Bruce Jenkins: Fiers ‘appreciates’ the questions that will persist through the season, but ...
Sitting at a table with A’s teammate Marcus Semien, Mike Fiers was completely at ease. Through genuine smiles and laughter, the two of them looked like best friends who had been separated too long, but hadn’t missed a beat.
It was a day for media availability at the A’s offices near Jack London Square, ahead of Saturday’s Fan Fest, and Fiers was obviously the star attraction. The idea was to have all of the players available for an hour or so, with the Houston Astros’ signstealing crisis off limits in Fiers’ interviews, at which point he would meet the 25odd media representatives to address the Major League Baseball investigation he triggered by publicly exposing the Astros’ scheme.
It sounded appealing, but that show closed down in a hurry. Fiers wasn’t up to answering any questions about the controversy. The right questions were asked — about the magnitude of his comments, a lingering distraction surrounding the A’s, and whether there would be resentment from any teammates who felt Fiers crossed a line.
“I appreciate the question,” he said, time after time, “but I’m only talking about baseball.”
So it was that Fiers, in normal settings a bright and engaging conversationalist, left everyone hanging.
One got the feeling that Fiers didn’t make this decision alone. He met with MLB investigators to repeat the comments he had told The Athletic in November, all about the Astros using technology in an illegal signstealing manner. It’s not hard to imagine the MLB people telling him, “Let us take it from here. We’d appreciate it if you just stay quiet and help us get things back to normal.”
Nothing says Fiers has to expand on this subject in any way, but he has to know that the media scrutiny will not subside. This is a searingly hot issue around baseball, certain to persist all season, and Fiers’ burst of honesty led to a chaotic sequence that cost three managers and a general manager their jobs. He made his stance clear to the Bay Area media, but around the country, there will always be print and broadcast people thinking, “Well, he’ll talk to me,” or “I’ll bet tonight’s the night he opens up.”
Meaning: If Fiers found Friday evening’s session awkward, he’d better get used to the feeling.
Fiers’ comments to the Athletic certainly were no surprise to his Oakland teammates, none of whom revealed any animosity toward him Friday. Players constantly reveal dirty secrets once they’ve left one team for another, and when Fiers joined the A’s, certain conversations headed that way.
“No doubt,” said manager Bob Melvin. “And we did things accordingly. I’m glad it’s out in the open now, because it needs to be an even playing field, and it wasn’t.”
A longstanding clubhouse code states, in essence, that the locker room is sacred, and players should never publicly reveal compromising information about the organization, no matter where they might wind up in the future. To that effect, players around the major leagues have taken issue with Fiers.
“I read a lot of criticisms about Mike,” Melvin said, “but it was never gonna go down like this unless a player came out, who was on the former team, and actually said something. It needed to happen. And it takes a lot of courage to do something like that.
“I hear a lot of people saying we complained to the league, well, a lot of teams did (behind the scenes). Until you get somebody that was in their clubhouse, and makes it public, which allows MLB and everybody else to investigate in the fashion that they did — it wasn’t gonna happen any other way.”