Alan Truex on the Astros’ buzz(er): Crane forcing players to apologize
Updated Wednesday, January 22, 2020
HOUSTON — The 2017 World Series was a redemption story for a city that two months earlier had sustained $100 billion damage from Hurricane Harvey. Houstonians sacrificed most of their sleep to watch a procession of 4- and 5-hour games that concluded with the Astros beating the Dodgers 4 games to 3.
Except that now we find it didn’t conclude.
The championship is tainted – asterisked if not jeopardized — by the Astros using illegal electronic assistance to anticipate what pitches the opponents were about to serve them.
Postings on social media allow us to hear two thumps of what could be a trashcan as the Houston batters prepare to launch a changeup over the Minute Maid walls.
They had this advantage in home games throughout that postseason, and they were 8-1 for those home games.
So of course the teams they cheated – Cleveland Indians, New York Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers – are looking for redemption of their own. We hear calls for the Astros to “vacate” their championship.
That’s not going to happen. Stop with the comparisons to the 1919 Black Sox. Shoeless Joe and cohorts did not vacate a championship. It never was theirs. They were the overwhelming favorites who conspired to throw the Series to Cincinnati.
Who should the Astros vacate to? The Dodgers think they deserve it. But we can’t be sure they would have beaten the Yankees in an honest World Series. “We had magic that year,” insists CC Sabathia. “And they (the Astros) stole it from us.”
Perhaps. But we can’t assume that in a best-of-7 ALCS the mighty Yankee bats would have overcome the strong young arms of the Cleveland Indians.
Commissioner Rob Manfred’s 9-page report sanctioning the Astros cited “the culture of the baseball operations department” and deemed “problematic” the club’s treatment of employees and “relations with the media.”
So it wasn’t just sign-stealing.
The Brandon Taubman scandal influenced Manfred’s punishment. The assistant general manager’s misogynistic clubhouse rant was so different from the World Series runup the commish had in mind.
Jeff Luhnow, who hired Taubman, was slow to reprimand him. Also implicated: Reid Ryan, president of business operations and a vital link to corporate sponsors and the season-ticket base.
Ryan was pushed out (in favor of owner Jim Crane’s son) a few days before Mike Fiers blew the whistle on the trashcan caper.
The unexpected sacrifice of Ryan signaled to me that Crane would be unmerciful as the sign-stealing scandal unfolded. I predicted in this blog in November that Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch, as talented as they are, would be fired before the upcoming season.
So where do the Astros go from here? It’s doubtful any of their players will be suspended. Carlos Beltran, who played for them in 2017, regular season and postseason, was cited in the Manfred Report as one of the inventors of the trashcan telegraph. Beltran avoided punishment by the league, though he lost his job as manager of the Mets, who were not willing to continue with an endless distraction.
The main issue for the Asros is their 2017 MVP, Jose Altuve. His niece – or someone purporting to be his niece – posted two tweets about Altuve wearing a hidden electronic buzzer during the ALCS. Supposedly that explained why he pleaded with teammates not to rip off his jersey to celebrate his walkoff home run that finished off the Yankees.
Altuve’s explanation: his wife disapproved of his buffed torso being unveiled in an earlier walkoff. He didn’t want a repeat. Sounded reasonable to many of us who have been married. But now, everything is suspicious. The Astros are impeached forever.
None of their players shed light during Saturday’s FanFest at Minute Maid.
Altuve and the always verbose Alex Bregman realized that any comments about sign-stealing will be held against them or someone else they don’t want to alienate. We’ll see how players treat the snitchy Fiers: hero or rat?
Crane was not happy with their lack of accountability. Not that he’s accepting any blame himself. As he was accepting a local Executive of the Year award Tuesday (how ironic is that?), Crane said: “A couple of guys who were interviewed have been holding back a bit.” He promised that when spring training opens next month, “All of them will address the press, either as a group or individually.”
The newsiest quote that came out of FanFest was Altuve promising a repeat appearance in the World Series. Actually not an outrageous prediction considering the team’s fine nucleus of bashers under 31 years of age: Altuve, Bregman, George Springer, Carlos Correa, Yordan Alvarez.
And if they can retain Brent Strom as a pitching coach, the Astros should have a very solid staff.
Call me a homer but I think the benefits of the cheating are being overstated. It’s not like the Astros were roadkill. When they didn’t have their home-field monitors going, they still hit the baseball.
Springer is one who never welcomed reconnaisance. He refused to look at Luhnow’s analytics printouts regarding pitchers he was about to face: “I see the pitch, I hit it. I don’t need to know what it’s supposed to be.”
Whether his teammates can do that remains to be seen.
