McHugh: Astro pitchers not “brave” enough to stop their cheaters

A Single Line of Defense

McHugh didn’t get half the benefits of the Astros’ off-field-based electronic sign-stealing operation that his fellow pitchers did. He was able to pitch only twelve regular-season games thanks to arm issues in 2017. And he made only two postseason appearances that year: Game Three of the American League Championship Series in New York; and, Game Five of the World Series in Houston.

The Astros lost to the New York Yankees in that ALCS game but beat the Los Angeles Dodgers by a single run in extra innings in Minute Maid Park. McHugh may be remembered best for the first of his two innings’ World Series work, when he walked two, struck out the next, but served Cody Bellinger something to send into the right-center field seats, busting a four-all tie.

But McHugh says now that he and his fellow Astros pitchers simply failed to do the right thing. It took two years’ worth of off-the-record whispers from other players to assorted writers, then a few uninvestigated complaints from a team or three (most notably the Oakland Athletics), before another former Astro pitcher, Mike Fiers (with the A’s since mid-2018), finally threw his hands up and blew the whistle on the record last November.

McHugh holds to one line of Astrogate defense, kind of: they conceived and executed the AIA after determining a few other teams were getting a little too prolific at stealing their signs. He didn’t say any much more than others have, whether those crafty opponents did it the old-fashioned, on-the-field-gamesmanship way, or whether his Astros thought they had something electronic and illegal in the works.