” he actually said.
Then, in the classic coward move — especially popular these days — he began throwing people so far under the bus you’d need the jaws of life to pull them out. Not his players, of course. Those are his meal tickets.
“These are a great group of guys,” Crane said, “who did not receive proper guidance from their leaders.”
Ahhhhh. So it was the leaders’ fault — except for Crane.
OK, let’s go with that. Let’s move down the leadership chain. Crane has a point, in that you have to go a long way to find somebody who takes unqualified responsibility for this mess.
On the day they were fired, general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch released statements that at first seemed apologetic but in the end were nothing more than creative forms of “what about them?”
Luhnow said, “I accept responsibility” but made sure to add, “I did not know rules were being broken” and “I am not a cheater” and the sign stealing system “originated with lower-level employees.”
Hinch also claimed “responsibility” and said “I apologize” but made sure to add, right there in the second paragraph, that “evidence consistently showed I didn’t endorse or participate in sign stealing practices.”
Yo, AJ, if you didn’t stop it, you endorsed it. YOU’RE THE MANAGER.
The players were all over the place Thursday in their “apologies,” some of which made the typical Antonio Brown apology sound sincere.
One stood out as somewhat contrite.
“There’s no excuse,” shortstop Carlos Correa said. “We were wrong for everything we did in 2017.”
That’s more like it, although Correa denied the cheating continued into 2018 and ’19, perhaps in the form of players wearing electronic devices.
We’ll see.
Seems to me the players are sorry they got caught, not that they cheated. They’re probably livid with ex-teammate Mike Fiers. He was the whistleblower, which is another way of saying he was the adult.
Fiers didn’t step up in the midst of it, only long after the fact. But it’s never too late to do the right thing.
Any good leader will tell you that.