Tag Archives: Mike Fiers

“I was floored. It was a massive story.”

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Bang the can slowly!

The passage from the Astros’ dugout in Minute Maid Park to the clubhouse. The wires above the trash can connected to a monitor, presumably seated between the can and the Everlast bag, “exactly as the (sign stealing) setup had been described to me.” (2018 photograph by Evan Drellich, published this morning in The Athletic.)

Come Valentine’s Day, baseball will receive a gift that won’t exactly be a love letter, or even a mash note. It’s going to get Athletic reporter Evan Drellich’s account of Astrogate and the broader issues raised and/or revived by the 2017-18 Astros’ above-and-beyond, and very illegal, electronic sign-stealing intelligence operation. At last.

Drellich, of course, is the reporter who teamed with Ken Rosenthal to break the Astrogate story in November 2019, shortly after the Astros fell to the Nationals in the World Series. This morning, The Athletic published an excerpt from Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess. It reveals that what became Astrogate didn’t just arrive to Drellich on a flaming pie over three years ago.

A year before Drellich and Rosenthal dropped the opening shot, Drellich was a Red Sox beat writer NBC Sports Boston, following a tour covering the Astros for the Houston Chronicle. During the 2018 postseason, in which the Red Sox beat the Astros in the American League Championship Series, he found himself speaking to people with first-hand knowledge that the Astros cheated beyond mere replay room reconnaissance on their way to their franchise-first World Series title.

“These were not sources on the outside pointing fingers, but people who knew—who had lived it,” he writes.

I learned how the Astros used a camera in center field to zoom in on the signs the catcher flashed the pitcher before the pitch. How the Astros had set up a television monitor near their dugout, where the players sit during games, to be able to see that video feed, and how they brazenly banged on a garbage can with a baseball bat and other devices to communicate what they gleaned from that screen. It was an advantage, many players felt, to know what was coming, be it a straight fastball or a bending curveball. And to use technology to gain that knowledge was beyond the pale.

This wasn’t just one player breaking the rules, either. This was a World Series–winning team that had collectively cheated, and the public didn’t know it.

I was floored. It was a massive story, the kind, frankly, many reporters dream of, and some might even dread. I was confident in everything I had at the outset—indeed, it all proved to be true. But to get a story done, I would need further corroboration.

One Astros source warned of the context of cheating in the sport, an encouragement that in hindsight could have both been earnest, but also self-serving, meant to deflect attention away from what the Astros had done. Nonetheless, I wanted to learn for myself and include it in my reporting—in what environment did this behavior arise?

Drellich first sought to get an idea from none other than the highest cheating Astrogate mind himself, the Astros’ then general manager Jeff Luhnow, during that ALCS. He spotted Luhnow in the Astros’ Minute Maid Park dugout. “He was the architect of the team,” Drellich writes, “and I tried to get his attention as he was walking away from me. ‘You won’t find anything,’ he said defensively, making clear he wouldn’t talk to me.”

The night the Red Sox won that ALCS, in Houston, Drellich acted upon the aforementioned first-hand knowledge shared with him and walked toward the Astros clubhouse. He even photographed what he saw just past the steps down from the dugout. Oops.

When the Red Sox met the Dodgers in the 2018 World Series, Drellich met with two baseball officials hoping to get a picture of what baseball’s government was or wasn’t doing about electronic sign stealing. One started generalising the suspicions until Drellich broke in to tell him he had sources from within the Astros’ operations telling him about the extent of their Astro Intelligence Agency, so to say.

“‘They have acknowledged that?’ one [official] said. ‘I mean, I can’t speak to that. I mean, to our knowledge—you have your information, and we have ours, and that’s all we can go off. As to whether that has occurred, to our knowledge we are completely unaware. I am confident in the measures that we’ve taken’.”

Drellich wasn’t trying to be a friendly tipster to MLB because he couldn’t. “It’s not a reporter’s job to steer sources to the league,” he writes. But he also saw too clearly that, at that time, MLB wasn’t exactly in that big a hurry to act.  He also knew that, having multiple sources but none willing to go on the public record just yet, he needed to find the one who would.

To get something, anything on the record, Drellich writes, he composed a “general piece on electronic sign-stealing” in November 2018, after the Red Sox beat the Dodgers in five in that World Series. “Very quickly,” he continues, “my doubts about the support I had at NBC Sports Boston proved correct. When they fired me in February 2019, I was blindsided, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been.”

His unemployment didn’t last long. The Athletic hired him, placing him into proximity with Ken Rosenthal: “Together, we would pick up my reporting on the Astros.” Indeed. Rosenthal had the sport-wide cred to make the calls Drellich couldn’t yet make. Such calls as to Danny Farquhar, the White Sox pitcher who heard the Astros banging the can slowly and called his catcher right to the mound to switch up their signs.

Such calls as to Mike Fiers, the pitcher who had something even more precious to offer on the record than an opposing pitcher who had ears to hear and brains to act accordingly: Fiers had been a 2017 Astro. And he was only too willing to go on record now, after assorted failed attempts by himself and others to convince other writers to expose Astrogate.

Drellich writes that Rosenthal asked Fiers if he was comfortable being quoted. “Well, that’s the whole thing about this. I don’t want to be put out there like that,” the pitcher began.

But they already know, so honestly, I don’t really care anymore. I just want the game to be cleaned up a little bit because there are guys who are losing their jobs because they’re going in, they’re not knowing. Young guys getting hit around in the first couple of innings starting a game, and then they get sent down. It’s bullshit on that end. It’s ruining jobs for younger guys. The guys who know are more prepared. But most of the people don’t. That’s why I told my team. We had a lot of young guys with Detroit trying to make a name and establish themselves. I wanted to help them out and say, “Hey, this stuff really does go on. Just be prepared.”

By “they already know,” Fiers indicated the Astros knew he’d tried to warn subsequent teammates on the Tigers and the Athletics. “Fiers, to his immense credit, stood by his words and never tried to back out before the investigation ran,” Drellich writes. “He helped change the sport, and the toll ostensibly has been heavy for him.”

Ostensibly? Fiers hasn’t pitched in the Show since the pan-damn-ically shortened 2020 season. He’s been to the Mexican League and the Chinese Professional Baseball League since, before signing with the Toros del Este of the Dominican Winter League last September. Age to one side (he’s 37), Fiers probably still finds one person denouncing him as a traitorous snitch for every one applauding him as a brave whistleblower.

“Many fringe players train in the Caribbean during the offseason to prepare themselves for the upcoming Major League season in hope of finding a better contract,” wrote Sports Illustrated‘s Ben Silver when Fiers signed that deal. “Fiers, though, may face an uphill battle. He is forever linked with the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal and teams may no longer wish to associate themselves with the weight his name carries.”

“At the time Ken spoke to Fiers, we were preparing to publish our findings without his account,” Drellich continues. “It’s impossible to say exactly how the world would have reacted to the story had Ken not spoken to him—if all the sources had been unnamed. But the facts of the story had already been ascertained, and we had Farquhar’s account.”

The whistleblower’s is often a lonely lot. “Whether Fiers was quoted or not,” Drellich writes, “it seems unlikely to me that MLB would have been able to ignore the general outcry. But our investigation was still in a much better position with Fiers on the record. His name helped validate everything instantly, making it harder for anyone to try to shove the story aside.”

Today’s Astros are the defending 2022 World Series champions, no longer the Luhnow team that cheated from the top down to extents above and beyond mere basepath or even mere replay room reconnaissance. (Only three Astrogate team members remain on the roster; one, Jose Altuve, has been shown conclusively as the one Astro who rejected stolen signs consistently.) Nothing suggests that the 2022 Astros didn’t beat the Phillies straight, no chaser.

But the Astrogate taint remains, at least until the last Astrogate team member no longer wears their uniform. There remain only too many who think the whole thing wasn’t the Astros’ fault for having committed the crimes but Fiers’ fault for having blown the whistle on the record. Today’s excerpt demonstrates that Winning Fixes Everything promises to knock that and other Astrogate canards into the middle of next year.

The A’s re-up the whistleblower

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Mike Fiers—the A’s re-sign the Astrogate whistleblower.

Under ordinary circumstances a team signing a good pitcher who’s a worthy number-four man in a starting rotation isn’t extraordinary. But then there’s Mike Fiers, whom the Athletics have re-upped for 2021 on a one-year, $3.5 million deal. There’s also San Francisco Chronicle baseball writer Susan Slusser dropping a troublesome suggestion.

Now the Giants’ beat writer and a former president of the Baseball Writers Association of America, Slusser was a longtime A’s beat writer for the Chronicle. So when she says, “The A’s were the only team to make Fiers an offer, I’m told. Interesting – was he being blackballed for being a whistleblower? I certainly hope that’s not the case,” it ought to sound an alarm or two.

Lots of teams have been in need of third and below starters. It shouldn’t have been that difficult for an innings-eating righthander with fourth-starter solidity to find a job even in this winter’s somewhat surreal market. Except that Fiers, who did say his preference was to stay in Oakland, isn’t just an ordinary fourth starter.

Whistleblowers don’t fare as well as some people think after their whistles blast cases of wrongdoing to smithereens. When Fiers blew his on the Astros’ illegal off-field-based electronic sign-stealing cheating of 2017 and some of 2018 (at least) to The Athletic, it seemed as though half of baseball considered him a hero and half a rat bastard.

He moved to the Tigers for 2018 and to the A’s later that season. He warned both collections of new teammates that the Astros were playing with a stacked deck. He and others suspecting the Astros of extracurricular pitch intelligence also tried futilely to convince members of the press to run with and investigate it; those writers couldn’t convince their editors to let them run without a name willing to go on public record.

That’s when Fiers finally put his name on it to Athletic writers Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich in November 2019. From which point it swelled toward Commissioner Rob Manfred’s marshmallow hammer, the hammer constructed when he handed Astro players immunity in return for spilling, suspended a GM and a manager, voided two key draft picks and fined owner Jim Crane pocket money.

The Astros likely weren’t the only team in the Show using extracurricular off-field-based sign stealing, just the most sophisticated. They took an existing center field camera off the mandatory eight-second delay or installed a surreptitious new such camera, set monitors up in the clubhouse, and translators would decode the pitch signs and signal hitters with bangs on an adjacent trash can.

The 2018 Red Sox turned out to have enlisted their video rooms at home and on the road for a little extra aid to old-fashioned gamesmanship: the signs would be decoded off the feeds and sent to baserunners to signal batters. They—and anyone else thinking and doing likewise (would you be shocked?)—didn’t install anything extra.

Essentially, the Show handed those Rogue Sox and others, who knows how many yet, the keys to the liquor cabinet and dared them not to imbibe while Mom and Dad high tailed it out of town for the weekend.

Some looked at Fiers’ membership on the 2017 Astros and discovered a rank hypocrite, never mind that if he’d blown his whistle then he’d also have been denounced most likely as a backstabber on the spot. (Fiers wasn’t on those Astros’ postseason roster.) It’s called hell if you do and hell if you don’t.

“Even in cases of obvious right and wrong,” wrote The Athletic‘s Marc Carig last year, “crying foul on family is easy to call for in retrospect and hard to do in real time.” Remind yourself if you will how often you learned of egregious wrongdoing and lamented the lack of a whistleblower. Now ask how simple it really is to blow the whistle in the moment or even a comparatively short time later.

It took New York police legends Frank Serpico and David Durk several years’ futility trying to get that police department to attack graft before they finally went to the New York Times and launched the largest New York police scandal since Brooklyn-based bookie Harry Gross was found to have enough police on his payroll to staff half his borough’s precincts.

Cheating may be sports’ oldest profession, but affirmations don’t always happen concurrent to the instances, for the reason Carig enunciated. When Joshua Prager finally affirmed what was long just suspected—that the 1951 New York Giants cheated their way back into the pennant race to force the fabled playoff with an elaborate telescopic sign-stealing operation—it was half a century after the fact, with the surviving principals willing to talk long retired.

Prager eventually expanded his expose into The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World. “A spitballer or corker can be caught by an umpire, who has the right to examine or confiscate equipment,” wrote the Washington Post‘s Thomas Boswell when Prager first hit The Wall Street Journal running.

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.

If revealing the Astros’ elaborate 2017-18 system at last made Fiers a criminal, maybe baseball needs more such criminals. If other teams needing fourth starters refused to even think about him because he blew a whistle instead of a ball game, after two years worth of trying futilely to get others to investigate without a blown whistle, something’s worse than a hanging slider driven out of sight.

Slusser doesn’t know for dead last certain. Neither does anyone else, possibly including Fiers. To those who still think blowing the whistle is worse than the crime, perhaps you’d like to ask what might have been, instead, if Alexander Butterfield hadn’t suffered a pang of conscience and an inability to lie under oath enough to expose Richard Nixon’s White House taping system.

At last, an Astrogate apology

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signstealingscandal.com

A video capture made infamous by Jonboy after the first Astrogate revelations: Evan Gattis at the plate in 2017, about to face a pitch from Danny Farquhar just before Farquhar called his catcher to the mound to switch signs . . .

Maybe Evan Gattis felt a little too much heat last week, when he snarked about being the last to land a nasty drinking cup with Mike Fiers’s face and the caption “Snitches Get Stitches.” And, when he hastened to walk it back after his boast got him a small firestorm (including “Cheaters Get Heaters”) of snark-back.

Maybe, too, the former Astros backup catcher was reminded that was him at the plate in a 2017 game against the White Sox, on preserved and notorious video, getting electronically stolen signs banged his way until White Sox pitcher Danny Farquhar smelled the proverbial rat, called his catcher out to the mound, and changed signs posthaste.

Whatever compelled him, the now-retired Gattis isn’t feeling too snarky about Astrogate anymore. He unloaded to The Athletic‘s podcast 755 is Real this week. He unloaded a no-holds-barred apology for the Astro Intelligence Agency’s illegal, off-field-based electronic sign-stealing of 2017-18, even while acknowledging that by now no apology on earth will untaint or restore the Astros’ image.

And he’s also more than willing to give Fiers—the original Astrogate whistleblower, the only one among four 2017 Astros who was willing to put his name on the record to The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich last November—his props, rather than saluting even a just-kidding threat against the now-Athletics pitcher.

“I don’t think I can win the hearts over of anyone right now at all, or maybe ever,” Gattis told 755 is Real. “I don’t know how to feel yet. I don’t think anybody—we didn’t look at our moral compass and say, ‘Yeah, this is right.’ It was almost like paranoia warfare or something. But what we did was wrong. Like, don’t get it twisted. It was wrong for the nature of competition, not even just baseball. Yeah, that was wrong. I will say that.”

Retired since the end of the 2018 season, Gattis didn’t stop there. “If our punishment is being hated by everybody forever, then (so be it),” he said, after saying he hated to see general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch fired almost the moment their suspensions for 2020 were handed down by commissioner Rob Manfred.

“And I don’t know what should have been done, but something had to be [fornicating] done,” the former catcher continued. “And I do agree with that, big time. I do think it’s good for baseball if we clean it up. But I really don’t know to this day, and I’ve thought about it a [spit] ton, know what I mean? And I still don’t know how to feel.

“I’ll get ripped by somebody—‘That’s not an apology’—and if I do apologize, that’s still not going to be good enough. No [spit], it’s not going to be good enough. I understand that it’s not [fornicating] good enough to say, sorry. I get it.”

Luhnow and Hinch may have been suspended from baseball through the end of the 2020 season, whenever the season might be played if it’s played thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, but they’d be free to seek other baseball employment afterward. Even if 2020 ends up canceled entirely. There are those who say nobody should even think about hiring them even as concession hawkers.

Luhnow fostered the victory-uber-alles culture within the Astros organisation that too often operated according to Major Strasser’s law (expressed in a memorable line in Casablanca), “You’ll find that human life is cheap.” A culture that allowed Luhnow to dismiss internal alarm when he dealt for a relief pitcher still under suspension for domestic violence and call for an internally-developed sign-stealing algorithm that paved the way to the AIA.

Hinch didn’t exactly look the other way when he caught onto the AIA, but he did nothing to stop it other than smashing one or two of the monitors in the clubhouse from which the opposing signs picked up by an illegal camera were transmitted for translation to pass on to Astro hitters. He fiddled while the plot apparently led by his then-bench coach Alex Cora and his then-designated hitter Carlos Beltran—both of whom eventually lost managing jobs over their Astrogate culpability—burned opponents with little to no idea they walked into a stacked Astro deck.

“For some players that we faced, that I’d never faced before or something like that, even selfishly we didn’t get to find out how good those people are—and they didn’t either,” said Gattis to 755 is Real. “I think that was the one cool thing about playing in the big leagues, was just to find out how good you are, which I think is valuable. Everybody wants to be the best player in the [fornicating] world, man, and we cheated that, for sure. We obviously cheated baseball and cheated fans. Fans felt duped. I feel bad for fans.”

Gattis may have handed ammunition, inadvertently, to former major league pitcher Mike Bolsinger’s legal team, in Bolsinger’s lawsuit arguing that—when he was trying to hang in as a remade relief pitcher with the 2017 Blue Jays—the Astros’ illegal sign-stealing operation destroyed him in what proved his final major league appearance.

In that game, the Astros got more stolen signs banged on the can to their hitters than in any other game for which banging-the-can-slowly could be determined. They also got more when Bolsinger was on the mound than when they faced any other Blue Jays reliever that day. Bolsinger was torn apart for five runs when he entered with two out in the bottom of the fourth, escaping only when he managed to get Alex Bregman to fly out.

The Blue Jays sent Bolsinger to Triple A right after the game. He might have been a former starter reduced by injuries to a journeyman trying to remake himself as a reliever, and I’ve said this before elsewhere, but it’s worth a reminder: Even a marginal relief pitcher has the right to know that his major league career got torpedoed straight, no chaser.

The Astros have had the original Los Angeles judge in the Bolsinger lawsuit removed for “prejudice,” never mind that the judge was chosen at random. They followed that by filing to have the suit either thrown out or moved to Texas in the name of “fairness.” They also face a lawsuit back east from a group of fantasy baseball players arguing that the AIA tainted the games through which they played their fantasy ball.

Aside from handing both lawsuits’ plaintiffs valuable close air support, Gattis isn’t so willing to be snarky about Fiers anymore, either, if his comments to 755 is Real are any indication.

“With Fiers, he had something to say, dude,” the former catcher continued. “It probably started out with him saying exactly what he said—some of these guys coming into the league, they don’t [fornicating] know yet that this [spit] goes on. And I respect that. And he had something to say. So he had to [fornicating] say it. And then we had to get punished. Because if not, then what? It’ll get even more out of control.”

Gattis acknowledged that previous reports citing an anonymous 2017 Astro had it right that Brian McCann, the longtime Brave who joined the Astros for 2017-2018, who retired after a final tour with the Braves last season, objected to the AIA “and made his feelings known at least a couple of times,” as Athletic writer David O’Brien phrases it.

“I could tell it was eating him up,” Gattis told the podcast. “He didn’t like it one bit . . . He’s played so long, and he just understands what it takes to get to the big leagues, and he’s got a lot of respect for ballplayers. You could just tell.”

But you can also just tell that a man making his objections known at least a couple of times isn’t quite the same thing as a man in McCann’s position—a veteran with respect in the clubhouse, whose voice would be heeded assuming he puts more weight into it than a couple of objections made known—pushing a little further within his particular boundaries to turn mere objections into a needed confrontation.

And Gattis isn’t exactly ready to lay the Astrogate onus as heavily as others upon Beltran, whose standing as so respected a veteran, with a Hall of Fame-worthy playing resume, is said often enough to have felt just a little omnipotent among his younger teammates.

“[N]obody made us do [spit] — you know what I’m saying?” Gattis said. “Like, people saying, ‘This guy made us do this’ . . . That’s not it. But you have to understand, the situation was powerful. Like, you work your whole life to try to hit a ball, and you mean, you can tell me what’s coming? What? Like, it’s a powerful thing. And there’s millions of dollars on the line and shit? And what’s bad is, that’s how people got hurt. That’s not right; that’s not playing the game right.”

The Astros weren’t exactly overcome with remorse when Manfred’s Astrogate report was released in January. They weren’t exactly allergic to (depending on your viewpoint) non-apologetic apologies or apologetic non-apologies when spring training opened. Owner Jim Crane persists in his delusion that the Manfred report “exonerated” him and his ignorance that, when you lead, you assume responsibility for what’s done by your subordinates.

Now it’s only to lament that Gattis couldn’t have said upon his retirement what he finally said to 755 is Real. It might have made a far larger difference. Still, the fact that Gattis was willing to go on the public record as he now has to 755 is Real is staggering enough. Whether he saw the light, felt the heat, or came up somewhere in between.

Whistling under Fiers

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2019-12-08 MikeFiers

“Hero or snitch? Depends on the lighting, and maybe Mike Fiers doesn’t care which.”—Tim Brown, Yahoo! Sports.

We know now that both the book and the film Eight Men Out are somewhat riddled with errors, shall we say, but one thing they got right. That was 1919 White Sox third baseman Buck Weaver’s refusal to partake of the payoffs to tank the World Series and to tell what he knew of the fix, which was plenty enough and hazardous to his baseball health.

In the film Weaver was scripted to say that a guy who didn’t “stand by his friends” was no good, enunciating part of a code by which men and women customarily live in professions great, modest, and dubious alike, sometimes all at once. It’s a code for which those who live it evoke honour even as practising it often protects or invites dishonour. Weaver living and practising it cost himself a baseball career when Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the original baseball commissioner appointed because of the Black Sox scandal, banished him specifically for “guilty knowledge.”

“[T]here was a method to Landis’s harshness. By making an example of Weaver, Landis sent a message to the rest of Organized Baseball that any player who learned of a fix was guilty in the eyes of baseball unless he immediately reported it,” wrote Weaver’s Society for American Baseball Research biographer David Fletcher.

The effect of this policy is readily apparent: Prior to Weaver’s banishment, baseball authorities usually only discovered game-fixing schemes after they had already occurred. After Weaver’s suspension, some attempted conspiracies were brought to light before they ever unfolded on the field, thanks to the honesty of players frightened by the Weaver precedent.

“A murder even serves his sentence and is let out,” Weaver told James T. Farrell soon before the former third baseman died in early 1956. “I got life.” In a sense Weaver was sentenced for refusing to be a whistleblower, which might or might not have imposed upon him another kind of hell.

Often as not whistleblowers are viewed paradoxically, depending upon whether they’re honest men and women who happened upon dishonest and even criminal activities or whether they’re among the dishonest and even the criminal by the time too much proves enough or the heat reaches suffocation levels. Government is only one place to hear whistles blown by those on whom they should have been blown.

One-time Trans World Airlines owner Howard Hughes wasn’t the most ethical business titan when he exposed Maine’s U.S. Senator, Owen Brewster, a man with vice presidential aspirations, holding them from the hip pocket of Pan American World Airways chieftain Juan Trippe, carrying a bill to make Pan Am the sole legal American international airline when TWA had its own international flight plans. Joseph Valachi’s 1963 testimony to the Senate providing the first true public exposure of the Mafia and its apparatus hardly came from an innocent bystander.

Frank Serpico and David Durk were clean New York police officers struggling to expose rampant corruption in their department until, in 1970, they took advantage of Durk’s personal connections, those who didn’t prove invested in depth in protecting Mayor John Lindsay, anyway, to get the New York Times to blow their whistles. Lindsay himself having proven between indifferent and impotent in the matter (“If you’ve had as long and as delicate a relationship with the 35,000 member police department as I have had, you might understand,” he told one questioner), it helped vapourise his already uneasy presidential aspirations, too.

Alexander Butterfield was no criminal when he blew the whistle on himself, disclosing to Senate Watergate Committee questioners that the Nixon White House indeed had a sophisticated taping system which he’d installed. It helped to prove the undoing of several culpable in Watergate, and the president who let himself be dragooned into its coverup, while stirring concurrent regrets that Lyndon Johnson’s previous taping system hadn’t been exposed instead of overlooked when it mattered.

Bringing us to Mike Fiers, the former Houston Astros pitcher—since with the Detroit Tigers (2018) and, now, the Oakland Athletics (2019 and for 2020)—who blew the whistle on the Astros’s against-the-rules 2017 electronic sign-stealing operation four weeks ago. Yahoo! Sports columnist Tim Brown probes the senses around baseball regarding Fiers’s expose, to the press and not to major league baseball’s governing apparatus, and the rock and the hard place between which Fiers may yet find himself for his effort.

The senses as Brown draws them are very mixed, quoting players incumbent and past but with the proviso that their names not be revealed. And Fiers for now is reluctant to talk further about his revelations and what compelled them at last, perhaps pending his discussions with baseball’s investigators. “Hero or snitch?” Brown asks, before answering, “Depends on the lighting, and maybe Mike Fiers doesn’t care which.”

After the Times‘s Serpico-Durk revelations, Serpico himself was shot in the face during an arrest attempt and the suspicion never really abates, on his or other cops’ parts, that his partners set him up. (Serpico still lives with a bullet fragment up against his brain.) Indeed, a Serpico biographer recorded him receiving among his well-wishing greeting cards one whose maker printed inside, “With sincere sympathy,” to which the sender added a handwritten addendum “that you didn’t get your brains blown out, you rat bastard. Happy relapse.”

Fiers is about as likely to be set up for a shot in the face by corrupted ballplayers as is a cobra to be set up on a blind date with a mongoose. But he risks the reputation Brown describes him having, a well-liked teammate on a personal level and as “honest, by all appearances, sometimes to his detriment,” but jeopardising his “place in the fraternity of generations of ballplayers who went along, who shrugged and decided it—whatever that day’s it was—was someone else’s problem.”

Baseball’s fraternal inner culture has never really suffered exposure gladly even when what’s exposed is just jovial, can’t-grow-up-yet, boys-will-be-boys stuff instead the sort of thing for which the Astros (and others, prospectively) have been broiled and basted. Boys being boys is one thing, but cheating above and beyond the bounds of on-field gamesmanship is something else entirely, of course. But exposing even benign hijinks from the inside is foolishness not always suffered gladly.

Jim Brosnan (pitcher) merely revealed the clubhouse, the dugout, the bullpen, and the tours through road towns as the repositories of young men running the spread from rakish to priggish to bawdy. Jim Bouton (pitcher) revealed likewise in far more pointed detail and with far deeper shafts of wit. Bill Veeck (owner) exposed pronounced absences of ethical discrimination among owners incumbent and past, including a few of his own,  with shafts of wit Bouton would recognise as kindred.

Brosnan’s The Long Season and Pennant Race, Bouton’s Ball Four (and hilarious recounting of its controversies and aftermath in I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally), and Veeck’s Veeck—As In Wreck and The Hustler’s Handbook were best sellers. Readers were entertained and perhaps enlightened, but the game didn’t always agree. And how.

The White Sox tried to jam a contract clause down Brosnan’s throat that would bar his writing publicly without prior club approval; Brosnan elected to retire instead. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to suppress Ball Four by forcing Bouton to sign a statement saying it was all his editor Leonard Shecter’s fault. Unidentified members of the San Diego Padres left a burned copy of Ball Four on the top step of the Astros dugout. (Bouton was an Astro when the book was published.)

Astrogate has been rather quiet of late, with the commissioner’s office continuing its investigation but not yet revealing whether the Astro Intelligence Agency operated beyond 2017 or their high-tech cheating exists on other teams and to how far an extent. And you notice that from the moment Fiers’s revelation to The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Dillich hit the world running the Astros themselves really haven’t challenged Fiers publicly.

Whistleblowing’s conundrums include that the honest provide only so much. That’s what the Knapp Commission faced when formed and operating in the immediate wake of Serpico’s and Durk’s 1970 police corruption revelations. The commission needed (and got, in due course) a completely corrupt cop (it turned out to be a detective named William Phillips) to finish what the pair started and expose its truest depths. Commissioner Rob Manfred and his bloodhounds probably need no-questions-asked cheaters to start finishing what Fiers started.

But the conundrums also include a hell-if-you-do, hell-if-you-don’t kind of channel surfing. Take what you know to the proper in-house investigative channel and risk that its administrators do as assorted NYPD superiors did with Serpico and Durk: little to nothing, if that much. Take what you know at long enough last to the channel of press, when the “proper” channels prove off the air, and the public may call you a hero but at least some of your professional colleagues may express sincere sympathy that you didn’t get your brains blown out, you rat bastard.

Brown records that, for every player who says, “Takes big nuts to call bull(feces) on people and stand there and take the heat that follows. I admire that,” there’s another who says, “Freakin’ punk-ass bitch.” And another who says, “I don’t think he’s a hero or a villain. I just hope he doesn’t get demonized.” Or, yet another who says, “I would not have gone public, but I don’t condemn him for going public . . . In the end, I probably would have fallen back on the sanctity of the clubhouse. Would I have felt good about it? Probably not.”

Once upon a time Buck Weaver fell back on the sanctity of the clubhouse, too, as well as falling back upon the code that enjoins against ratting on “friends,” some of whom weren’t exactly his friends. He probably didn’t feel too good about that, either.

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.