Tag Archives: Joe Kelly

NLCS Game Five: Dead men make tales

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Chris Taylor

Taylor starts the Dodger party in the bottom of the second Thursday night, hitting the first of his three bombs on the evening off Max Fried’s fastball down the chute. (TBS screen capture.)

Memorandum to: Boston Red Sox; Minute Maid Park, Houston. Subject: How to return from the dead.

Dear Red Sox: Pay attention to what the Dodgers did Thursday night. It isn’t the only way to keep postseason elimination outside the door. But it was as profound and unlikely as the night was long.

You’ve certainly got the firepower capable of doing together what Chris Taylor did almost by himself to the Braves all the live long night. You’ve got the mind over matter power to coax your bullpen back to reasonable efficiency. You’ve got the defense that’s capable of turning prospective Astro hits into definitive Astro outs.

You’re also needing two straight triumphs on the road to return from the dead to the World Series. It’ll be no simpler for you to do that than it will for the Dodgers in Atlanta. But it’s not impossible, either. Impossible is in the eye of the beholder. You proved that winning the 2018 American League Championship Series against the Astros, remember?

Just like Dodger manager Dave Roberts, who isn’t quite the tactical conqueror or strategic genius your Alex Cora happens to be, you haven’t quit believing in the impossible just yet. Have you?

Hopefully not, because you Red Sox know better than I know that anything can happen in baseball—and usually does. All you have to do is be as certain as mere human men can be that, when anything happens, it’s you making it happen, not you to whom it happens.

If Taylor can yank himself even further onto the high plateau to hit three insane home runs all by himself during an 11-2 blowout of the Braves, you Red Sox have a collection of bats who need only provide one burst of power each, preferably with someone on base ahead of him.

Hopefully, you won’t have to sacrifice a key pitching arm to save and continue your season. It might have been curtains for the Dodgers when their National League Championship Series Game Five opener Joe Kelly had to leave the game with a biceps strain in the top of the first, while in the middle of pitching to Austin Riley.

Suddenly the lack of genuine snap to Kelly’s bread-and-butter curve balls in the inning, one of which Freddie Freeman smashed into the right center field bleachers for a two-run homer, made sickening sense.

Kelly’s gone for the rest of the postseason, however long it lasts for the Dodgers. Roberts pulled six pitching rabbits out of his hat after Kelly went down, and they pitched eight and a thirds worth of three-hit, nine-strikeout, no-walk shutout relief. Taylor did most of the rest of the work for him.

You Red Sox may have such postseason supermen as Kike Hernandez to send to the plate, but you’re smart enough not to count on him alone to run roughshod over the Astros in their house. Roberts didn’t exactly plan that Taylor should be responsible for 55 percent of the Dodger runs Thursday night.

He merely leaned forward and enjoyed it with the rest of Dodger Stadium’s throng and the millions in front of the telly, the radio, or the Internet. He enjoyed the Dodger batters stretching their plate appearances, going the other way when need be, refusing to see the Braves’ pitches as incoming carnivores. He sure as hell loved the power, too.

Dodgers left fielder A.J. Pollock started the fun when he hit Braves starter Max Fried’s second pitch of the bottom of the second over the left field fence. Old Albert Pujols, starting at first base because he still has a useful bat against lefthanded pitchers, slipped a base hit to left immediately. Immediately after that, Taylor Tonight went on the air.

Fried started Taylor with a fastball right down the chute. And Taylor started the blowout by driving it clean to the rear end of the Dodger bullpen in left.

One inning later, with one out, Pollock lined a single to left with one out, Pujols cued a single the other way into right, and Taylor flared one into short center, beyond the reach of onrushing Braves shortstop Ozzie Albies and incoming Braves center fielder Adam Duvall, to single Pollock home.

Two innings after that, a leadoff walk to Will Smith turned into Pollock dialing Area Code 6-4-3. But Pujols hung in to work a full count walk out of Fried, which walked Fried out of the game in favour of Braves reliever Chris Martin. For having the audacity to start Taylor off with two strikes, Martin’s reward was his head on the proverbial plate. Also known the unsinking sinker getting sunk into the right center field bleachers.

Dylan Lee took over for the Braves in the sixth and made the Dodgers behave themselves despite Corey Seager’s two-out single, and Lee even kept the Dodgers on time out for the first two outs of the bottom of the seventh. Then he ran into Taylor. He ran Taylor to 2-2. But then Lee somehow hung a changeup, and Taylor hung it into the left field bleachers.

The Dodgers abusing yet another Braves reliever, Jacob Webb, for three in the eighth—Trea Turner singling Mookie Betts home with nobody out; Pollock sending a three-run homer into the left center field bleachers—seemed as though they were saying, “Who died and named Taylor in his will to have all the fun tonight?”

Who also died and left in his will that the Dodgers were particularly vulnerable to lefthanded pitchers? They’d gone 4-for-40 against Braves portsiders entering Game Five . . . and carved Fried up like a Halloween pumpkin going 8-for-21 before his evening ended mercifully enough.

“At the end of the day, it’s playoff baseball,” said Fried, who denied calmly that pitching playoff baseball in front of his home folks from Santa Monica (TBS broadcasters observed he’d left sixty game passes for them) got to him worse than the Dodgers did. “It’s a really good team that won a lot of games, and you’ve got to be on top of your game. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as sharp as I needed to be.”

The guy who sent the Dodgers past the National League wild card game in the first place with his eleventh-minute two-run homer didn’t need anything but to remind one and all it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing, or three of them. Some Dodger fans think that RBI single in the third only proved that Taylor’s only human, after all.

Jackie Robinson. Duke Snider. Roy Campanella. Gil Hodges. Frank Howard. Steve Garvey. Ron Cey. Pedro Guerrero. Mike Piazza. Shawn Green. None of those Dodger bombers of legend—and there are four Hall of Famers in the lot—ever hit three into the seats or beyond in a single postseason game.

What do Hall of Famers Willie Mays, Stan Musial, and Cal Ripken, Jr. have in common? They hit three postseason homers at all . . . one each: Mays, 1971 NLCS; Musial, 1944 World Series; Ripken, 1997 ALCS. It must be humbling to think you did more in one postseason game than three of the game’s all-time greatest did in their postseason lives.

What do Hall of Famers Babe Ruth, Reggie Jackson, and George Brett have in common? They each hit three bombs in one postseason game and Ruth did it twice—but none of those three did it the way Taylor did, going 4-for-5 with six runs batted in in those games. One other man hitting three out in one postseason game ever did the same four-fer with six steaks: Taylor’s teammate Pujols.

And none of the above on the postseason three-bomb game did it in a game their teams absolutely had to win if they weren’t in the mood to be home in time to deck the halls and yards for Halloween. Or, to leave their teams standing as the only such team to win seven consecutive win-or-be-dead postseason games.

Taylor had one spell of three homers in a single week this year before he partied hearty Thursday night. He went 8-for-72 over the regular season’s final five weeks—and now stands 9-for-17 in this NLCS alone, including his Thursday night 4-for-5.

“The highlights,” Pujols said of Taylor postgame, “are going to be there the rest of his life. That’s something you’re going to share forever.”

“The only thing that excites him, I’ve seen, is he likes to have a beer,” Pollock said of Taylor. “He gets excited about that, a beer with the boys, and then he loves watching surfing. Maybe the three home runs today might have spiked his adrenaline, but probably not. Most likely just the beer and watching surfing.”

So, naturally, a beer-loving surfer dude who battled with a balky neck down the stretch does in a little over two weeks what nobody else has done in an entire career—namely, walk one postseason game off with a home run and then hit three in a postseason elimination game. Let’s go surfin’ now, come on on safari with me.

The only thing the Dodgers have to do now is sweep the Braves back in Atlanta. As the man once said on the radio, it ain’t easy, Clyde. Writing the Braves off this year has proven an exercise in presumptuousness so far.

Remember that, Red Sox. You, too, have been written off often enough this year. You may not have a Taylor in your midst, but the foot you’re said to have in the grave isn’t as far beneath its surface line as you think.

“You name it, we have to do it,” Cora has said approaching ALCS Game Six.

Meaning Nathan Eovaldi gotta Eovaldi when he starts Game Six. Meaning Kike Hernandez can’t take another night off at the plate the way he did, somewhat surprisingly, in Game Five. Meaning the Schwarbinator gotta Schwarbinate, and shake off his Games Four and Five plate absences.

Meaning, too, that the bullpen gotta bullpen, especially if you get to Game Seven and Nick Pivetta, Garrett Whitlock, and Tanner Houck are recalibrated fully, critical when the pen’s depth is still under compromise. (And closer Matt Barnes is still injured and among the missing.)

Meaning Xander Bogaerts has to get his bat back to where his glove at shortstop mostly remains, top of the line or close enough. Meaning the next time you pinch hit Bobby Dalbec and Travis Shaw, make sure they’re not carrying pool noodles to the plate.

Nobody has to make Chris Taylor’s kind of history Friday night, Red Sox. But your manager’s right. You name it, you have to do it. Whatever it takes to win twice in a row. The Astros won’t make it easy for you. But you didn’t get here the easy way, this time, anyway.

You have nothing to lose but your season. You have a pennant to win. Red Sox of all shapes, sizes, swings, and slings, unite.

Max the Knife comes up aces

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Max Scherzer

Dodger fans asked Max the Knife for something he’d never had in his career before Wednesday night—a curtain call.

Nothing could spoil Max Scherzer’s mound premiere in a Dodger uniform Wednesday night. And it wasn’t for lack of trying by the Astros. Not even for lack of trying by one particularly brain dead Dodger fan down the right field line.

The Astros made a grand enough effort after Scherzer left the game following seven stellar innings and ten strikeouts marred only by a solo home run and an RBI single. They had to settle for losing by two runs instead of five.

The Dodger bullpen made a grand enough effort, too, letting the Astros pry three runs out of them including a two-run homer in the top of the ninth off Kenley Jansen before he finally struck out the side to end the 7-5 Dodger win without any further self-immolation.

The aforesaid meathead in the stands did his best to contribute to a potential overthrow, too. With two out in the top of the eighth, struggling Cody Bellinger playing right field, and Carlos Correa at the plate against his old buddy Joe Kelly, Correa on 1-0 lifted a long foul down the line. Bellinger had a running bead on the ball and a certain side-retiring catch ready and waiting.

Until he didn’t.

Bellinger jumped just enough to make the catch. Except that the idiot in a Mookie Betts jersey with a glove on his left meathook reached up to snatch the ball right before it would have landed in Bellinger’s glove. Some of the fans surrounding the jerk congratulated him. Others surrounding him looked as though they wanted to brain him.

Technically, the jerk didn’t quite cross the line into obvious fan interference. But you’d think even the most profit-hungering souvenir hunter would be smart enough to back down when the right fielder has a chance to end an inning with a catch just above the edge of the fence padding.

Instead of side retired, Correa got extra life against Kelly. He swung and missed for strike two immediately after the stolen foul out, fouled another off, then turned on a hanging slider and sent it almost halfway up the left field bleachers for the third Astro run of the night.

Dodger Stadium security removed the miscreant after Correa finished his trip around the bases. A few of the fans in the same region let the security people know just how happy they weren’t over that removal. They’d better be grateful that this wasn’t another World Series game.

They’d also better be grateful that not even jerks being jerks could spoil Scherzer’s first outing as a Dodger.

The packed, roaring house just gave Scherzer even more incentive to go forth and do what he tends to do best, refusing to let even Michael Brantley’s one-out bomb in the top of the first, or Kyle Tucker singling Yordan Alvarez home with two outs in the fourth keep him from his appointed ten punchouts thanks to an effective curve ball setting up the fastest fastballs he’s thrown all season.

“You live for this,” Max the Knife said after the game. “You live to pitch in front of 50,000 people going nuts.”

They went nuts enough that still-ailing Clayton Kershaw, his fellow three-time Cy Young Award winner, nudged Scherzer back out of the dugout after his outing ended to take what he’d never taken in his entire career to that point—a curtain call.

“With everything on the line, the way the crowd was, that was a high-adrenaline start, coming here,” the righthander continued. “Try not to do too much. Just pitch my game, go out there and do what I can do, and just try to navigate the lineup. The offense tonight went off.”

“Went off” was a polite way to put it. The Astros barely had time to let their opening 1-0 advantage sink in when Betts turned on Jake Odorizzi’s slider and sent it over the center field fence to lead the bottom of the first off. A walk, a swinging strikeout, and a Jose Altuve throwing error later, Will Smith turned on Odorizzi’s fastball and drove it into the right field bleachers.

One inning and one out after that, Betts struck again, hitting a 3-1 heater into the left field bleachers. An inning, two outs, and a walk after that, A.J. Pollock hit one over the left field fence and Odorizzi must have thought by then that he could have pulled an automatic pistol out of his pocket, fired toward the plate, and still watched the bullet travel out of the yard off the end of a Dodger bat.

The Astro righthander blamed poor mechanics since the All-Star break, but with a 4.95 ERA and a 5.06 fielding-independent pitching rate on the season you could almost wonder whether the Astros threw him up as a sacrificial lamb Wednesday night.

“My fastball has been flat,” Odorizzi said after the game. He could have said “flat-tened” and it wouldn’t have made a difference. “There are a lot of things I am working on between outings, but then I am reverting back to bad form.”

The bad news for the Dodgers was that such reversion threatened to ruin Jansen and them in the top of the ninth. He surrendered a leadoff single to Aledmys Diaz before Tucker sent a hanging cutter into the right field bullpen. Then Jansen re-horsed to strike Robel Garcia, Jason Castro, and pinch-hitter Meyers out swinging.

Nothing, though, could diminish Scherzer’s impact. Especially with the Dodgers in straits desperate enough in the starting pitching department. Walker Buehler and Julio Arias have had to hold fort while Kershaw’s forarm inflammation hasn’t subsided yet, and it’s already kept the lefthander out since early July.

Tony Gonsolin’s shoulder is inflamed likewise. Still-ailing Kansas City import Danny Duffy isn’t likely to be ready before September. And the execrable Trevor Bauer remains on administrative leave while MLB and the Pasadena police continue investigating sexual assault accusations against him.

The Dodgers hogged the headlines on trade deadline day when they swept in and snatched Scherzer (plus star infielder Trea Turner) from the Nationals and right out from under their downstate rival Padres’s noses. Now Scherzer had to live up to the headlines—just the way he forced himself to live up to the biggest noise of 2019 and pitch on nothing but fumes and will to keep the World Series-winning Nats in Game Seven just long enough to give them a chance to win it in the first place.

Manager Dave Roberts almost wasn’t worried. Almost. Buehler and Urias must have felt as though thousand-pound iron blocks were removed from both their shoulders after Scherzer’s evening’s work finished.

“From the moment I got to the ballpark, we got to the ballpark, you could just see that elevation, anticipation from our guys,” Roberts said post-game. “The buzz in the crowd from the first pitch, him taking the mound, donning the [Dodgers’ home uniform] for the first time—he delivered. He delivered. Just the intensity. It was so much fun. And it was just really cool to see the crowd smell it and want him to finish that seventh inning.”

“I mean, it’s Max Scherzer,” the Mookie Monster said post-game. “I think that kind of speaks for itself.” (In case you were curious, Betts had one hit—a double—in six lifetime plate appearances against Scherzer before they became teammates.)

For Scherzer, coming off the only mid-season trade of his distinguished career, and to the team he’d helped beat in the 2019 National League Division Series, the hardest part’s over. For now. “I’m a Dodger,” Max the Knife said. “It feels a lot more normal when you just go out there and pitch and win. Winning kind of cures everything.”

It might even get him the final home address of his career. Might.

If he keeps pitching the way he did Wednesday night, even at age 37, and nobody including Scherzer shouldn’t be shocked if the Dodgers decide to make it worth his while and his bank account to keep him in the family. At least until his arm finally decides to resign its commission a couple of years from now. Maybe with a couple of more World Series triumphs to its credit before he’s done.

“They [screwed] it up twice”

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2020-08-14 AJHinchAlexCors

Former Houston Astros manager A.J. Hinch and bench coach Alex Cora. Los Angeles Dodgers relief pitcher Joe Kelly fumes that Astro players tainted Hinch’s and Cora’s names to save their own.

With everything else buffeting major league baseball before delayed “summer camp” and the truncated season, it was easy enough to miss. But Alex Cora—considered an Astro Intelligence Agency co-mastermind and unproven shepherd of the Red Sox Replay Room Reconnaissance Ring—spoke out in June.

And Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly, one of Cora’s Red Sox charges during their run to the World Series title in 2018, spoke up likewise in a podcast by Dodger teammate Ross Stripling days before his suspension—for throwing at Alex Bregman and Carlos Correa, the latter drawing Astros and Dodgers alike out of dugouts in social-distance violation—was cut from eight to five games.

Between them comes an alteration of the former Astrogate narrative, and it’s not likely to mitigate the AIA stain on the 2017 world champions. If anything, it’s liable to make the stain deeper. Upon the 2017-18 Astros’ players and upon commissioner Rob Manfred, who handed those players blanket immunity in return for spilling about the AIA’s off-field-based, electronic pitch sign espionage.

“The people who took the fall for what happened is nonsense. Yes, everyone is involved,” said Kelly aboard Stripling’s podcast.

But the way [the AIA] was run over there was not from coaching staff . . . They’re not the head boss in charge of that thing. It’s the players. So now the players get the immunity, and all they do is go snitch like a little bitch, and they don’t have to get fined, they don’t have to lose games.

Kelly’s remarks hark among others to Cora telling ESPN writer Marly Rivera in early June that he didn’t object to shouldering his own responsibility for the 2017 Astros’ chicaneries, having been their bench coach before becoming the Red Sox’s manager, but also wanting one and all to know that neither himself nor 2017 Astros designated hitter Carlos Beltran were the sole drivers.

When Manfred dropped his Astrogate hammer earlier this year, he fined owner Jim Crane the maximum-allowable $5 million, virtual tip money. He suspended general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch for all 2020. Crane fired the pair almost at once.

Then the Red Sox more or less forced Cora out as their manager before the Rogue Sox sign-stealing report emerged. And the New York Mets more or less forced Beltran out as their newly-hired manager—before Beltran got to manage even a single exhibition game for the team he once starred for as an outfielder.

“When you take someone’s livelihood . . . to save your own ass, that’s what I don’t like,” Kelly continued.

Cheating? They cheated. Everyone knows they’re cheaters. They know they’re cheaters. It’s over. That’s done with. But now they mess it up by ruining other people’s lives, so they [screwed] it up twice . . . When you taint someone’s name to save your own name, this is one of the worst things that you could probably do . . . That really friggin’ bugs me. I think I’ll be irritated forever.

In other words, the Astros players accepting Manfred’s immunity to throw Cora, Beltran, and even Hinch and Luhnow under the proverbial bus isn’t even close to being Mike Fiers—frustrated that attempts by himself and others in the know to get reporters to push for exposing the AIA previously—finally blowing the Astrogate whistle to The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich last November.

Kelly may have missed Cora telling Rivera it wasn’t only players who might have made himself and/or Beltran sacrificial lambs. “There has been a narrative out there of what happened,” Cora said.

Ever since mid-November until the commissioner announced the results of the Red Sox investigation, I have read many things that are true and many others that are not.Out of this whole process, if there is one thing that I completely reject and disagree with is people within the Astros organization singling me out, particularly Jeff Luhnow, as if I were the sole mastermind. The commissioner’s report sort of explained, in its own way, what happened. But the [Astros players] have spoken up and refuted any allegations that I was solely responsible.

If there is one thing I am absolutely sure of, it is that it was not a two-man show. We all did it. And let me be very clear that I am not denying my responsibility, because we were all responsible.

Manfred’s subsequent report on the Rogue Sox determined—after the commissioner handed 2018-19 players the same immunity to spill as he handed the Astros—that their replay-room sign-stealing scheme was actually executed without Cora’s direct knowledge of the operation.

Remember: The AIA involved either installing an illegal real-time camera or altering an existing camera off mandated eight-second transmission delays to send opposition pitch signs to a clubhouse monitor, where someone deciphered them and signaled them to hitters by way of banging a can slowly next to that monitor.

The Rogue Sox didn’t go that far. They married old-fashioned on-field sign-stealing gamesmanship to new-fashioned technology all but gift-wrapped for them. MLB itself handed them and anyone else so inclined the keys to the kingdom when it installed multiple-monitor replay rooms in both clubhouses in all ballparks.

Someone deciphered opposition signs on one of those monitors and transmitted them to a Red Sox baserunner who’d send it on to a batter. The key is that the Red Sox needed a man on base to execute the reconnaissance operation in the first place. They couldn’t and didn’t have stolen signs for every man in the lineup.

The AIA didn’t need baserunners to do its dirty work, though it could only operate in Minute Maid Park. Which made the scheme even more bizarre, never mind unnecessary, since the 2017-18 Astros actually won sixteen more games total on the road than at home.

Cora, remember, once made himself a Dodgers folk hero thanks to an epic eighteen-pitch plate appearance against Chicago Cubs pitcher Matt Clement that ended in a two-run homer into Dodger Stadium’s right field bullpen. Now he’s a pariah for being the bench coach of the ’17 Astros and the manager of the ’18 Red Sox, both of whom beat the Dodgers in back-to-back World Series.

Unlike those Astros who met the press as spring training opened (pre-coronavirus shutdown) and sounded as unapologetic as men offering apologies can sound, outraging about seven-eighths of MLB players, Cora did apologise for both the AIA and the Rogue Sox. “I understand why people think that our championship is not valid, and it’s our fault that they think that,” he told Rivera.

I am being honest and I apologize for what happened and for the mistakes we made as a group. I understand why people are disappointed. I am disappointed in myself. At the time, one doesn’t think about the consequences. It was something that kept growing and growing, and in the end, it was wrong. We made a mistake and I must pay for the consequences of my actions.

Kelly pondered aloud whether those Astros who spilled to Manfred called Beltran, Cora, Hinch, and even Luhnow—whose administration was controversial enough before Astrogate’s exposure, and whose departure may have been mourned the least—“and said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry’ . . . If they had said, ‘Hey, I’m super scared, I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t want to lose money, I had to rat’ . . . Grow a pair of balls and say that.”

Would that make any difference to Beltran, Cora, and Hinch now?

Beltran lost a job he’d barely begun to do but one for which he seemed qualified enough. Cora lost a job in which he’d become only the fifth rookie manager ever to win a World Series, after Bucky Harris (the 1924 Washington Senators), Eddie Dyer (the 1946 St. Louis Cardinals), Ralph Houk (the 1961 New York Yankees), and Bob Brenly (the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks).

The hapless Hinch, who’d shown himself mostly as an ideal managerial marriage between smarts and sensitivity, was exposed as powerless to stop his charges from plunging deeper into baseball crime or to stop his superiors from fostering such an atmosphere in the first place.

Before you return to the false narrative of Kelly’s “hypocrisy” for scoring the Astros while being a member of the Rogue Sox, remind yourself: Red Sox pitchers catching on to baserunning teammates sending stolen enemy signs to hitters probably thought the runners got the signs the old fashioned way, catching on to and exploiting an enemy catcher’s inadvertent tells.

The Red Sox fell to the ’17 Astros in a division series but beat the Astros in five—abetted especially by Andrew Benintendi’s Game Four-ending, three-run-saving, series tie-thwarting catch in left field—in the ’18 American League Championship Series.

Six Astros regulars on the 2017-18 team remain with them today. How long before the AIA stain dissipates is anyone’s guess, never mind that there were those from the scandal’s birth who suggested the stain wouldn’t leave the Astros until all the 2017-18 players had either moved on or ended their career.

There’s little enough comfort for Astro and Red Sox fans still coming to terms with having rooted for two great teams who, obviously enough, lost enough faith in their own greatness. There’s also the distinct possibility that the bad blood between the Astros and the Dodgers won’t dissipate too soon, either. They meet again in Dodger Stadium in September.

“Just to say, ‘Oh, it’s done, it’s over with, move on,’ I don’t think is a reality for anyone,” Dodger third baseman Justin Turner told a Fox Sports pre-game show. “I think around the league, there are a lot of guys upset, who kind of feel like the punishment didn’t really fit the crime. I don’t know if that’ll ever go away for me.”

Millions of fans and an awful lot of players don’t know, either.

Five for Kelly, not eight, but . . .

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Syndication: Phoenix

Joe Kelly’s suspension is now five, not eight games. Some say that’s still too excessive.

The good news, such as it is, is that Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly’s suspension for throwing at Houston Astros Alex Bregman and Carlos Correa, triggering a bench-clearing, safety protocols-defying debate, was reduced from eight to five games. Enough might say that’s still too much.

The bad news is that there remain enough, aboard social media especially, to whom Kelly didn’t go far enough in administering Astrogate justice. Much like rioters and looters turning peaceful if grief-stricken demonstrations into war zones, they would cross the line between demanding justice for the guilty and destroying the innocent.

“Asstros [the poster’s spelling] need to be assaulted, often and viciously,” said one such social media poster, perhaps too typically, not specifically about Kelly but about the protocol-defying near-dugout scrum into which Astros coach Alex Cintron goaded Oakland outfielder Ramon Laureano last Sunday afternoon.

“Bean balls, mound charging, spiking, spitting, fighting, punches, headlocks, punches to the face hard and often,” the poster continued. “Umpires should call every pitch against them a strike.” And then we should get really mad?

Such outrage is far more comprehensible than the same poster going forward from there to say violence has deeply therepeutic benefits. For whom? For those whose rage over the lack of Astrogate discipline against the cheating players simply will not be satisfied by one pitcher throwing beanballs?

Or, by one Athletics outfielder fuming over being hit by Astro pitches thrice in one weekend and twice that Sunday while, coincidentally, not one Astro batter saw so much as a brushback all weekend?

Social media hounds such as that demand retribution above and beyond the bounds of the game policing itself, no matter how wanting commissioner Rob Manfred proved to be when he handed Astro players from 2017-18 blanket amnesty in return for spilling about the Astro Intelligence Agency’s illicit electronic sign-stealing operation.

And, no matter how wanting fans and about seven-eighths of major league players found both that amnesty and the Astros’ subsequent unapologetic apologies as spring training opened.

Kelly himself suggested distinctions for which right reason demands acknowledgement as well. That otherwise fine 28 July saw him send a pair of fastballs upside and behind Bregman’s head and—a few batters later, before striking Correa out for the side—a pair of breaking balls making Correa dance in the batter’s box.

Bregman and Correa are two of only six 2017-18 Astros regulars remaining in those positions on this year’s edition. Kelly made a point of send the messages strictly via them when the opportunity arose.

Doing it to that pair made things obvious enough, since no pitcher customarily would think of decking a Bregman on a 3-0 count with one out. Nor would he think normally of putting runners at second and third as happened when one of Kelly’s dusters to Correa sailed past to be ruled a wild pitch officially.

Kelly probably didn’t have to be reminded that justice demands a line between the guilty held to account and those having nothing to do with the crimes in question left unscathed. If he’d elected to deck, say, Michael Brantley, who didn’t become an Astro until 2019, and was the only non-2017-18 Astro he faced in the inning, he would have crossed that line and maybe earned not one degree of the acclaim he received.

When Kelly struck Correa out, Correa and Kelly jawed a little as Kelly strode from the mound and approached the third base line returning to his dugout. Kelly then sent mock crybaby gestures including a pronounced pout to Correa. From there the dugouts emptied, health and safety protocols be damned. Not too bright on either side’s account.

But it combined with the Bregman knockdowns and Correa dustings to make Kelly a folk hero in Los Angeles, where they’d still like to send the Astros to the guillotine over the 2017 World Series the Dodgers lost to the Astros and, quite possibly, to the AIA as well.

In other places, considering Kelly’s membership on the 2017-18 Boston Red Sox (vanquished by the Astros in the ’17 division series, vanquishers of the ’18 Astros en route their own World Series triumph against the same Dodgers), Kelly’s “hypocrisy”—considering the subsequent revelation of the Red Sox Replay Room Reconnassance Ring sign-stealing—was denounced almost as furiously.

At least, it was until right reasoning people reminded themselves that neither the AIA nor the Rogue Sox operation involved the teams’ pitching staffs specifically. And, that Kelly, who became a Dodger last year, might well have gotten enough of the skinny from his mates to comprehend a significant distinction between the AIA and the Rogue Sox.

The AIA involved either altering an existing off-field camera off mandatory eight-second transmission delay or installing a furtive real-time camera to send the stolen intelligence to a clubhouse monitor for transmission to hitters. The Rogue Sox’s Four Rs involved using screens already installed in replay rooms league wide to decipher signs and signal them to baserunners who’d signal them to the hitters.

In simpler terms, the AIA went off the grid and over the barely-consecrated official line, while the Rogue Sox simply behaved like a teenage boy finding the keys to the hooch hutch unable to resist temptation until he was of legal drinking age. Especially since MLB handed them the hutch in the first place.

When Kelly’s pair of fastballs went upside Bregman’s head, there was a lot of jawing about them showing a lack of “professionalism.” Mostly from people—like Astros pitcher Lance McCullers, Jr.—who called those pitches unprofessional but couldn’t explain why illegal high-tech cheating wasn’t.

In the immediate wake of Kelly’s messaging, the word came unimpeachably that Manfred now has a hammer to drop on future such Astrosoxgate espionage: not only can those players caught taking or transmitting electronically stolen signs be suspended without pay, they lose the days of their suspensions in MLB service time, too.

The poster I cited earlier also demands the Astros’ 2017 World Series title be vacated. So has half the world, seemingly. Good luck with that. Vacate that title and you’ll have to try vacating a host of pennants (the 1940 Detroit Tigers, the 1951 New York Giants, the 1961 Cincinnati Reds) and/or World Series titles (the 2018 Red Sox, perhaps; the 1948 Cleveland Indians, possibly) past.

What the 2017-18 Astros and at least the 2018 Red Sox did was bad enough, even if you agree the Asterisks went over the line while the Rogue Sox were clever if warped enough to use what was handed to them gift wrapped.

But it would be just as wrong to compel those Astros and Red Sox people who weren’t there to pay for the crimes of those who were. Those demanding aboard social media and elsewhere that the innocent in essence must suffer with the guilty can put a sock in it.

Clueless Crane

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2020-08-01 JimCrane

Astros owner Jim Crane—Playing what-about-ism, implying everyone else’s fault, possibly sorry only that his boys got caught, talking to USA Today’s a still-bad look for him.

In a 1964 novel about Navy fliers in World War II, Richard Newhafer’s The Last Tallyho, a fresh group of pilots assigned to a carrier performs a target hop. One of the young men overshoots the tow plane target and hits the plane, instead, flown by their squadron lieutenant. Forcing the lieutenant to a fatal water landing.

The tow pilot happened to be the squadron skipper’s best friend. When the skipper and their air group commander face questioning by the task force commander flying his flag aboard their carrier, the latter asks the skipper why they were called in. “We’re here,” the skipper replies, “because we are responsible for what happened.”

“I don’t see it that way,” the CAG practically snaps. “No matter who did what,” the skipper rejoins, “[CAG] and I are in positions of command. When you command you accept the responsibility for what is done by your subordinates.”

Maybe Houston Astros owner Jim Crane should have read The Last Tallyho. He might have learned something about command responsibility and avoiding mealymouthed avoidance of it, the latter of which he availed himself in an interview with USA Today columnist Bob Nightengale.

Astrogate returned to the otherwise coronavirus-dominant baseball news last week after Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly threw fastballs twice behind Astros third baseman Alex Bregman and breaking balls twice making their shortstop Carlos Correa skip rope. They got Kelly an eight-game suspension and the Astros on the receiving end of fresh rounds of fury.

Remember: Commissioner Rob Manfred handed Astro players on the 2017-18 teams immunity to spill about the Astro Intelligence Agency’s off-field-based electronic sign stealing those seasons, instead of bringing the powers of his office to bear and ordering one and all to spill or be spilled. Even if the players’ union filed countering grievances, Manfred would have sent a far stronger message than a few brushback pitches.

The outrage over Kelly’s suspension was, basically, “He gets eight games for doing in essence what Manfred wouldn’t, but those guys still get off scot free?” Nobody’s justifying throwing at Bregman’s head, but the outraged are right. As a matter of fact, Nightengale asked Crane the same question, phrased a little differently. The answer may or may not surprise you.

“People are aggravated the players didn’t get suspended,’’ said the owner, “but I didn’t have anything to do with that. That was Rob’s call. Listen, it’s always going to be whatever you want to call it. A black mark. An asterisk. It happened. It’s not good for anybody. It’s not good for the game. We broke the rules. We got penalized. We were punished. There’s no doubt it weighs on all of us every single day.”

Crane seemed to say it as though he hoped that would be the end of the story. Except that it wasn’t, quite. After apologising for sounding like a fool at the infamous February spring training press conference, the subject detoured briefly toward the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, both of whom have been reprimanded for a little espionage of their own, though not quite performed the way the Astros developed it.

“I think (MLB) had a bigger problem than everybody realized,’’ Crane told Nightengale, playing the what-about-ism card. “[The Yankees and the Red Sox] were doing things and got caught, but we’re the ones who took the bullet. That’s the way it works. I’m not trying to blame anyone else. It was our problem. We dealt with it.”

Except that, after a little talk about things such as revelations about the Astros’ less than honourable front office “culture,” Crane tried to blame, well, something close enough to everyone else as well as the Yankees and the Red Sox.

“I just think everybody was paranoid that everybody was doing it,” he said. “The technology was right in front of you. We already know two others teams were doing it and got caught. But the way we were doing it, that was pretty (stupid). I mean, banging on trash cans? You could have found a better way to do it.”

“Crane’s take . . . seems to be that he and the Astros are the real victims here, and everyone else should leave them alone already,” writes NBC Sports’s Craig Calcaterra. “Really. That’s the vibe he gives off on all of this. Crane seems to believe that the Astros sign-stealing fallout is overblown and that the public’s anger mostly has to do with how Crane himself bungled the P.R.”

Crane seems indeed clueless that, except for the Red Sox’s AppleWatch incident late in the 2017 season and an extra Yankee dugout phone the same time, the AIA didn’t stop at just the technology just being “right in front of you.” Not even close.

The Red Sox’s Replay Room Reconnaissance Ring didn’t involve anyone altering a real-time monitor feed to decipher opposing pitch signs to signal to their baserunners who’d then send the pilfered intelligence to their hitters. Needless to say by now, it also didn’t depend upon having a man on base to receive the stolen signs in the first place.

It would have shocked nobody to learn that the Rogue Sox weren’t the only team to operate a similar reconnaissance ring out of the replay room. And, yes, MLB handed them the keys to the hooch hutch with the replay rooms at home and on the road. Boys will be boys, alas, and asking them to resist such temptation would have been like asking Donald Trump to give up Twitter.

But the replay room reconnaissance ringers didn’t alter ballpark cameras off their  mandatory eight-second delays or install second cameras not on the delay to send signs to a clubhouse monitor in front of which someone, several someones perhaps, decoded the signs and then banged the can slowly for the benefit of Astro hitters.

Using what’s there for a little chicanery is one thing. Altering it or supplementing it illegally is something else entirely. When a team as genuinely great as the 2017-18 Astros were takes up such subterfuge—and if you need proof they were great without the AIA (which operated in Minute Paid Park and wasn’t portable), remember that those Astros had better road than home winning percentages in both seasons—it’s well past boys being boys.

Some accuse Kelly of hypocrisy because of his membership on the 2017 AppleWatch Red Sox. Well, now. Their replay room reconnaissance ring apparently began in 2018—after they hired, what do you know, the Astros’ 2017 bench coach and (we’ve known since the Manfred Report on Astrogate) AIA co-mastermind Alex Cora to manage them. All the way to a World Series ring.

Before Manfred released his Rogue Sox findings, Kelly wondered aloud, “Whenever the investigation is done I’m interested in seeing what is in the investigation.”

If there is cheating involved with how good our team was we should have won every single out. We should have not even lost an inning if there was some good cheating involved, which would have been a lot more fun because we would have won in four. We would have swept through the playoffs and made it really, really fast and been able to go to Hawaii or go to Mexico and go on vacation a lot sooner than we did.

Known to be an erratic pitcher who isn’t shy about a little headhunting when he thinks it’s called for, Kelly inverted the old observation, “If you can’t beat them, join them,” and became a Dodger last year.

The Astros’ mealymouthed responses to Astrogate questioning as spring training opened outraged the Dodgers more than most, and enough players around the Show were outraged, because they’d been the team the Astros beat in seven to win the ’17 Series. It’s not impossible that Kelly had in mind both Astrogate and what was subsequently revealed about his former Rogue Sox when he decked Bregman and Correa.

If the Dodgers weren’t playing this year’s pandemic-inspired regional season schedule, they might have faced the Red Sox. And, inspired perhaps by a few revelations in Manfred’s Rogue Sox report and his Dodger teammates, Kelly might have sent a few messages to those 2018 Sox still on the team for tainting those ’18 Series rings.

Astroworld’s been buffeted harshly by Astrogate. It’s still tussling between those of its citizens who think the AIA was a reasonable defense against whomever else was doing illegal sign stealing and those who think their faith in their team’s greatness was misplaced or abused.

Crane hasn’t said much if anything about that yet.

Meanwhile, note once again Crane’s choice of phrasing to Nightengale: [T]he way we were doing it, that was pretty (stupid). I mean, banging on trash cans? You could have found a better way to do it. Is he saying the AIA itself was stupid? Is he saying he’s sorry only that the Astros got caught committing high crime?

“We’re sorry. We apologized. But no matter what happened, it wasn’t going to be enough,” Crane told Nightengale. “People wanted me out of baseball. They wanted players to be suspended. They wanted everything.” Setting aside that those February apologies were as non-apologetic as apologies can get, what did he expect people to want? A whitewash?