Houston Astros: From the owner down, an accountability gap

Houston Astros owner Jim Crane says Astrogate didn’t impact the game. Compared to that his players were the essence of candor.

I have an acquaintance who couldn’t resist repairing to Quiz Show, the film about the 1959 scandals around rigging popular big-money shows like Twenty-One when Astrogate erupted. I get what prompted it. Then, I remember the late Charles Van Doren, the Columbia University literary scion, Twenty-One‘s most popular champion, who turned out part of the show’s fixing, fed answers in advance throughout most of his run on the show.

That championship made Van Doren a media star, including a promising career to follow with NBC, until he finally appeared before a Congressional hearing into the scandal. He didn’t resort to boilerplate, or to what one writer calls “sincerely insincere apology.”

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"I’ve learned a lot about good and evil. They are not always what they appear to be. I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception . . . I have a long way to go. I have deceived my friends, and I had millions of them . . . [T]he truth is always the best way, indeed it is the only way, to promote and protect faith. And the truth is the only thing with which a man can live."

Someone forgot to send Houston Astros owner Jim Crane a memo advising that the truth is the only thing with which a man can live. If you’re going to deliver one of the great non-apologetic apologetic pressers of your time, it’s best not to talk out of both sides of your mouth.

Especially when one minute you say that if you’d known about the Astro Intelligence Agency’s illicit off-field-based electronic sign-stealing espionage you’d have stopped it right there, but the next minute you say it didn’t taint either the game itself or your team’s 2017 World Series championship and other success.

“You know,” said Crane, facing the press in an orange sport shirt with an Astros logo on the left breast side, “our opinion is that this didn’t impact the game, we had a good team, we won the (2017) World Series, and we’ll leave it at that.” Except that he didn’t.

Asked shortly what he meant by Astrogate not impacting the game, Crane replied, “I didn’t say it didn’t impact the game.”