I hope this is still just a guess (RE: Altuve/buzzers) per posts above. Chucks post really worries me. I’m doing my best to weather the storm but affirmative news regarding buzzers and the like is going to be hard for me to swallow personally and also difficult to explain to my kids should I have to. They have already taken the onslaught of “cheaters” head on at school and dealt with it admirably IMO but this kind of news would probably push their fan-loyalty to the team and their favorite players to the brink of collapse. This entire situation is just awful. I just hope it doesn’t get much worse.
Marwin Gonzalez expressed remorse for his role in the 2017 season, the first position player to address the issue. https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2020/02/11/marwin-gonzalez-becomes-first-astros-hitter-to-apologize-for-cheating/amp/
I haven’t seen anything new regarding Altuve and the use of buzzers. At this point it’s still outrage from speculation.
True or not, proof or none, it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
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Buzzers are no different or worse than vocal or hand signals or trash cans. Illegality is how and when signs are stolen AND signaling in hitter in the same game.
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Exactly what they’re not going to look
The recipient of more trashcan bangs than any other player is concerned about the reception accorded his former team, while he works to repair relations with his new teammates who played for LA in 2017. Too bad for them! That season elevated his asking price to $21 million over two years. From ESPN:
Gonzalez said he is still in contact with several of his former Astros teammates, whom he called his “second family.” He said he expects his former team to receive a rough reception on the road this season.
“That’s how it is, unfortunately. It’s how it is. They’re going to get booed,” he said.
Now Gonzalez is turning his focus toward the 2020 Twins team, which he noted has a chance to be “great.” That 2020 team includes right-hander Kenta Maeda, a starting pitcher on the 2017 Dodgers who was acquired by Minnesota in a trade with Los Angeles this week.
Gonzalez said he will address the issue with his Twins teammates who were on the 2017 Dodgers and noted that he has eight months to bond with them.
“I’m sure that we’re going to have a great relationship,” he said.
During the season, small groups of Astros discussed their misgivings. McCann at one point approached Beltrán and asked him to stop, two members of the 2017 team said.
“He disregarded it and steamrolled everybody,” one of the team members said. “Where do you go if you’re a young, impressionable player with the Astros and this guy says, ‘We’re doing this’? What do you do?”
Yikes. If McCann is getting over-ruled, that’s a big deal.
It does appear that there’s a lot of effort being spent to make one person the mastermind or bad actor in all this, but as with most “conspiracies”, it’s really just a matter of good people either not speaking up or being ignored until it was too late.
Rosenthal writes very clearly for those willing to read. Which apparently is almost no one outside of us.
“The Astros’ development of an algorithm to decode signs from video was legal as an advance scouting tool, and the use of that algorithm would have remained legal if it had not been deployed live during games — a practice the Astros eventually adopted.”
Well said.
True, but we all know Beltran was a team leader. It was reported on a lot and at the time we all thought his veteran presence was the ticket.
He said that their sign-stealing methods were “behind the times.” He learned it somewhere and took it with him.
Amazing the influence one player, who wasn’t on the field much, can have.
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This is one of the things I just can’t get over yet. Had Manfred had the balls to do the right thing, which would have been (IMO) to administer a punishment fitting the crime and then to convene a leaguewide symposium on how to handle sign-stealing and what constitutes “cheating” in 21st century baseball, he and the Astros would have taken a Mack truck of umbrage from an incoherent and bloodthirsty public. As it is, he cravenly walked into the trap he’d set for himself after the Smart Watch episode, overreacted against the Astros, and now he and they are taking a Mack truck of umbrage from an incoherent and bloodthirsty public.
It’s Houston’s fault for being truly egregiously stupid about this stuff in '17 and '18 but it’s hard not to feel like a victim of concatenating bad decisions from MLB and a by now universally accepted narrative that has painted the Astros as villains since at least 2014.
It’s also weird and disillusioning and shitty to live in a time when so much of the literate public is totally galvanized by various podcasts and stories that hinge on historical incidence of erroneous judgments and yet here is this enormous blitzkriegy rush to judgment and virtually nowhere do you see anyone saying, Hmm, maybe we should think about this for a moment. You don’t expect it from the hoi polloi in the piranha pool of Twitter of course but it’d be nice to see some restraint from the fucking mavens of baseball journalism!
Finally, the silence from Our Nine continues to be absolutely fucking deafening. I for one have just about entirely run out of patience with them. I don’t know what Crane has planned for his Spring Training mea culpa, but it had better be good. I don’t know about you all but I am losing sleep just about nightly and no longer feel at all sure about my fandom, and most of my insecurity is fueled by the fact that the particular remote group of millionaires I have a proud inherited allegiance to is acting as if it isn’t worth a fucking thing to them.
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Their silence was mandated from above, probably in an ill-conceived attempt to let the furor quiet down before letting them peak out of their foxholes.
Now hopefully the club is using this time to have a PR person with an actual clue to get them coached up so they don’t put their collective cleats in their mouths.
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LOL, whats hilarious about the reaction this “new” article is how many mouth breathers are like “The Astros are trying to put it all on Beltran now!”
It was always about Beltran and Cora. Its right there in the very first Athletic article that started it all…
"Early in the 2017 season, at least two uniformed Astros got together to start the process. One was a hitter who was struggling at the plate and had benefited from sign stealing with a previous team, according to club sources; another was a coach who wanted to help. They were said to strongly believe that some opposing teams were already up to no good.
They wanted to devise their own system in Houston. And they did."
It was very easy to name the names within the first minute of reading the article.
I always liked Musgrove.
Prepare to be disappointed. If the players wanted an apology to appear genuine and meaningful, the time for that is long gone regardless of the reason for the delay (e.g. ownership/MLB gag order). Oh, they want to wait until everyone is together? Then just fucking get everyone together. It’s not like they can’t afford plane tickets.
I’m in kind of the same boat but for a different reason. I used to think that the level of emotional investment that caused one to lose sleep over their sports team was fun and worth the euphoric payoff of winning, but it’s becoming less and less appealing to me. I can handle losing, but it’s the stress in the moment that I can’t seem to control. I was so stressed out during the late innings of ALDS game 2 that my watch thought I was in the middle of a workout. I hate feeling that way while doing something I should be enjoying, and it really caused me to start reconsidering my priorities even before the WS.
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I’m planning on riding this shit-tsunami in the same manner I rode out the AL move and 100-loss seasons. Detachment combined with limited connection with this crew to make sure I don’t go all 'stros-rays and walk the earth like Caine. I’ll still care but not enough to make me lose sleep.
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