I don’t think it’s at all an exaggeration to say that the sign stealing scandal is the biggest story in baseball since the height of the steroid era, and may end up being even more detrimental to the sport. I don’t think it was a given that a sign stealing scandal would become this big of a story. Sign stealing — even electronic sign stealing — has been a part of the game basically since the beginning of baseball; Steven Goldman of Baseball Prospectus has a story about the Cincinnati Reds catching the Philadelphia Phillies sending signs to their batters through a telegraph wire in a game way back in 1900. One of the most famous moments in baseball history is the Shot Heard Round The World; the 1951 New York Giants were among the most notorious sign-stealers of all time, stationing a man and binoculars in center field and having him relay signs electronically to the bullpen, who would then relay them to the batters.
Given baseball’s long history of such activity (and fans’ frequent acceptance and even embrace of it as part of the lore of the game), it’s almost surprising that this is the scandal that brought baseball to the brink. But it shouldn’t be. Baseball teams do any manner of unethical, immoral, and occasionally illegal things that make stealing signs look like child’s play. But a scandal like this strikes at the core not just of the game, but of sports in general. One of the biggest appeals of sports is the belief that, unlike in the real world, we can trust that the outcome on the statsheet or the scoreboard reflects some kind of fairness. In order for sports to have this appeal, we have to believe the things we see on the field. This was, from a fan perspective, the worst outcome of the steroid era — every great performance by a player, especially every performance that seemed aberrant (like a player pulling a Brady Anderson and going from good to great in the span of an offseason) raised a question; is this real? In order for a sport to matter at all, people need to believe that the outcome wasn’t a result of cheating. Is there a murky line between what we consider gamesmanship and what we consider cheating? Does the line often shift based on myriad cultural factors and media coverage? Of course; just look at the popular perception of steroids in 1998 versus 2005. But the point is, any time you start toeing the line, you’re playing with fire.
Why did the Astros scandal blow up if in substance it’s almost exactly the same as similar infractions in baseball history, and probably less egregious a violation than the Red Sox’ essentially unpunished use of Apple Watches in the dugout in 2017? Maybe it was the fact that you could hear the damn thing on the TV broadcasts; Jomboy and the other internet sleuths had a field day going through old Astros game footage and finding incontrovertible proof of the Astros’ scheme. Maybe it was the numerous previous allegations of sign-stealing levied against the Astros, or the fact that they had won the World Series that year. Whatever the case, this story became one that had the potential to decimate baseball in a similar way that the Steroid Era did. And for whatever other comparisons you could make to that time (at least with sign stealing, nobody felt pressured to shoot potentially dangerous chemicals into their ass), the sign stealing scandal has the potential to be even more harmful than the steroid era to the perception of baseball’s competitive integrity. With the steroid era, people questioned individual achievements and individual records. After the sign stealing scandal broke, people were ready to throw the legitimacy of the past two World Series into question. No scandal since the Black Sox has done more damage to the legitimacy of the outcome of the World Series.
To his (partial) credit, Commissioner Manfred’s report and the punishment he levied out appear to at least reflect what a problem this represents for baseball. The report and the punishments seem incongruous both to the facts and to each other. The report makes the trash can-banging scheme out as “player-driven”, with only then-bench coach Alex Cora involved in setting it up among management. Manager AJ Hinch, per the report, had no hand in the scheme, and the front office was apparently totally unaware. Neither of these things sound true; the Astros’ front office was notorious for both its micromanagement of its players and its willingness to engage in any practice that would increase its chances of winning, and the idea that they wouldn’t know about a scheme this involved (and this obvious) is quite frankly unbelievable. At the same time, both Hinch and Luhnow were suspended for the 2020 season and then summarily fired by owner Jim Crane (possibly at Manfred’s direction); the players in this “player-driven” scheme were unpunished. Obviously there were practical and pragmatic concerns with this outcome (players were awarded immunity for their testimony, any player suspensions would mean a battle with the players’ association), but it’s still surprising from reading the report.
There has been a lot of completely fair criticism of the penalties. For one thing, the punishment does very little to punish the Astros as an organization. The loss of a manager and GM, plus two top draft picks in 2020 and 2021 and a $5 million fine, does very little to make the Astros worse in the near-term, and it doesn’t come close to matching the benefit they received from the scheme, both in winning the World Series and in the huge financial windfall they made from winning the World Series (reasonable estimates put that figure as high as a quarter of a billion dollars). But punishing the Astros largely wasn’t the point of punishing the Astros. Manfred had two goals here; deterrence, and mitigation of the reputational damage to the game. If you believe, like I do, that this was a scheme that the front office had a hand in to some degree (or even if you believe the report’s insistence that management’s failure was a failure to supervise) then essentially banning the manager and GM from baseball, at least for the time being, and the promise of even harsher punishment for future offenses is probably a good enough deterrent. World Series titles are only good to members of the front office insofar as they give them job security; threatening that job security if they get there by stealing signs will likely keep them from doing it.
As far as limiting the reputational damage to the game, Manfred has to convince the public that all the bad actors have been rooted out. His approach has been primarily to try and convince the public that the bad actors were limited to two teams, the Astros and the Red Sox, who are being investigated for sign-stealing in the 2018 World Series and whose punishment hasn’t been handed out yet. This is a problem because it simply isn’t true. There are numerous other teams who have been accused of sign-stealing with varying degrees of credibility. Sign stealing, as every single investigative report has detailed, was pervasive in the game; the Astros, because of the visibility and flagrency of their offenses, deserve to be made an example of, but they certainly are not alone in deserving punishment. And because MLB has staked its credibility on this issue on a premise we all know to be untrue, it’s in a very precarious place. One inaccuracy in their report coming to light, one more expose revealing another team’s sign-stealing exploits, and the entire thing unravels. We saw this today, when allegations that Jose Altuve had a wire under his jersey feeding him signs, based on tweets from someone claiming to be Carlos Beltran’s niece and the fact that Altuve didn’t want his shirt ripped off after his pennant-winning home run, turned baseball twitter into a bad approximation of a QAnon 4Chan thread. The sport is teetering on a legitimacy precipice right now, and all it takes is a brisk wind to knock it over the edge.
But the sign stealing scandal epitomizes an even more fundamental problem with baseball right now. Manfred touches on it in the report. He calls out the Astros, and Jeff Luhnow in particular, for having a “problematic” team culture which “valued and rewarded results over other considerations”. This is a somewhat oblique way of putting it. The Astros have a reputation throughout baseball as a team whose philosophy is essentially that if a marginal advantage can be had, it must be relentlessly pursued, regardless of ethical considerations. This is the team that viewed a player who had been suspended for domestic violence not as a human being who had done a terrible thing but as a distressed asset who could be had for cheap. This is the team that then took so much pride in that worldview that their assistant GM felt the need to proclaim their vindication to three female reporters on the night they won the pennant, as if winning the pennant was a salve for amoral conduct. They had been the most aggressive “tanking” team in baseball, ignoring possible damage that not even attempting to win could do to the relationship between the team and the community. They had become among the most aggressive front offices in utilizing advanced stats which were touted by some credulous reporters as capable of turning average players into MVPs, and had used their statistical “innovations” to justify eliminating all but a handful of scouts and treating both baseball personnel and players as replaceable. And they had been hailed as brilliant for it. They’d been the subject of fawning coverage, including several books, which framed their approach (and the on-field success it had appeared to bring) as revolutionary. There have been many reporters over the past two months who have asked whether the sign stealing taints the Astros’ legacy. But they’re asking the wrong question. The relentless pursuit of marginal advantage above ethical and moral considerations, including the long-term health of the sport, was always the Astros’ legacy. It’s just that now, the sign stealing scandal has made the negative consequences that legacy carries plain enough for even the Sawchiks, Lindberghs, and Reiters of the world to see.
But this philosophy isn’t limited to the Astros (though they are its biggest and most strident ambassadors). It isn’t even limited to the front offices filled with quants and Luhnow clones trying to squeeze every marginal advantage possible out of their rosters, regardless of the aesthetic appeal of their strategies or the interests of their fans. It pervades Major League Baseball as an institution. It’s present in ownership’s decision to respond to falling attendance not by dropping prices to increase attendance, but by maximizing revenue through “luxury experiences” and dynamic pricing that extracts as much money as possible from the thinning crowds that do attend. It’s present in baseball’s reliance on cable revenue leading to decisions like blackout restrictions and removal of games from broadcast television, both of which make baseball’s TV rights more lucrative but make the sport even harder to watch. It’s present in the capital strike that slowed baseball’s offseason to a halt in 2018-19 (and which has subsided for unexplained reasons in 2020), in which ownership seemed to prioritize maximizing near-term profits over the labor peace which had allowed baseball to flourish economically since the last strike. Which is what made Manfred’s condemnation of the Astros’ culture in his report ring so hollow. The report itself, like so many actions the Commissioner has taken, encouraged, or allowed over his tenure, was far more concerned with mitigating short-term damage than doing the equitable thing or preserving the game’s long-term stature. And when the whole league is operating like the Astros, sooner or later, the other shoe is gonna drop, and the damage done will be as evident as the banging of a trash can on a midweek day game in Houston.
Serious Jammage 