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

New Red Sox pitcher Collin McHugh is remorseful that his fellow 2017 Astros pitchers didn’t do more to stop the high-tech cheaters on their own team.

Even as we still await the final report on the Boston Red Sox‘s replay room reconnaissance ring of sign-stealers, a freshly-minted Red Sox pitcher would like you to know that he and his fellow 2017 Houston Astros could have been a little braver in standing athwart the Astro Intelligence Agency.

“You’ve got to be willing to stick up for what you believe in and what you believe is right and what you believe is wrong,” says Collin McHugh, who signed with the Red Sox as a free agent earlier this week, after six seasons in Houston with a 3.63 earned run average.

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“And I think a lot of the guys on that team, including myself, are looking back now and wishing we had been as brave in the moment as we thought we were beforehand.”

Or, cognisant of opposing pitchers getting an AIA gumshoe in the backside at the worst possible moments, the moments when even a single pitch stood between them hanging on to pitch another day’s worth of major league baseball and falling back to the minor leagues, perhaps to stay or even to say goodbye to what remained of their careers.

“To put myself in the shoes of the guys who pitched against us in 2017 and to know that our hitters made that job that much harder that year—it’s hard to swallow,” he says. “And I feel for them and I understand the anger and I understand when people are mad and pissed off. I get it. I’ve been there. I know what it feels like to be out there and feel like a team has your signs. It’s a lonely place.”

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.