MLB: The long, winding, painful reach of the sign-stealing scandal
MLB players formerly of the Astros now playing elsewhere have to live with the regrets and the ramifications of the electronic sign-stealing scandal.
The Astrogate arm drives a hammering fist down upon the Houston Astros, but its reach isn’t limited to them alone. There are ex-2017 Astros now playing, working, or not working elsewhere. And while they won’t feel the brunt of it, they won’t exactly live without it, either.
Two of them are out of MLB jobs thanks to their roles as the Astro Intelligence Agency’s apparent masterminds: then-bench coach turned now-former Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora and then-designated hitter turned now-former New York Mets manager Carlos Beltran. Cora got to manage two full MLB seasons and won a World Series title. Beltran never got to manage even a spring training exhibition game.
But a couple of other Mets live with it. One of them is left fielder/corner infielder J.D. Davis, a rookie with the 2017 Astros. He was a little flip when asked about the sign-stealing scandal in December, almost a month after former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers blew the Astrogate whistle in the first place. Now he’s not flip but regretful. Even if he was on the margin at best as a 2017 Astro.
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That was December: Davis first said he hadn’t heard from commissioner’s investigators and, by the way, he didn’t know what was afoot. “I have no idea what was going on or what’s really happening. That is MLB’s investigation,” Davis told the New York Post then. “I wasn’t aware of anything and even if there was I wish I would have known because I batted only .180 or .200 or something like that, but I really have no clue.”
Tony Adams, the fan who broke down the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal to include who got how many stolen signs banged their way slowly, discovered that the little-used Davis saw 49 pitches in 2017 and got banged for 14 of them. Equaling 28.6 percent of the pitches he saw all season.
The Astros traded the barely-a-factor Davis to the Mets after the 2018 season.
He went from nothing special as an Astro to rather valuable as a Met, with a respectable .895 OPS in 2019 plus 22 doubles and 22 home runs. He was one of the Mets’ unlikely jacks-of-all-trades in a year they rotated players around the field more often than day camp counselors rotate volleyball teams. And this is now: “I spoke a little bit prematurely,” Davis tells the Post‘s Mike Puma.
“I spoke before or during the MLB investigation, and so I was a [2017] rookie and was going up and down the [Astros’] system and I was fighting for my life. MLB called and I cooperated with them and made my statements, and back to the December comment in the interview I spoke prematurely.”
Davis talks a day after Astros owner Jim Crane led an embarrassing presser in which he said the electronic sign-stealing didn’t impact the game before saying he didn’t say that. Davis says, looking back to that rookie season, “of course it’s regrettable and you feel ashamed to be a part of it.” Even as marginal a part, however high the percentage of bangs on the can he got for the pitches he saw.
“I didn’t really think much of the [AIA], going up there fresh and being part of a major league clubhouse and a major league guy,” he continued. “Maybe what they did was the norm. I had no idea. I had never been in another big-league clubhouse to compare the two. Looking back on the details of it, it’s terrible. It’s terrible for the game of baseball.”
Davis couldn’t bring himself to use the word “cheating” on the public record, seemingly. He’s not even close to alone.
MLB: The long, winding, painful reach of the sign-stealing scandal
Another ’17 Astro-turned-Met is Jake Marisnick, an outfielder who’s a rangy gazelle with a glove on his hand but swings a spaghetti bat by comparison. Something the New York Yankees forgot in Game Six of last year’s American League Championship Series. When Marisnick waited on deck, while Yankee manager Aaron Boone elected not to order his gassed reliever Aroldis Chapman to just put Jose Altuve aboard on 2-1 with two outs and despite George Springer on first.
Chapman could still hit three figures on the radar gun even gassed, but his GPS was off-line. Altuve hit the next pitch for a monstrous two-run homer to win the pennant for the Astros. And, provoke eventual questions of was-he/wasn’t-he wearing some sort of electronic device under his uniform once the revelation of the sign-stealing scandal took hold for permanent flight.
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Marisnick hasn’t yet spoken about Astrogate. But Mets outfielder Michael Conforto did, saying about him and Davis earlier this week, “They’re our guys now, and we’re moving forward.” Which struck Newsday columnist David Lennon as not necessarily surprising.
“In baseball, the only criminals are the players on the wrong side of the clubhouse door. The guys wearing the other uniform,” Lennon wrote.
” …What choice does Conforto, and the Mets, really have in this situation? Despite spring training’s sunny promise of a fresh start, they’re stuck in the same ethical quagmire as many other teams currently housing former Astros of a certain vintage, 2017 and beyond.”
MLB: The long, winding, painful reach of the sign-stealing scandal
One Mets pitcher thinks getting a sign-stealing scandal gumshoe in his 2017 backside might have changed his working life from the starting rotation to the bullpen. The problem is that Seth Lugo, perhaps like more than a few pitchers, didn’t catch onto anything suspicious when he went to work on September 2, 2017, in Minute Maid Park.
Almost a full month after the game former Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Mike Bolsinger says put paid to his major league career, Lugo started against the Astros’ Brad Peacock. The husky right-hander more or less cruised through five innings, his only previous struggle being when he and Peacock swapped troublesome but scoreless half-innings in the second. Dominic Smith put the Mets on the board first with an RBI double in the top of the sixth. But Lugo ran into disaster in the bottom.
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Alex Bregman led off with a base hit and Altuve worked out a walk to follow immediately. Then Josh Reddick singled Bregman home, Marwin Gonzalez singled Altuve home, and the Mets went to the bullpen, from which Hansel Robles got a run-scoring ground out (Brian McCann) and a sacrifice fly (Davis, of all people) to make it 4-1, Astros, which proved the final score.
Lugo still can’t forget that game. “I remember pitching really good the first half of the game, and then I don’t know why, they knocked me out of the game in one inning,” he told Newsday‘s Tim Healey this week. “I pitched that inning. I was making good pitches. And when you execute a pitch, you shouldn’t give up good hits. Maybe a little bloop or a ground ball up the middle or something. But their whole approach changed.”
Did the Astros simply adjust to Lugo? Did the sign-stealing scandal start banging the can slowly after Smith’s double gave the Mets that extremely short-lived lead? Impossible to say. Adams couldn’t find video of that game, and running a general search for it produces no results, either. But Lugo can’t help wondering even now, even at a time when he’s arguably the Mets’ best relief pitcher.
He knows he had other inconsistencies as a starter, but he still can’t help wondering whether he’d have stayed in the Mets’ rotation long enough to turn things around if he hadn’t gotten swatted in that game. That’s allowing for two of the four runs hung on his jacket coming home when he wasn’t even on the mound.
MLB: The long, winding, painful reach of the sign-stealing scandal
It’s a little different for the Oakland Athletics, for whom Astrogate whistleblower Fiers is about to start his second season, and where Fiers himself would like to move forward and his manager and teammates have his back as a hero.
For one thing, the A’s were hip to Astro chicanery and actually filed a formal complaint with baseball government before Fiers blew his whistle. For another, Fiers helped make them hip to it in the first place, telling them when he came aboard—just as he had in Detroit when he became a 2018 Tiger—to beware the AIA spooks and adjust accordingly.
Marwin Gonzalez became the first 2017 Astros position player to show remorse for the sign-stealing scandal. Now with the Twins, Gonzalez said plainly, this week, “I wish we could take it back and do it a different way but there’s nothing we can do,” but he added that we’d never know now whether the ’17 Astros could have won that World Series straight, no chaser.
The word “cheating” didn’t come out of his mouth, either, not on the public record.
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Charlie Morton, one of the key pitchers in the Astros’ 2017 Series triumph (his Series ERA: 1.74), who’s now with the Tampa Bay Rays for whom he beat the Astros in 2019 division series Game Three, said last weekend that he was sorry he didn’t do more to stop the sign-stealing when he had the chance.
“I was aware of the banging . . . Being in the dugout you could hear it. I don’t know when it dawned on me, but you knew it was going on,” Morton told the Tampa Bay Times. “Personally, I regret not doing more to stop it. I don’t know what that would have entailed. I think the actions would have been somewhat extreme to stop it. That’s a hypothetical.”
What’s not a hypothetical: Morton, too, couldn’t bear to say “cheating” on the public record.
“Certainly the public perception of that win has changed, and my peers, too,” Morton added. “People have weighed in on this. That’s the reality of it. There are moments during the World Series that will always be special to me, that won’t be quote-unquote, tainted. But certainly, that’s justified, that’s a justified perception to have, and what people have expressed.”
MLB: The long, winding, painful reach of the sign-stealing scandal
Several Astros spoke remorsefully after Thursday’s presser embarrassment, most notably Carlos Correa and Yuli Gurriel. “No one put a gun to our head,” Gurriel told Marly Rivera of ESPN. “It would be a lie to say that one or two people are responsible. We are all responsible.” But they didn’t say “cheating,” either.
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Yet another ex-Astro freshly present trying to win a job with the A’s, Tony Kemp, tells reporters he didn’t partake of the sign-stealing scandal despite being asked if he wanted to. The Adams analysis bears him out, too: Kemp saw 23 pitches as a ’17 Astro September call-up and didn’t get a single stolen sign banged his way even once. Kemp also says he wasn’t “going to say that things that were going on over there were necessarily right. Those things were wrong.”
He didn’t seem to say “cheating” on the record, either.
Davis, Marisnick, Gonzalez, Morton, and Kemp are only five ’17 Astros who have to carry it forward despite being ex-Astros. Their subsequent or current teams might have their backs, but they won’t be the only former Astros who have to live with Astrogate’s ramifications, either. Especially considering the outrage others have expressed since the sign-stealing scandal revelation. When not excoriating Fiers for exposing it, they’ve excoriated the Astros for letting it operate.
When MLB commissioner Rob Manfred delivers his final report on the Red Sox Replay Reconnaissance Ring, the Olde Towne Team won’t have it any simpler for living with the fallout. Nor should they. But neither will any Red Sox players who’ve moved on. Possibly (underline that in thick ink) including the ones who finally got dealt to the Los Angeles Dodgers after enough hiccups to make you wonder whom among the trading partners was drunk while trying to get the deal done.
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And we’ll wonder, too, whether any of those Red Sox will express remorse the way the Astros did at Thursday’s presser, without even a single public-record utterance of the C-word.