Should MLB Players strike on behalf of a harder Astrogate hammer?

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Former pitcher Phil Hughes thinks yes, the MLB Players Association should consider a strike for stronger Astrogate punishments.

Surely you remember Al Pacino as aging Don Michael Corleone fuming, in The Godfather Part III, “Just when I thought I was finally out, they pull me back in!” That’s how I was feeling about Astrogate, frankly. And when I had occasion to write on Sunday about the guys who bopped them entirely on the road in last year’s World Series, that’s just when I thought I was out, for a good while if not exactly finally.

Now, former pitcher Phil Hughes and still all-universe center fielder Mike Trout have pulled me back in. I’ll start with Hughes, because he’s thrown a gauntlet down to the Major League Baseball Players Association the bulk of whose membership believes, with justice, that the Houston Astros require more than a coming season full of outrage married to sorrow (and maybe a few knockdown pitches) to atone for their illicit electronic sign pilferage.

Hughes thinks the union ought to strike until commissioner Rob Manfred steps out of character, violates the immunity he gave Astros players in return for spilling, and really fans their behinds over the Astro Intelligence Agency’s electronic espionage.

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You’d be hard-pressed to find other players untempted by the idea if their on-the-record fumings since that unapologetically apologetic presser last week.

“I know this may sound extreme,” Hughes tweeted Sunday, “but I’m curious if the players have considered a work stoppage until real punishments are handed down. I know this probably can’t and won’t happen but what are the 99.9% of players who care about the game’s integrity supposed to do? Just carry on like everything is fine?”

Unfortunately, baseball has a season to prepare for and to play. It’s not as though the game has a choice about it unless the union takes Hughes upon his thought. And unlike the commissioner who admits that he’s a precedent guy (precedents being relative, of course, as a lot of his silly-to-witless rule changes exhibit), this is a union that isn’t exactly fearful of precedents.

One of the safest suggestions about organized labor and its history is that you can count on half a hand how often any union went on strike because one of its locals stepped so far out of line that even that union’s majority was willing to hit the picket lines until the leadership finally stepped in and took that local over its knee.

Two years ago, members of the United Food and Commercial Workers protested at the union’s Las Vegas convention, outraged over union leadership looking the other way too often over sexual misconduct by their San Diego local’s president, for its own sake and because the charges got in the way of the union’s efforts at organizing low-wage Latina workers.

Customarily it’s hard to conceive the UFCW striking the supermarkets because one of their locals or one of their leaders went rogue, even if that leader cost the union a small pile of money to settle a few sexual harassment lawsuits. It wasn’t the markets that cost them that money. If unions deal traditionally with anything in their existences, they deal customarily with tried-and-true pocketbook and workplace condition issues.

(Photo by Lachlan Cunningham/Getty Images) /

Should MLB Players strike on behalf of a harder Astrogate hammer?

What Hughes thinks the MLB players union should strike over is a workplace condition issue. On-field gamesmanship is one thing, but teams still have the right to play the game without fear that the other guys took gamesmanship unfairly off the field and into subterranean surveillance and secrets-stealing.

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When a former player suggests his now-former union shut the game down because one team went rogue and got off with just a fired executive, a fired manager, a seven-figure fine, and the cheaters walking around loose on immunity (two of them have since become ex-major league managers thanks to their Astrogate culpability, of course), we’re boldly going where few unions have gone before.

Dare yourself to visit any social media outlet lacking for even an hour’s worth of Astrogate-related raving. Dare yourself to visit two days’ worth of Twitter and not find a handful of players bellowing everything short of the Astros getting away with premeditated murder and Manfred getting away with a kind of plea bargain. Hughes speaks to a very real and mostly justifiable sentiment.

It’s a sentiment Trout shares even if he hasn’t suggested he’s just about ready to hit the picket line over it. “It’s sad for baseball,” the defending third-time AL MVP told reporters after arriving at the Los Angeles Angels’s spring camp. “It’s tough. They cheated. I don’t agree with the punishments, the players not getting anything. It was a player-driven thing. It sucks, too, because guys’ careers have been affected, a lot of people lost jobs. It was tough.”

Trout couldn’t resist a moment’s speculation, though. “Me going up to the plate knowing what was coming — it would be pretty fun up there,” he said, entirely facetiously, very well aware that there isn’t a professional hitter alive who wouldn’t feel that much less on trial if he knew what was coming instead of having to guess as normal before swinging or taking.

(Don’t even think about it. Those who persist with comparing Astrogate favorably to the era of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances ought to remind themselves: Even the juicers still had to hit what was thrown to them without advance knowledge, until or unless a teammate on base sent them a stolen sign the old-fashioned gamesmanship way. Alex Wood wasn’t just talking through his chapeau when he said he’d rather face a juicer than a sign stealer.)

Now, see if you can resist speculating as Hughes couldn’t on the sight of a players’ strike not to secure or protect their previously hard-earned rights but to secure stronger punishment for the illicit electronic sign-stealing cheaters. Have any active players steaming over Astrogate thought of what Hughes has thought of?

For that matter, has the union leadership—which is seen as likely to have screamed blue murder if Manfred had either rejected immunity for Astrogate players or fanned their behinds anyway once he thought he had the full story—pondered a strike unless their rogue local, so to say, is punished further for its miscreants?

Would they strike for stronger punishments against the stolen sign swingers? Against Astros owner Jim Crane, who put his foot so far into his mouth last Thursday that he resembled either the biggest ignoramus in Houston or the most corporately culpable man in baseball for fostering the kind of top-to-bottom culture that allowed the conception, never mind the deliverance of the AIA?

Next. Blue Jays: The argument to extend Jr. and Bichette. dark

You may have an easier time figuring out how to hit a well-delivered changeup and how to throw a dead fish past a barracuda named Mike Trout than answering those questions. And you may have to wait on that changeup less time than on the players’ union deciding whether to take Hughes up on his suggestion.

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