Astros’ scandal was well timed: good for them to delay the season
Updated Monday, March 16, 2020
For the first time in 25 years, baseball is suspended. The last time it happened, the sport had itself to blame. Billionaires tried to bust up the world’s richest labor union. A federal judge who was destined for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, issued her ruling in a packed Manhattan courtroom and chastised the ballclub owners for their lawless ruthlessness.
I was covering the baseball labor beat, and I recall the Houston Astros’ owner at the time, Drayton McLane, blaming Major League Baseball’s band of splendidly-degreed attorneys: “I could have found us better lawyers in Temple, Texas.”
The sport paid more than it will ever know for giving up its 1994 postseason. It lost a third of a very large country, when the Montreal Expos were shut down in the final third of their best-ever season. Then we had a spring in which junior-college pitchers posed as big-leaguers. It was farce. It quashed whatever credibility remained in what had been our National Pastime.
To keep perspective, this shutdown is not as grim, so far, as that one was. Whatever develops, this disaster is not baseball’s fault. Their players washed their hands and apparently did not infect anybody with coronavirus. Unlike Rudy Gobert, Utah Jazz tower of ignorance, they were respectful of its force.
Doesn’t matter, they’re going to miss at least the first two weeks of the 2020 baseball season. The plan is for coronavirus to pass when the heat rises. For once, I’m rooting for global warming.
The Astros could be the only people in the world to benefit from coronavirus. Whenever the gates do open, expect fewer people in the stands than a year ago. Not just fear of The Plague but fear of economic ruin. With the nation in or near recession, expensive sporting events may not be in many budgets. Fewer fans mean less harassment of players. Fewer trashcans hauled to ballparks. The Astros play in peace, bask in irrelevance.
But I’m doubting it will be much fun even then. One thing you learn from decades on a baseball beat is that spring training games mean nothing. But there is significance in how individuals are performing and behaving. Not so much statistically, but health-wise and emotionally.
You do fret about batters with sore knees, pitchers with sore elbows, sore shoulders, sore anything, really. And opponents throwing at your heroes.
As the Astros labored through the spring, 7-11, their competition indulged in schadenfreude (gotta hand it to the German language for succinctly describing evil). Oakland pitcher Liam Hendriks was relishing the opportunity to overthrow Houston in the American League West. He told USA Today: “It’s going to be a very long season for them.” Matt Carpenter chimed in: “It’s going to feel like them against the world.”
The Astros’ dilemma: widely chastised but not punished very much for the most comprehensive scandal in baseball history. This was not just Eight Men Out but a lot more of them than that.
Some of their team leaders – Carlos Beltran, Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, et al — conspired to construct a spying network, combining high tech and low, to transmit illegally acquired information.
And after it was all exposed, they didn’t sound very contrite. They want us to believe they would have been world champions anyway, cheating or not. I’m not buying. They would not have taken the extreme risk they did without knowing the value and significance of the reward.
Commissioner Rob Manfred jumped all over them, pummeled them with wrist slaps. Well, what could he do? The baseball owners had tied his hands. The most he could fine Jim Crane was $5 million, which is about the cost of a middle reliever. And Crane makes that back by firing his negligent overseers, Jeff Luhnow and A.J. Hinch. The Astros had their whistlers but not their whistle blowers. At least not until Mike Fiers left the organization.
Oh, they had to give up four high draft picks, as if that’s a mortal blow in baseball. Would they have to “vacate” their 2017 World Series championship? Or their 2019 AL pennant? Apparently not.
So their sporting rivals are bitter, vengeful, making threats, veiled and not so veiled, that pitchers will throw baseballs at Astro heads. Can’t wait to see if vigilante justice reigns. And how the Astros respond.
I wonder about their emotional stability and also their physical health apart from coronavirus. Until that overshadowed everything, the main medical issue was Justin Verlander’s right shoulder. In the wake of his second Cy Young Award he’s 37, not quite the indomitable force of the past. In his final spring appearance he felt soreness that was subsequently attributed to a “mild lat sprain.”
Not all that mild. Verlander said it would “take a miracle” to pitch on opening day. Here again, coronavirus is not such a problem for the Astros. For them, delay is good.
No. 3 starting pitcher Lance McCullers Jr. could use more time recovering from Tommy John elbow reconstruction. He had an encouraging abbreviated spring, 3.86 ERA. But we haven’t seen the power curve the team hopes he can throw when the season eventually starts.
Only one Houston starter this spring attained regular-season form: Zack Greinke, No. 2 in the rotation and no less for wear at 36. He allowed one run in his 9 innings, struck out 7, even though he’s never been a spring-training enthusiast.
As for the Houston hitters, most looked lost without their stolen signs. Rookie of the Year Yordan Alvarez has two sore knees and had zero homers for the six games he played. Altuve had zero in eight, Bregman one in eight. Nobody besides me is counting, and that’s as it should be. But spring training so far is all we have. And for all we actually know, it could be all the baseball we get in 2020. It may turn out that the Astros could not have timed their scandal any better.
