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.”
Houston Astros: From the owner down, an accountability gap
With that kind of talent for self-contradiction, Crane may have a future in American politics, whose contemporary variety seems anchored in the precept that ignorance is virtuous and accountability a vice.
Amidst the volumes written about baseball’s clubhouse culture keeping the leery from blowing the whistle on things like the AIA, before Mike Fiers finally blew it to The Athletic in November, there should have been something written about another culture, in baseball and elsewhere. The one that says when you lead you take responsibility for your subordinates’ actions, whether or not you were on the scene or just in the loop.
Crane should probably be the first to get that particular memo now. “I should not be held accountable,” he said during his portion of the presser. “Had I known about it, I certainly would have done something about it.”
He’s hereby designated Astrogate’s version of Howard Leary, the New York police commissioner who dismissed Frank Serpico’s and David Durk’s in-house crusade against rampant graft as the work of “psycho cops.” Until Leary was hauled in front of a commission finally appointed to investigate, two years after he resigned his post, and pleaded that things would have been a lot different if only he’d known.
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Accountability was an Astro issue long enough before Astrogate. They’ve either had none or brushed it to one side. They tried to brush it aside when now-deposed general manager Jeff Luhnow dealt for domestic violence-attached relief pitcher Roberto Osuna in 2018, while he was still under suspension pending the outcome of his case.
When Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik’s The MVP Machine was published a year ago, its revelations included Luhnow fostering so deep a front office culture hell-bent for results that the human side of things was often thought expendable. Enough so that the Astro front office and organization turned over with quicker breaks than curveballs.
Then the front office chose to smear Sports Illustrated reporter Stephanie Apstein last October rather than act promptly upon Apstein’s disclosure that soon-to-be-deposed assistant GM Brandon Taubman, with three women reporters in clear earshot, ranted how [fornicating] glad he was that the Houston Astros had Osuna after they won the American League Championship Series.
It took public backlashes both times for Luhnow and Crane to pronounce the Astros had a zero-tolerance abuse policy, and for Taubman to pay with his head almost a week after the Apstein story and smear. It took a formal investigation plus suspending Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch before Crane did what had to be done and fired both.
What does it tell you that the most sincere expression of Astrogate remorse at Thursday’s presser came from a man who wasn’t even a member of the organization from when the AIA opened for business in 2017 right up to the moment the Astros hired him to succeed Hinch?
Houston Astros: From the owner down, an accountability gap
“I must admit that when technology gets as advanced as it has become, the boundaries seem to change,” said Dusty Baker, who apparently talked to his players the day before. “The guys said what they did was wrong. Hopefully baseball can help clean up the game and control the technology so this doesn’t happen again.”
When Baker was announced formally as the Astros’ new manager, one of the first things he said was that there’d be no cheating on his watch. On Thursday, Crane said his team didn’t cheat, they just “broke the rules.” It was like Archie Bunker telling the Meathead on All in the Family, “Richard E. Nixon didn’t lie! He just forgot to tell the truth!”
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“We had a great team meeting last night and the whole organization and the team feels bad about what happened in 2017,” said second baseman Jose Altuve—who took the lowest percentage (2.8) of bangs on the can sending him stolen signs among Astro batters facing 200 or more 2017 pitches—at Thursday’s presser. “We especially feel remorse for our fans and for the game of baseball.”
“I am really sorry about the choices that were made by my team, by the organization and by me,” said third baseman Alex Bregman, who took stolen signs via the bangs on the can in 16.8 percent of the 800 pitches he faced in 2017. “I have learned from this and I hope to regain the trust of baseball fans.”
Altuve and Bregman said just enough more Thursday than they’d said at last month’s Astros fan fest, which was plenty of little. “We are a team,” Bregman added. “We are all taking responsibility.” The charitable would take that to mean, “That’s a huge start.” The cynical would take that to mean, “That’s still plenty of nothing much.”
Shortstop Carlos Correa was more emphatic, especially when he rejected stories claiming the 2017 Astros were too intimidated by then-designated hitter Carlos Beltran’s veteran status while he masterminded the AIA. “We all had a say in everything,” Correa said after the presser. “Whatever we were doing, we had the chance to stop it, as a team, everybody. Everybody had the chance to say something, and we didn’t.
It was better than Crane saying that he shouldn’t be accountable but he’d have done more if he’d known, and that Astrogate didn’t impact the game but he didn’t say it didn’t impact the game.
We know now that at least ten teams complained to baseball’s government when they suspected getting AIA gumshoes in the backsides and nothing was done until Fiers finally blew the whistle. We know now that several players at the margins of the Show as it was got their final pushes out of the Show, and maybe out of baseball entirely, with AIA gumshoes in their backsides.
We know that too many people who love the game dearly and the Astros in particular think, with a blend of outrage and sorrow, that the Astros’ furtive camera-to-monitor-to-bang-the-can-slowly sign theft taints a World Series title they’d worked their tails off to make happen.
We know the since-revealed Boston Red Sox replay room reconnaissance ring may well taint their 2018 World Series title, too. Especially since the 2017 Astros and the 2018 Red Sox had Alex Cora (bench coach for the former, manager of the latter) in common, co-masterminding the AIA and possibly inspiring the Red Sox reconnaissance, too.
Not to mention that four people associated with the 2017 Astros—Cora, Luhnow, Hinch, and designated hitter Carlos Beltran, who went on first to be a New York Yankee advisor and then hired and fired as the New York Mets’ manager over his AIA administration—are out of work, and potentially unemployable in baseball again.
The players escaped only because commissioner Rob Manfred gave them immunity from discipline in return for spilling all about the AIA. And Manfred may have exposed comparative weakness in pushing for new rules of play ranging from silly to stupid while not swinging his hammer harder on the techno-cheaters.
So much for that immunity letting Altuve and Bregman speak a little more explicitly about the cheating now. Especially since they and their teammates will be as suspect as the day is long for as long as they remain Astros, maybe for the rest of their careers, until or unless they prove they can win without going rogue. (So will the Red Sox, whose sign reconnaissance investigation results haven’t yet come forth.)
Los Angeles Angels pitcher Andrew Heaney would say you’d be right to think that way. “Somebody in that locker room had to say, ‘This is [fornicated] up. We shouldn’t be doing this’,” Heaney said the day before the presser. “For nobody to stand up and nobody to say, ‘We’re cheating other players,’ that sucks. That’s a [crappy] feeling for everybody. I hope they feel like [crap].”
Bregman only made it a little worse after he was finished with his first remarks. Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell tweeted that Bregman, after ten minutes on message, said, “We ARE sorry . . . I learned about what’s right and what’s wrong. I’ve thought of this for the last four months non-stop.” Baseball players have problems above and beyond Astrogate-style cheating if that’s when they learn about what’s right and what’s wrong.
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“[I was] foolish, naïve, prideful, and avaricious,” Charles Van Doren admitted to the press after he unburdened himself before that Congressional committee in 1959. And, in a surprising 2008 essay in The New Yorker. He died last year. It’s a shame nobody thought to show his story to the Houston Astros. Or, to the Red Sox. Or, to anyone else who turns out to have had a little extralegal sign espionage of their own going.