Signs Signs Everywhere Signs

 

Who was it that said "If you aren’t cheating you aren’t trying"? Alex Cora, AJ Hinch?

 Well the Astros tried hard, and took sign stealing to an industrial scale level. Manager AJ Hinch was suspended for a year by the commissioner, as was the General Manager Jeff Luhnow. Promptly after that Astros owner Jim Crane fired them both. The league also tacked on a 5 million penalty to the team for violating policy, which they can afford now after dumping both Hinch and Luhnow.

If you’re not up to speed on this scandal here it goes. Since at least 2017 the Astros used a sophisticated form of sign stealing from opposing pitchers in their home games. Sign stealing is familiar to everyone who’s ever played little league. If you’re a runner on second you look at the sign the catcher gives the pitcher and you try to relay that sign to your teammate at the plate. If the catcher puts one finger down it’s a fastball (usually) and two fingers mean an off-speed pitch like a curve or change-up. You can communicate to your batter a signal like tipping your cap or clapping. Teams look for it though and try to come up with different signals to confuse. No one considers this cheating.

But let’s say one of the parents behind the fence in center field uses a high resolution video camera and zooms in on the catcher. The parent recording the game communicates to the batter by shouting or waving his hands. Most people rightly see this as cheating. Not just because of the magnitude but because the other team isn’t aware it’s happening. This is almost exactly what the Astros did. What they were doing, and it looks like the Red Sox as well, was industrial scale cheating. I’m sure they weren’t the only ones but they needed to be made an example of.

Rumors floated around the league after the 2017 season so other teams got wise to the Minute Maid Park (Houston) advantage. The Nationals, who just won the last series, used a complicated set of signs for all their games in Houston.

Pitcher Mark Fiers, who was with the Astros in 2017, broke the story to the Athletic in November last year. Minute Maid Park has a camera set up to record the game for instant replay purposes. This has been the case for all teams since 2014. Somehow the team was able to send the live feed to a dugout monitor where the players would watch and bang on a trash can for off-speed pitches and sit quietly for fastballs. If anyone was going to have major problems with sign stealing it would be a pitcher. Not to mention, doing something this brazen is bound to fall apart after your players start going to other teams. The Astros of course won the World Series in 2017. How much is due to their clever ‘replay gate’?

If it didn’t help, no one would bother. This is the biggest problem with cheating, you tarnish your reputation for something you may well have earned without it.

 It doesn’t matter that they had the best pitching staff that year, by a long shot. It doesn’t matter than Jose Altuve, George Springer, Carlos Corea, and Alex Bregman all had incredible years. Altuve even won the MVP award that year.

A lot of teams the Astros went through that year are rightfully salty today. C.C. Sabatha (Yankees) wants the win vacated as does David Freese (Dodgers). Kevin Youkilis  (Yankees) is disappointed that the penalties weren’t steeper. Trevor Bauer (Reds) trolled the Astros with video clips of AJ Hinch mocking the idea that the team was cheating. 

I don’t know how to feel about the punishment the MLB did hand down. In addition to the 5 million dollar fine slapped on the organization they also lose their first and second round picks for the next two years. It might not seem like much, but the real damage is not in payroll or future talent or vacated wins, it’s in the perception we have of players who cheated. Not to mention an organization that allowed it. 

Baseball’s commissioner Rob Mannford decided to not punish the players individually. It’s too difficult to determine to what extent each player benefited or went along with it to not upset the others. That’s a reasonable explanation for me but I can’t imagine it goes over well with players on other teams that got beat. If social media is any indicator of how other players feel about the Astros, it will be a while before this episode is forgotten.