Houston Astros: From the owner down, an accountability gap

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.

“[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.