Punishments are official

What was cheating, jerk? Tell me what you think it was and which teams were doing it. The memo was from the Commissioner, not the front office, and he had tolerated the system until the memo.

Really? The cheating that I believe Hinch had a responsibility to stop, was using a live video monitor to look at the opponents signs. There are other shenanigans which may have involved the front office as well, but thats what I hold Hinch responsible for stopping.

I believe that several other teams cheated (or cheat) as well, but I don’t believe for one second that “everybody does it.” I also don’t think it is a huge scandal in baseball history and think many teams in many eras have done basically almost exactly the same thing. If Tony LaRussa had got caught doing what the Astros did in the 80s or 90s. Fucking fire him. Davey Johnson, fire him. I know that no other manager yet has ended up in this situation for this kind of shit. Except AJ Hinch. I think possibly many other managers have been ethically deficient as well, but were better at inspiring fear, and impressing the need to keep your fucking mouth shut, which I guess is another area where Hinch didnt measure up.

As far as the memo being from the commissioner, your argument is that Hinch didnt get the memor forwarded to him by the front office isn’t that correct?

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Looking at signs with a live monitor was NOT cheating.

You are a fool.

Hinch’s players and coaches participated in a system where they installed a monitor, decoded signs live, and implemented a system for all the world to hear, including AJ Hinch, and relay some information about the signs to the hitter. This is contrary to MLB rules and always has been. Cheating.

The organization also got popped for using the replay room to decode signs and relay them to the dugout, things which other franchises have also done, and do have a serious responsibilty attributable to the front office.

However, what has pissed off the entire baseball world and all the ninnies and jerks and jackasses, and morons that we all have to deal with saying stupid shit about our team constantly, is what I described in the first paragraph of this post. Something Hinch was responsible for stopping, and he didnt need a fucking memo to do it. Even if an evil, sinister caricature of Jeff Luhnow ordered him to tolerate that stuff, or something like that, then it still doesnt change the fact that when the scandal eventually comes out, Hinch is gonna get fucking fired, and would deserve it.

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I agree with you that there is a fool in the conversation. But from my perspective, it wasn’t JJxvi.

You wasted your first post on this?

Read more, post less.

It might help if you explain what is the cheating part.

Now feels like the right time for me to again

  1. thank Jeff Lunhow for building the Astros
  2. kindly ask him to fuck off for that ridiculous interview

It changed no one’s mind about anything, made him look (more) like a weasel, and did not bolster his chances of securing a job.

First rule to get out of a hole: stop digging.

Did you sign up just to post this? Fuck off.

Help who or what? I trust the Astros fans in the TZ and GZ know what the “cheating” was. It was not looking at a monitor or stealing signs. It was not even banging a trash can, which merely was a signal no different than the traditional “first name fastball, last name curve” used by every team from LL on up.

Maybe I need a remedial course. Isn’t using the OF camera and video monitor to steal signs and then transmitting that information to players in the same game the issue? Yes, a variety of those elements (studying film to steal signs from past games, stealing signs in game without the assistance of technology, relaying signs, etc…) on their own aren’t a problem, but the result of using technology to steal signs during the game that is being played is the rule violation.

Cameras as a scouting tool are not illegal.

They are not to be used in-game to decipher signs. Until this season, the video rooms could be used in-game for other things (ostensibly batters analyzing swings, but also looking for pitcher’s tells). MLB cited covid concerns as the reason for the change.

The major line-crossing, won’t someone think of the children, my God they’ve destroyed the fabric of our pristine game issue was the real-time signaling to batters information that was gathered electronically.

Guy standing on second relaying signs: doing the Lord’s work.
Guy in the tunnel watching a feed then banging on a can: societal collapse.

(For the record, it was cheating and worthy of punishment. I reject the vitue signalers.)

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Correct:

The rules violation was using the camera to get signs AND transmitting the pitch learned from the camera to the hitter in the same game. Either of those things separately would be ok; stealing signs and signaling pitches to hitters are part of the game done by every team from LL on up.

It was the combination of getting a pitch with the camera AND signaling the pitch learned from the camera to the hitter. Banging the trash can or whistling or using code words would be “illegal” only if they were signaling pitches learned from a camera and transmitted to the signaler.

For you folks who think this is new evil practiced solely by the Astros in 2017, read a little about the 1951 NY Giants. Binoculars were their cameras.

‘48 Indians, too. Fuck Tom Hamilton.

'40 Tigers (rifle scope and walkie talkie). The White Sox in the late 80s (Larussa came up with the camera and a light switch scheme). These are all confirmed.

The Philadelphia A’s in fucking 1900 had a buzzer buried beneath the dirt in the 3rd base coaching box. This shit has litterally been going on since the beginning of baseball

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Sam Miller, who writes for ESPN and podcasts with Ben Lindbergh on Effectively Wild, had a comment earlier this year to the effect of: The significance of the Astros scandal is that people today have decided they don’t want baseball to be like that anymore, they don’t want to tolerate cheating. I think there’s a good chance though that his thinking there is a little utopian, and it’s more likely that the standards are being applied prejudicially, ie, burn the Astros, ignore the Red Sox, let the Yankees bury their little embarrassments, move on.

And this goes back to the beginning of the Luhnow era. Why were the Astros painted as villains for the teardown strategy while Theo Epstein’s Cubs were doing the exact same thing?

Nobody in the national media is in Houston’s corner. They just aren’t. And then you have an Evan Drellich, who it seems likely (at least to me) is the increasingly common baseball beat reporter that sort of hates baseball teams, who reports on the Astros’ disruption of the industry (an industry that geeky baseball writers have been begging to be disrupted for decades) as if reallocating resources to better reflect spending priorities and modern technologies is suddenly anathema. What, you replaced scouts with cameras!!!???

Ditto the shift. Yes, the Astros did it harder and more than anyone else, but it’s not as if they alone were employing the strategy, they were just a convenient rock to kick because no one nationally is in their corner, the Rays are so cute, and Luhnow worked for McKinsey.

The team that was criminally hacked by the sainted Cardinals and forcibly uprooted from their league started off in a PR deficit and never climbed out of it. They got close in the '17 World Series, Roger Angell loved them, some admiring books were written, but always they were written into the teeth of a wind manufactured by Bud Norris: they treat people like numbers. What an asshole.

And in fact, instead of just not being in their corner, a tremendous number of national personalities in the field of baseball journalism are appallingly lazy. It is still stunning to me how few people in influential positions seem to have read or absorbed the import of research done on Fangraphs and other sites that show beyond the shadow of a doubt how amazingly ineffective the cheating was. It’s taken as an article of faith now by lots of them that the trash can scheme was 100-percent behind the radical dropoff in strikeouts between the '16 and '17 teams, even though that exact dropoff was predicted beforehand by Jeff Sullivan writing for Fangraphs.

And don’t get me started on the fucking “buzzer.” A single anonymous person on Twitter? Really? It just goes to show how starved people are for outrage. They were tearing each other’s shirts off all year! They’d torn Altuve’s shirt off! Are we supposed to believe they didn’t know? That the one regular Astro who’d made use of the scheme the least of all of them came to work up a device all his own, and didn’t share it with any of his teammates?

It’s a damn shame.

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The media template right now to generate clicks or social media traffic for pretty much any major league baseball offseason discussion that doesnt have anything to with like free agency or hot stove or whatever is as follows…

  1. Headline that implies or outright says that “the Astros are awful, here is what they are doing”
  2. Story about a widespread “problem” that all of major league baseball has

The Astros ruined service time by not calling up Springer when he deserved to be
The Astros ruined baseball by tanking
The Astros ruined the minor leagues by spearheading contraction
etc etc etc

Take it with a grain of salt, but Drellich’s sources refute Luhnow’s “I didn’t know anything” claim:

Jeff Luhnow’s interview with a Houston television station this week included assertions that were either misleading or inaccurate, according to people with knowledge of Major League Baseball’s findings during the Astros sign-stealing investigation. Those individuals continue to cast doubt on Luhnow’s credibility, saying there was “direct testimony” that he was aware of the rule-breaking. …

But people with knowledge of the investigation said that “there was direct testimony that Luhnow was aware of the sign-stealing scheme.” The league’s department of investigations, headed by former federal prosecutors, gathered a combination of direct evidence, circumstantial evidence and testimony that a source said would hold up in a legal forum, despite Luhnow’s suggestion to the contrary.

This is part of what cheesed me about press coverage throughout the Luhnow era. All the sports writers wrote about Luhnow as if “dude from the financial/consulting world takes over a baseball team, uses numbers to find every tiny advantage” was a brand new phenomenon.

It’s not at all–it is exactly the Rays story. A team in the toilet, Goldman Sachs dudes came in and used their finance brains to try to find good investments and small competitive advantages. Jonah Keri wrote a whole book about it called “The Extra 2%,” referring to the team’s philosophy of squeezing out marginal advantages wherever they could (I’d give the book 3.5 stars out of 5). Oh, and the GM they put in place who guided the Rays to a WS win just a few years later? Andrew Friedman, formerly of Bear Stearns and MidMark Capital, and currently running the same playbook with a lot more resources in Los Angeles.

Luhnow did a really good job GM-ing this team, and I think a lot of his “cold-hearted, cutthroat, robot-brain” decisions were the right ones–but you’ve gotta pair those decisions with tact and people skills, otherwise you just end up pissing off everyone around you (players, owners, MLB front office, sports reporters, etc.). And when it came down to it, those were the exact people who brought the pressure to get Luhnow axed.

This is no consolation whatsoever about the Astros losing in the ALCS, but I did smile smugly to myself when I realized how many sports writers were going to have to ditch the lazy ass “one team out for redemption, one team out for revenge” stories they already had teed up for a Dodgers-Astros rematch.

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