Tag Archives: Astrogate

Mr. Crane, Astrogate IS about baseball

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2019-11-21 JimCrane

Astros owner Jim Crane talking to the press, presumably without police protection, on another occasion.

“If you want to talk about baseball, I’ll talk about baseball,” said Astros owner Jim Crane to an inquiring reporter at this week’s owners’ meetings at Arlington’s Live! By Loew’s luxury hotel. “What else do you want to talk about?” And then two police officers shepherded Crane away.

If Crane was trying to say he wasn’t going to talk about Astrogate, here’s a bulletin for him: Astrogate is about baseball. It’s about cheating in baseball, it’s about the Astros rigging an off-field camera tied to a clubhouse television set for stealing signs, it’s about violating baseball’s specific rules against that kind of sign stealing, it’s about the likelihood that they weren’t the only such extralegal reconnaissance operation.

It’s about playing the game the right way, as former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers said outright when he blew the whistle on and the covers off the Astros Intelligence Agency last week.

If none of that is baseball, we should love knowing what Crane thinks is baseball. Or what he thinks baseball is. Either way Crane offered as bad a look as the police presence at the owners’ meetings, part of which moved him away from legitimate questioning about something that is very much baseball.

Early during the Watergate scandal, Barry Goldwater said it started to smell like Teapot Dome. Early during Astrogate, I said it started to smell like the Black Sox scandal. The references weren’t just to those scandals’ gravity but to their attempted coverups. Richard Nixon in 1973 tried to get away with saying, “One year of Watergate is enough.” Crane seems to believe almost two weeks of Astrogate are enough.

Nixon’s mistake was not demanding names, places, and heads on platters from the moment he learned about the Watergate break-in. Crane’s making a mistake if he isn’t demanding names, places, and heads on platters over Astrogate. If Manfred needed any more ammunition to take after the Astros, whom he has in his specific sights for now, Crane just handed the commissioner a loaded Uzi.

Trying to say Astrogate isn’t about baseball is like trying to say Teapot Dome—in which Warren Harding’s interior secretary Albert Fall (talk about the perfect name for the job!) sold Navy oil reserves to oil baron Harry Sinclair without formal sanction or competitive bidding—was much ado about Lipton’s Tea.

Crane would do himself and Astroworld alike a phenomenal favour if he shies away from stonewalling legitimately inquiring journalists. They’re trying only to get the answers fans who support his team and the game itself want very badly. Other teams want those answers too, even those who operated similar reconnaissance to counter the Astros or otherwise.

And if Crane wants to, he can look at it this way: They’re trying to get the answers he himself should want as the owner of a team whose game-changing success run was compromised by who knows yet how many people that couldn’t resist the temptation to just that little extra edge, whatever good it did or didn’t do, extra-legally.

The questions out of Crane’s mouth to his organisation should be, “What did you know? When did you know? And who are the wisenheimers whose brainchild this was in the first place? I want names. I want places. I want heads. And I want them five minutes ago.”

He needs to be the Astro Hoover, beating, sweeping, and cleaning. Baseball observers ask what his general manager Jeff Luhnow knew and when he knew it. Manfred already has former assistant GM Brandon Taubman under questioning for taunting women reporters over domestic violence, and don’t think for a minute Manfred won’t ask Taubman what he knew and when he knew about the AIA, too.

Another Luhnow aide, Kevin Goldstein, is liable to face interrogation over his 2017 e-mail suggestion that Astro advance scouts—enough of whom seem to have quaked at the idea—use video cameras in the stands to help develop other ways of high-tech sign stealing.

Just before Astrogate began, Crane moved his son, Jared, into the Astros’ executive suite, which meant he had to move Reid Ryan out into a lesser role. Which meant Ryan’s father, Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan, leaving the Astros and saying, perhaps tellingly, “I will not be back with the club and will leave it at that.”

It’s not impossible that Manfred or his Astrogate bloodhounds have thoughts about asking Ryan if there was just a little more than a father angry about a son’s demotion prompting his departure. Especially since it happened five days before Fiers’s revelations hit the fan.

Crane doesn’t need to tell even one reporter that he’s only going to talk about baseball as if Astrogate is much ado about a spacecraft hatch. And he doesn’t need the cops to hustle him away as if he needs to be in the witness protection program.

He’s a businessman one of whose companies is involved in playing a game that millions love, in Astroworld and all over, but which has a serious enough issue that strikes at the very integrity of the game, the idea that everybody plays by prescribed rules and shouldn’t be trying extra-legal tactics to prevail in or profit from a contest or even a championship series.

That’s why the hoo-has over the Black Sox scandal (and the decade of rampant gambling/game throwing that nourished it in the first place), All-Star ballot-box stuffing (1957, on behalf of the Reds; 2015, on behalf of the Royals; others), Pete Rose’s Rule 21(d) violations, actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances (and the Selig era’s foot-dragging over it), and the ultimate confirmation (first in 2001) that The Giants stole the pennant! The Giants stole the pennant! in 1951.

If Crane doesn’t want to look at things that way, he can look at at it as a businessman: Astrogate stands to cost his baseball organisation millions—in fines, international bonus room, draft pick losses, whatever Manfred decides.

Any businessman cares about the health of his industry, no matter that he loves to one-up the competition at every legitimate chance. Crane should be very alarmed that similar hits could be laid upon other baseball teams running their own extra-legal espionage and compromising theirs and maybe, just maybe, the entire game’s credibility, too.

He should be alarmed likewise at Astrogate’s impact on his team’s credibility. It’s compromised. The Astros’ front office may have developed something of a reputation for ruthless lacking in people skills, but the team on the field built a reputation for dominant play by high character people, including some who were characters in the best ways. Astrogate now makes them look like shameless cheaters.

“When players discuss (off-field high-tech sign stealing) accusations,” Thomas Boswell wrote about the 1951 Giants and similar espionage, “it is with contempt in their voices, not amusement.”

A spitballer or corker can be caught by an umpire, who has the right to examine or confiscate equipment. Both teams play on the same damp base paths and inclined foul lines, even if they’ve been doctored a bit for home-field advantage.

But an elaborate system of sign stealing—with an old pro in the art of signs in a hidden space—is almost impossible to catch. Umps and foes are defenseless. The game becomes fundamentally unfair because knowing what’s coming is a big deal.

(Damp base paths? The 1962 Giants’ grounds crew turned the dirt around Candlestick Park’s first base into a swamp in a bid to slow down Maury Wills’s road running. Inclined foul lines? The 1950s Phillies’ grounds crews sculpted the third base line in Shibe Park into a ridge to keep Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn’s deft little bunts up the line from rolling foul so Mr. Putt Putt could beat them out for hits.)

Once or twice someone caught onto the Astroplot. Notably enough then-White Sox pitcher Danny Farquhar, a year before his tragic in-dugout brain hemorrhage, smelling enough of a rat—when he heard the boom! boom! of the clubhouse trash can being banged, sending the stolen sign deciphered on a live TV screen to an Astro hitter—that he called his catcher to the mound to switch the signs up.

“There was a banging from the dugout, almost like a bat hitting the bat rack every time a changeup signal got put down,” said Farquhar, now the pitching coach for the White Sox’s Winston-Salem (A-advanced) affiliate. “After the third one, I stepped off. I was throwing some really good changeups and they were getting fouled off. After the third bang, I stepped off.”

Crane saying he’ll talk baseball but not Astrogate, which is about baseball whether he likes it or not, makes him look further out of touch if not completely indifferent. A police presence at the owners’ meetings looks strange enough by itself without a couple of the gendarmes shielding Crane from valid questions about a rot in his team.

Try to picture the look of police shielding NBC chieftain David Sarnoff or CBS emperor Bill Paley from questioning about the quiz show chiselings of the mid-to-late 1950s. Sarnoff and Paley may not have wanted to own the fixings on Twenty-One or The $64,000 Question, since they weren’t exactly the masterminds, but neither did they call the cops when the press and Congressional investigators finally came a-calling.

Better yet, try to picture the look of the fuzz shielding American presidents, from the incumbent on back, way back, from legitimate questioning about why they forgot there was a crazy little thing called the Constitution that doesn’t, as the somewhat notorious incumbent prefers to believe otherwise, let them just do whatever they damn well please in office.

Those looks would be terrible. And it’s a terrible look for a baseball owner whose team has won, in three seasons, three American League Wests and one World Series, got to within eight outs of winning a Second series, but now looks as though the rules against off-the-field electronic video sign stealing either didn’t apply or didn’t exist.

Astrogate’s gut check for Manfred and baseball

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2019-11-20 RobManfred

Rob Manfred must broaden the Astrogate probe, even if it means he’s a dead duck with the owners who’ve extended him only through 2024.

Baseball commissioner Robert Manfred says he’s going to throw the book, drop the hammer, lower the boom, and call curtains on the Astros if his investigators find they really did rig a real-time, beyond-center-field camera to a clubhouse television set to steal opponents’ pitch signs in 2017 and beyond. And then he’s really going to get mad.

Except for one little detail. “I’m not going to speculate on whether other people are going to be involved,” the commissioner said as the owners’ meetings began in Arlington, Texas Tuesday. “We’ll deal with that if it happens, but I’m not going to speculate about that. I have no reason to believe it extends beyond the Astros at this point in time.”

Not so fast, warns The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal, who first exposed Astrogate with Evan Dillich a week before the owners’ meetings, when through them former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers blew the whistle on and the covers off the Astros’ illegal 2017 surveillance theft.

For one thing, Rosenthal and Dillich wrote in their first story, “Electronic sign stealing is not a single-team issue.” And that, Rosenthal reminds us now, was before they even mentioned the Astros.

I’ve made the point of saying that the Astros may be just the most flagrant about it but they’re hardly the only ones trying it. Last week, I wrote, “Reality check: The Astros—or whomever among them created their [Astros Intelligence Agency]—aren’t the only such electronic thieves, merely the latest to be caught red Octobered.” The Red Sox tried it with an AppleWatch, also in 2017, and got fined for their trouble.

Manfred then said in no uncertain terms that “future violations of [that] type will be subject to more serious sanctions, including the possible loss of draft picks.” And last February Manfred announced augmented rules clarifying: no off-field electronic camera sign stealing, which was already against the rules in the first place.

Apparently, that part still needs to be made clear to a lot of people. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Stealing signs while running the bases or on the coaching lines or in the shallow outfield* is old-fashioned gamesmanship. Stealing them by way of off-the-field devices was long against the rules and amounted to genuine baseball crime. And that was before anyone though of technology beyond binoculars or spy glasses.

The new rules this year also meant no monitors in clubhouses and tunnels, and every team required to audit every in-house camera, its purpose, its wiring, and where it can be viewed. Rosenthal and Dillich exposed the Astros’ 2017 techno-shenanigans. Manfred’s investigation may well turn up 2018 and even 2019 electro-chicanery.

Astrogate shouldn’t stop with the Astros no matter how brazen their operation or how unapologetic their Twitterpated. Or, no matter how risky it might actually be for Manfred to expand the probe, discover more franchises actually doing something close to the AIA, but make enemies enough among the owners who employ him that he could be dumped in due course.

The commissioner’s official powers to act in the best interest of baseball, installed from the creation of the job in the wake of the Black Sox scandal, aren’t exactly the same as getting away with it when he does act that way. It only began when Happy Chandler’s employers cashiered him in 1950.

You never quite know which unnerved that generation of owners more, Chandler allowing the Dodgers to sign Jackie Robinson and break baseball’s colour line or Chandler inadvertently screwing up baseball’s first big television deal two years later: he sold World Series rights to the Gillette shaving products company for $1 million a year over six years, but Gillette in turn sold the rights to NBC for $4 million a year.

Fay Vincent eventually learned the hard way that acting in baseball’s best interest still meant his head on a plate, or at least resigning before he could be executed. The owners weren’t thrilled over his intervention in the 1990 spring lockout, his direct involvement in labour issues, and (perhaps especially) his bid to strong-arm three Yankee officials including manager Buck Showalter out of baseball over standing up for drug-troubled relief pitcher Steve Howe despite Howe’s seventh such violation.

The owners in Chander’s, Vincent’s, and Manfred’s times still share one trait: the commissioner’s powers to enforce the good of the game won’t always get past the idea that the good of the game means making money for the owners. Or not costing them serious money, if Manfred’s serious about heavy Astrogate fines for now.

There’ve been times Manfred appeared to be in somewhat over his head. He’s cracked down impressively enough on domestic violence involving baseball people, but he hasn’t exactly been a tower of strength when it comes to things like umpire accountability. But if he finds his surety enough to go all the way in finding extra-legal espionage is more rampant than just the Astros or even just one or two other teams, Manfred risks skipping lame duck status (he’s been extended through 2024) and going right to dead duck. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

“To do the job without angering an owner is impossible,” Vincent said as he left office and Brewers owner Bud Selig became “interim” commissioner. “I can’t make all twenty-eight of my bosses happy. People have told me I’m the last commissioner. If so, it’s a sad thing. I hope [the owners] learn this lesson before too much damage is done.”

Another problem is that Manfred’s bloodhounds probably can’t expose every last extra-legal sign stealing operation by every last major league team, as Rosenthal notes. “Is it possible the Astros were the most flagrant violators? Of course,” Rosenthal writes. “But the risk in making an example of the Astros is that other franchises almost certainly stole signs illegally. Baseball potentially would face accusations of selective punishment.”

Why focus so hard on the Astros in the first place, then? “[B]ecause the information we had was on the Astros,” Rosenthal continues. “We also heard—and continue to hear—about possible violations by a number of other clubs. But hearing is one thing; confirming is another. We do not report gossip. We report only what we confirm, from multiple sources with first-hand knowledge.”

To revisit questions I asked early in Astrogate, which players will come to expose which teams’ extralegal sign intelligence in Fiers’s wake? Who’ll be the Astros’ or any other teams’ Alexander Butterfield, the man who installed but subsequently exposed the Nixon White House’s taping system?

Reported whisperings from the Astros’ circles indicate a belief that any Astro espionage was nothing more than countering what the other guys were doing. If that’s why the Astros did it, Rosenthal writes, “their people need to tell baseball’s investigators what they know, or else hold their peace.”

Does it matter, as some Astro defenders suggest in various social media places, that the AIA didn’t produce a better 2017 home record than road record? That they won five less at home than on the road in ’17? That they scored only 61 more runs at home in 2017 than in 2016 against 111 more runs on the road? Actually, it doesn’t matter. Rifle through volumes of history and discover some of its most notorious crimes were committed on behalf of goals that weren’t achieved but weren’t considered crimes any the less.

The Watergate burglaries didn’t deliver the desired results, but that didn’t legalise burglary or obstruction of justice, either. Whatever the Astros wanted to accomplish as they became the powerhouse they’ve become, the rules then and now say they did it not with old-fashioned, on-the-field gamesmanship but old-fashioned, off-the-field high-tech cheating. Remember—baseball’s history is littered with teams attempting off-the-field cheating with binoculars, rifle sights, hand-held telescopes, and hidden-wire buzzers. The 1951 National League pennant race was only the most notorious until now.

Some think Manfred wouldn’t dare discipline other marquee franchises if he and his investigators discover they, too, tried more than a little applied advanced electronic theft. Except that he did just that to the Red Sox and the Yankees in August 2017 over Applegate, even if it was just a wrist slap. And, to the Cardinals a year earlier, over then-scouting director Chris Correa’s hacking into the Astros’ scouting computer database. Manfred banned Correa from baseball for life and ordered the Cardinals to hand the Astros $2 million and two choice draft picks over Correa’s hacking. (It wasn’t just a baseball violation, either: Correa also went to the calaboose for 46 months for his trouble.)

Manfred may have to walk a fine tightrope investigating Astrogate, but when he wants to be he’s not afraid to throw the book, drop the hammer, lower the boom, and call curtains on baseball’s marquee or legacy franchises if need be. The key is, “when he wants to be.” Whether it’s the Astros alone, or several more teams operating their own versions of the AIA, the punishments can’t be mere wrist slaps this time. Even at the risk of Manfred’s long-term job survival.

And there’s that not so little matter of baseball’s integrity. “People want the game played consistent with our rules,” Manfred said Tuesday, “and feel it’s important that we figure out exactly what happened here and take steps to make sure that it doesn’t happen in the future by imposing appropriate discipline.” Not exactly as eloquent as A. Bartlett Giamatti was about cheating, but certainly to the point.

Manfred’s suggested heavy fines as well as taking away choice draft positions and picks and suspending offenders from international scouting. He’s done it before, and in 2017 to boot. That’s when he slapped the Braves by stripping them of thirteen international prospects (a $16.48 million loss) and banning freshly resigned general manager John Coppolella for life, over illegal signing bonus arrangements and trying to sign an underage player.

So, what if Manfred and his Astrogate bloodhounds do turn up unlawful electronic sign espionage from far more than just the Astros? What if it is more than just one, two, or three other teams? What if the hounds find those culprits and learn they did it because they really thought everyone else did it? Since when does everybody doing it make it right, for the Astros or anyone else?

Talk about a gut check. Astrogate’s giving one hell of a gut check to Manfred. And, to baseball itself.

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* Sign stealing or relaying isn’t just for hitters, sometimes. Once in awhile it isn’t even for the opposing team. Just ask former Red Sox right fielder Dwight Evans—now a Modern Era Committee candidate for the Hall of Fame—and former Red Sox second baseman Marty Barrett . . . who were sort of stealing their own signs once upon a time.

Evans once wanted a little extra field positioning help, so he and Barrett had a brilliant idea: Barrett would relay the Red Sox’s pitch signs behind his back to Evans from second base, and Evans, knowing which way the pitch was liable to be hit, would adjust his positioning accordingly.

Except that one fine day the Blue Jays’ bullpen caught onto the Evans/Barrett positioning signals . . . and started stealing Barrett’s signs and relaying them to their hitters! This is comparable to the bank robber discovering the bank empty but the vault wide open.

Astrogate: Scouts’ dishonour?

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2019-11-17 MinuteMaidParkAstrogate went from bad to worse this weekend. As in, it may not have been enough for them merely to train a center field camera toward the plate so someone in the clubhouse could steal signs watching television and send them out to the hitters by banging the can.

Now we learn an assistant to general manager Jeff Luhnow suggested, in a August 2017 e-mail, that not only might advance scouts test out stealing signs from the stands, but that they might have wanted to think about using cameras to do it.

And it’s going to prove what ESPN analyst Buster Olney says: the litmus test for whether baseball commissioner Rob Manfred will prove a strong commissioner capable of securing and truly upholding the game’s integrity or “a white-belted high-school crossing guard either incapable of controlling [teams], or someone they believe will be unwilling to come down with a disciplinary hammer.”

On Saturday night, the two Athletic writers to whom former Astro pitcher Mike Fiers blew the Astrogate whistle last week, Ken Rosenthal and Evan Dillich, reported that they received a copy of the August 2017 e-mail asking the Astro scouts to look into picking up signs from dugouts.

Rosenthal and Dillich emphasised they were sent the e-mail on condition the sender and the author’s identity not be revealed just yet. But ESPN’s Jeff Passan, citing assorted sources in positions to know, wrote Sunday morning that Kevin Goldstein, special assistant to Luhnow, was the e-mail’s author. And the text of the e-mail, in which Goldstein urged Astro scouts to go video in figuring out new ways to steal opposition signs, is damning:

One thing in specific we are looking for is picking up signs coming out of the dugout. What we are looking for is how much we can see, how we would log things, if we need cameras/binoculars, etc. So go to game, see what you can (or can’t) do and report back your findings.

Both Passan and the Rosenthal-Dillich duo emphasise the idea didn’t exactly receive unanimous approval from the scouts in question. To read their description is to surmiser that many of those scouts probably wanted to throw up.

“Scouts discussed sign stealing with the executive outside of email as well, on phone calls and in a group Slack channel,” wrote Rosenthal and Dillich. “Multiple Astros scouts said they were appalled by the possibility they would be asked to use a camera—and said that some scouts indeed voiced as much to management. Another scout noted a generally confounded feeling amongst the group by the overall request.”

“Some [scouts] were intrigued by the idea, sources who received the email said,” Passan wrote, “while others were bothered by the thought of pointing cameras from the stands toward opposing teams’ dugouts, a plan that could have earned them scorn within the scouting community if caught.”

Once upon a time, as Watergate unfurled further, the question became what did then-President Richard Nixon know and when did he know it. No less than Nixon’s fellow Republican, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, would remember thinking even in the early Watergate going, “This is beginning to smell like Teapot Dome.”

As of Sunday morning, Astrogate unfurls even further and the question now becomes what Luhnow knew and when did the GM know it. Don’t be shocked if a lot of baseball people start saying of Astrogate, “This is beginning to smell like the Black Sox scandal.”

When Astrogate first broke early last week, Luhnow responded with this, as cited by Forbes: “I know in the last couple of weeks there’s been a lot of news surrounding the Houston Astros and it’s not been good news. I’m disappointed in that. I think these incidents and topics are not tied together, but they obviously have come one after another, it seems like. It is disappointing and if there is an issue we need to address we will address it.”

Somehow, calling something like Astrogate merely “disappointing” resonates the same as would someone calling the Hindenburg disaster a little flare-up. And neither Goldstein, Luhnow, the Astros as an organisation, nor Major League Baseball would comment when asked by The Athletic, ESPN, or Yahoo! Sports.

Officially, and also when Astrogate first broke, the Astros said only this in a formal statement: “Regarding the story posted by The Athletic earlier today, the Houston Astros organization has begun an investigation in cooperation with Major League Baseball. It would not be appropriate to comment further on this matter at this time.”

Teapot Dome was a bribery scandal involving choice Navy oil reserves, a Cabinet official in President Warren Harding’s administration, and a once-fabled oil magnate, not breaking into a major party’s national headquarters. The Black Sox scandal involved players throwing the 1919 World Series for fun and profit, not off-the-field sign espionage.

But they, too, included coverup attempts. It took two years and Harding’s death before Interior Secretary Albert Fall’s Teapot Dome profiteering by bribe was exposed in full. It took almost the entire 1920 season before the 1919 World Series fix was confirmed and exposed. It took a little more than two years to expose the apparent depth of the Watergate coverup.

The Black Sox scandal could have destroyed baseball, which was buffeted long enough by gambling elements including players and even coaches fixing games for fun and profit and not in that order. Astrogate threatens baseball in a time when the Astros probably aren’t the only team engaging in electronic espionage but may just be the most flagrant at it.

What’s missing among other things is who was the Astros’ Alexander Butterfield, who installed but in due course revealed the Nixon White House taping system. Whom among the Astros’ people, at whose instigation, installed the center field camera tied to the clubhouse television set from which stolen signs could be sent to Astro hitters with a bang? And which one of them might become the one to own up to it?

Understand this much: Scouts in the stands can pick off signs on the field any old time they choose, so long as it’s with their own eyes or even a pair of binoculars. They do it on behalf of giving their team an edge in games to come, not the games they’re watching that involve coming opponents. But using cameras for sign deciphering in the stands even for scouts doing advance oppo research is verboten, formally.

When Manfred fined both the Red Sox and the Yankees in August 2017 over high-tech cheating attempts—the Red Sox were caught using an Apple Watch to steal Yankee signs; the Yankees were found using an inappropriate dugout telephone the previous year—he included in his decision, “Moreover, all 30 Clubs have been notified that future violations of this type will be subject to more serious sanctions, including the possible loss of draft picks.”

That means the Astros got the word about technocheating and continued flouting it anyway. Which means that the Astro Intelligence Agency behaved as a baseball law unto itself, thumbing its nose to Manfred with one hand while flipping him the proverbial bird with the other.

In that August 2017 ruling, Manfred made clear that neither the Red Sox nor the Yankee administrations knew of the chicaneries down below. But the commissioner now has no choice otherwise with Goldstein being a Luhnow aide. He has to step up, step out, and demand to know, for openers, whether Luhnow knew, what did he know, and when did he know. He may even have to ask the same of Astros owner Jim Crane.

Manfred also has to demand a complete accounting elsewhere around the game on behalf of the principle enunciated by his predecessor twice removed—at the time the man was president of the National League—when denying the suspension appeal of a pitcher caught with ball doctoring material in his glove:

[Cheating is] not the result of impulse, borne of frustration or anger or zeal as violence is, but are rather acts of a cool, deliberate, premeditated kind. Unlike acts of impulse or violence, intended at the moment to vent frustration or abuse another, acts of cheating are intended to alter the very conditions of play to favour one person. They are secretive, covert acts that strike at and seek to undermine the basic foundation of any contest declaring the winner—that all participants play under identical rules and conditions. Acts of cheating destroy that necessary foundation and thus strike at the essence of a contest. They destroy faith in the games’ integrity and fairness; if participants and spectators alike cannot assume integrity and fairness and proceed from there, the contest cannot in its essence exist . . . Cheating is contrary to the whole purpose of playing to determine a winner fairly and cannot be simply contained; if the game is to flourish and engage public confidence, cheating must be clearly condemned with an eye to expunging it.

—A. Bartlett Giamatti, “Decision in the Appeal of Kevin Gross,” 1987. (Emphases added.)

It’s not a stretch to imagine Goldstein acting entirely on his own in suggesting scouts wield cameras for sign stealing research. If he did, he put Luhnow and maybe even Crane into the hapless position of knowing no more about the underlings’ chicaneries than Richard Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in that happened the night before he picked up a Florida newspaper at his Key Biscayne retreat to read all about it.

If Luhnow and even Crane knew nothing about the Astro Intelligence Agency until Fiers blew the whistle last week, are the GM and the owner really working in-house to get to the nuts, bolts, and bytes of it? Did they really start the moment Rosenthal and Dillich first sent forth Fiers’ shot to be heard ’round the world?

Who would it be if it went down to that? Scouting director Pete Putila? Manager A.J. Hinch? Former Astros bench coach/current Red Sox manager Alex Cora, who’s already thought to have had a hand in the Astros’ 2017 sign stealing? Former 2017 Astros designated hitter/newly-hired Mets manager Carlos Beltran, who’s also suspected of having a role in setting the system up?

Fiers himself hasn’t named names yet. Cora and Beltran are now said to be cooperating “fully” with the Manfred administration’s probe; Cora was interviewed last week. Beltran is due to be interviewed. It won’t affect the Red Sox unless it turns out they tried a little espionage themselves during the season that ended in their 2018 World Series championship. It won’t affect the Mets unless Beltran is found culpable and suspended to open the season.

“There’s nothing illegal about studying your opposite team,” Beltran told reporters in New York. “We all have the same opportunity to look out for information and tendencies. I love and respect the game. I will be a student of it and apply all the lessons.” Studying the opposition isn’t illegal, but deploying off-field technology to steal signs during the game you’re playing is, according to baseball’s rules.

Someone else is bound to turn a name or two over sooner or later, either to a baseball investigator, to Rosenthal and Dillich, to Passan, to someone. It could be someone still in the Astro apparatus. It could be someone formerly in it. It could be someone else digging as arduously as Rosenthal, Dillich, Passan, and others.

Luhnow and the Astros administration already looked terrible in the Brandon Taubman affair before last month’s World Series, when they first reacted to the then-assistant GM’s taunting of women reporters over relief pitcher Roberto Osuna’s previous domestic violence suspension by trying to shoot and smear the Sports Illustrated messenger.

Now they look even worse regarding Astrogate. The since-fired Taubman is still being questioned by the Manfred administration over being so fornicating glad the Astros got Osuna while still under domestic violence suspension, but he’s also liable to be questioned about what if anything he, too, knew about Astrogate.

Do Luhnow and Crane realise this entire scheme has already compromised their rebuilding of the Astros into the powerhouse they’ve become? For an organisation priding itself on getting in front of several curves, the Astros’ leadership still leaves the appearance that they’re letting everyone else get ahead of the one that could prove their knockdown pitch.

The deeper goes Astrogate, the deeper run perceptions already running amok that the Astros don’t trust even the top-of-the-line players they have to play winning baseball without extracurricular subterfuge. There are probably other teams around the Show watching Astrogate unfurl further and wondering when their in-house intelligence operatives will be caught, if they have them.

And, no, going after those Astro players who accepted the electronically stolen signs won’t really help. It would be the same as New York police legend Frank Serpico once described about his department’s rampant corruption in the 1960s and early 1970s: going after a few flunky cops (players) wasn’t the same as going after a culture that allowed it in the first place.

Astro fans deserve your sympathy. Memory runs to the long, sad years when their futilities and shortfalls provoked even the most stubborn among them to call them the Lastros. Now, in an era when few fans have had as much to savour as Astro fans have, Astrogate and other fooleries are liable to leave them calling the team something else—the Disastros.

Except that it’s not just the Astros’s disaster. It’s baseball’s, too.

Yu’re kidding, right?

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2019-11-16 YuDarvish

Yu Darvish looking staggered after surrendering the 2017 World Series homer that knocked him out of Game Seven after an inning and two thirds.

Practically from the moment Mike Fiers triggered Astrogate, there came a swell of blended rage and remorse from Dodger fans still smarting over Yu Darvish getting battered twice in the World Series, especially Game Seven. A lot of which fans now wanted to apologise. To Darvish.

All of a sudden a high-tech cheating scandal made a hero out of a pitcher whom we thought was caught tipping his pitches and battered accordingly, while any Dodger who was supposed to spot those things didn’t spot them. And who still felt the compulsion to apologise on the record just a couple of days later.

Just two years ago Darvish was Public Enemy Number One. Now, all of a sudden, he was embraced as another possible victim of the Astro Intelligence Agency. As God and His servant Branch Rickey are my witnesses, I swear sports fans take a back seat to few for absurdism.

You could have been Los Angeles’s most notorious wanted criminal, and you wouldn’t have inspired half the dragnet Dodger fans wanted to run to capture, draw, and quarter Darvish. And whatever was left of him. Now the guy who was compelled wrongly to a public apology in the first place gets a lavish bubble bath of apologies from the same fans.

“Why am I trending [sic]?” Darvish tweeted on Day One of Astrogate. “Do people finally realize I’m cool?” Priceless.

He’s too polite to reject them directly, but he’s too self-aware to accept them sight unseen. “I’m not looking for that,” he said in a post on his YouTube channel. “I don’t want them to change their minds.” Be careful what Yu wish for.

A simple “I stunk, that’s all” from Darvish on Twitter wasn’t enough. Nor, perhaps, is his further YouTube demurral. “If you ask me if I got hit in Game Seven because they stole signs, I don’t think so,” he said, in a translation by the Los Angeles Times columnist Dylan Hernandez. “The Astros have great players who don’t have to do that. So I think that whether or not they stole signs, the results wouldn’t have changed.”

Notice Darvish’s phrasing. I said more or less the same thing myself in a previous Astrogate entry. About the Astros having great players who don’t have to resort to crime, high tech or otherwise. Which is almost as much of what makes Astrogate such an outrage as the fact that they so flagrantly broke the actual rules about off-field electronic surveillance in the first place.

These Astros needed high tech spying to win about as much as Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign CREEPs needed whatever they were looking for—while so ineptly bugging Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex—for their man to win by a landslide in 1972.

And the Astros are accused only of operating the AIA in Minute Maid Park. So far. Nobody’s yet suggested they sent the agency on surveillance missions in road ballparks in the first place, never mind gotten away with it if they had.

Unless there’s evidence yet to be exhumed, it’s not very likely that the Astros bugged Dodger Stadium to get the drop on Darvish. Unless they had a mole among the stadium personnel, any Astro personnel trying to set up electronic surveillance in the road ballpark would have been caught, thrown out of the stadium, and maybe have to answer to la policia in the bargain.

Wouldn’t they?

Even Darvish himself let the suggestion enter his mind for a moment. “What’s been reported up to this point is that they used cameras at their home field,” he said, “so I don’t know if there was anything like that. But what they were doing was so high-level that I can’t honestly say there’s no chance they were also doing it on the road.”

Dodger fans wanting to make it up to Darvish should stop right at the point of apologising for wanting to hang him after the 2017 World Series. Especially since he wasn’t the only reason the Astros won Game Seven, and getting sent to bed without his supper after an inning and two thirds still left the Dodgers plenty of time to overthrow the 5-0 hole the Dodgers were in when he departed.

Memory time, boys and girls. Darvish’s Game Seven evening began with a leadoff double by George Springer and Springer coming home on a throwing error in the infield, allowing Alex Bregman aboard to reach second on the play. Then Bregman stole third with Jose Altuve at the plate, and Altuve pushed Bregman home on an unassisted ground out to first. Two runs, unearned, in the top of the first.

Top of the second? Brian McCann opened with a full-count walk. Marwin Gonzalez doubled him to third. Josh Reddick grounded out to second. And Astros starting pitcher Lance McCullers, Jr. pushed McCann home and Gonzalez to third on another ground out to second, before Springer hit a full-count pitch into the left field bleachers.

Where were the Dodger brain trusters who didn’t catch him tipping pitches and fix it before the Astros could do any more damage than the Dodgers gifted them in the top of the first?

Where were the Dodger hitters who looked McCullers’s gift horse in the mouth, putting two or more on against him the first few innings including ducks on the pond in the bottom of the first, but swinging like Little Leaguers trying to hit six-run homers on every pitch and leaving the runners grounds for court martials, charges desertion?

The only reward Dodger fans got for Brandon Morrow (ending the second), Clayton Kershaw (four scoreless in relief), Kenley Jansen (a scoreless seventh), and Alex Wood (scoreless eighth and ninth) stopping the bleeding was a one-out RBI single from Andre Ethier in the sixth. The Dodgers had two or better on and men on second or better in five of the first six innings, and Ethier was the only man to cash in.

Now the Dodgers deny pitch tipping was the issue. Their roster included now-retired Chase Utley, said to be expert at catching pitch tipping. “[He] watched the Darvish outings,” says team president Andrew Friedman, “and said you couldn’t sell out on something that Darvish was doing.”

Darvish’s ERA in the first two 2017 postseason rounds was 1.62. His Series ERA: 21.60. The 2017 Dodgers won three more regular season games than the Astros despite the Astros out-hitting them—the Dodgers’ team ERA on that season was 3.38; the Astros’, 4.12. And you don’t need me to tell you the flip side of, “Good pitching beats good hitting.”

Was Darvish more right saying “I stunk?” Or did the Astros find some way to take the AIA on the road with them, after all? Were they that nervous about the Dodgers’ potential to out-pitch them?

I’ve written until I was blue in the fingers about baseball’s goats and fans inane enough to try making their lives to follow nightmares. The last time was in the immediate wake of Bill Buckner’s death on Memorial Day. I inadvertently omitted Darvish from the roll of those who really needed no forgiveness because there wasn’t a damn thing to forgive in the first place.

When Thomas Boswell eulogised Donnie Moore, after Moore’s shocking suicide in 1989, he wrote with no small indignation, “Many of us wish that, just once, we could be in your shoes and have a chance to fail so grandly. Although, if we really had to live the experience and its aftermath, which sometimes lasts a lifetime, maybe we would not.”

So Darvish had five runs torn out of him before he could get a third out in the Game Seven second? That didn’t make him a criminal. It made him a pitcher who tried and failed. The most successful people on earth try and fail, usually before their successes and more often than you think after them.

And they don’t all go to work with 50,000+ plus waiting to watch them in the office and millions more eavesdropping in front of television or radio, either.

Angel fans refused to forgive Moore for throwing a great pitch that Dave Henderson managed somehow to send over the left field fence to tie a game when the Angels were a strike away from the 1986 World Series. Haunted as it was, Moore was finally driven to shoot his wife and then himself. Only his wife survived.

He was only preceded by Fred Merkle, Freddie Lindstrom, Ernie Lombardi, Johnny Pesky, Ralph Branca, Gene Mauch, Willie Davis, Curt Flood, Luis Aparicio, Mike Torrez, Tom Niedenfeuer, and Don Denkinger. He was only followed by Buckner (in the ’86 World Series), Mitch Williams, Alex Gonzalez, Grady Little, and—so far as Astro fans are concerned (wrongly, I might add)—A.J. Hinch.

Come to think of it, if the Astros ended up losing the 2017 Series Ken Giles might have had the goat horns plopped on his head. His crimes included surrendering a fisted cue shot to Corey Seager on an inside fastball, walking Justin Turner on five pitches four of which were borderline corner calls, and throwing Cody Bellinger a fastball off the middle that was driven to deep left center to break a one-all Game Four tie in the top of the ninth.

Hinch brought in Joe Musgrove, who struck Yasiel Puig out and put Logan Forsythe aboard to load the pads for a double play, then surrendered a sacrifice fly before throwing Joc Pederson a slightly up, slightly in fastball on 0-1 and watching it sail into the right field seats.

But Giles took the abuse. Despite owning up after the game: “I didn’t do my job. Plain and simple. I let my team down.” Despite George Springer springing to his and Musgrove’s defense concurrently: “This game’s hard. They’re not out there trying to fail. I hope [Hinch] keeps giving ’em the ball. I have the utmost confidence in them, and I’m glad they’re on my team.”

Giles didn’t see another inning’s work in that Series. And it may have gotten to him a little more in the long run. He struggled in early 2018 and fumed when being lifted after a bad outing against the Athletics. He was demoted to the minors, then traded—in classic adding insult-to-injury style—to the Blue Jays . . . for then domestic violence-suspended Robert Osuna.

The Astros took a public relations beating over acquiring Osuna. And during this year’s World Series, assistant GM Brandon Taubman was fired after the Astros embarrassed themselves trying to defend his indefensible hollering with women reporters in post-ALCS triumph earshot that he was so fornicating glad they got Osuna.

Already still under questioning by baseball government over that incident, Taubman is now liable to face Astrogate questioning—as in, what did he know about the AIA and to what extent did he know it—while he’s at it.

Giles, meanwhile, regrouped entirely in Toronto. Though he finished 2018 on the down side, in 2019 he had a breathtaking comeback—a 2.27 fielding-independent pitching rate and a 1.87 ERA. Except that since he was in Toronto, nobody other than Blue Jays fans cared—if you didn’t count the trade deadline interest he drew before elbow inflammation put him on the injured list before the All-Star break.

Darvish went on to sign a mega-deal with the Cubs. He struggled out of the 2018 chute before going down for the season thanks to a triceps strain and concurrent elbow stress reactions. It’s not impossible that he put pressure on himself trying to live up to his new contract. Wasn’t the first, won’t be the last.

This year, Darvish struggled to regain his form—indignant Cub fans referred to him too often as “Flu Garbage”—before going mostly lights out in August and September: he was still prone to the long ball (well, so was American League Cy Young Award winner Justin Verlander), but his ERA for those two months was 2.99.

And he really doesn’t want to think that the AIA did him in in Game Seven two years ago. “I feel that if I absolve myself and say it was the Astros’ fault . . . I can’t develop as a person,” he said in his YouTube posting.

“In life, I think huge failures are extremely important. I’ve had a few up to this point,” he continued. “The World Series was one of them. I think it will remain a point of reference for me. I’ve already learned a lot from it. So regarding that, I can’t view myself charitably. I think I have to continue to accept the results.”

That makes him an even better man than he already showed himself to be. But we’re going to learn soon enough whether Astrogate involves robbing their road hosts. And if it does, who were their Bonnie and Clyde?