By: Mike Carter
“Fixed the World Series?” I repeated.
The idea staggered me. I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people–with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
-“The Great Gatsby”
This was the first thought that sprang to my mind when the Houston Astros cheating scandal mushroomed in the winter of 2019. The above is Nick Carraway’s comment when meeting the notorious gangster Meyer Wolfsheim in “The Great Gatsby.” And just like that, baseball is trying to wreck itself. Again. I am crestfallen. I don’t like this at all, and I don’t like feeling my faith in my oldest friend be tested this way.
My faith has been played with too many times by too many things in this world. By people. By religion. By politics. By shifting allegiances and alliances. I can’t have my faith in baseball be tampered with now too. But I should not be so naïve. Scandal has been around the game since its inception.
You can go back through the history of baseball and find that almost every decade has been besmirched by some type of scandal. Gambling allegations in the 1900s and 1910s. The Black Sox throwing the aforementioned World Series in 1919. Rampant alcoholism in the 1920s and 1930s. Illegal street drugs (the Pittsburgh Drug Trials) in the 1980s. Collusion by owners in the 1980s. Steroids and PED usage in the 1990s and the 2000s (and likely, still today…don’t fool yourself). The Biogenesis dealings in 2013. The sign-stealing now in 2020.
Here’s a quick summary if you have not been keeping track. Three managers (AJ Hinch, Alex Cora and Carlos Beltran) have all lost their jobs in the last week due to being involved in an elaborate scheme to steal signs from opposing teams while all three were with the Houston Astros in 2017. Houston general manager Jeff Luhnow and Hinch were suspended for a year, and then surprisingly, fired by team owner Jim Crane. And kudos to Crane for a gutsy action. That was the year the Astros won the World Series. You can read all the details elsewhere, but essentially a staff member was watching video of the catcher’s signals and banging a garbage can to signal the batter as to the coming pitch. You can be sure there is more to it than what MLB and commissioner Rob Manfred are telling us.
So Manfred would have you believe that this is over and we can put it all behind us. He suspended people, fined the Astros $5 million (which is little more than a tax for them), and made them surrender draft picks (which will be lower picked based on their record the last few years). Some applauded Manfred for this, saying it was a bold measure. But this is really a half-measure; they are clearly protecting players in this. My guess would be that MLB only asked the questions it was interested in getting answers to, and gave the players immunity for being “honest.”
Over 60 players were interviewed over the last two months; not one has been or will be suspended. They don’t really want to know, despite their press releases, if major stars like Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman were really cheating. Both were allegedly wearing buzzers that indicated pitch selection to them; we may never know the truth, and these are just allegations. We all know Manfred and MLB could find out if they wanted, and perhaps they do know; instead, baseball relies on half-measures to look like it is coming off tough, but essentially, Crane and other executives did the dirty work of firing those in management affiliated with this nonsense.
Some folks will say cheating is no big deal. I have had people mention “they’ve been stealing signs for years.” Heck, we all even tried to do it in Little League. There is evidence that pitchers and catchers have been using signs since the 1860s, so you’d guess stealing them goes back almost as far.
But this is different. This is about suing technology and manipulation. Teams had complained about it. A policy was put in place by MLB in 2019 to stop teams from stealing signs using technology. Mike Fiers, a former Astros pitcher, had told his next two employers that the Astros were doing this. He will be scapegoated for blowing the lid of this scandal. But in reality, he should be applauded for what he did, not chastised and blamed. Enough is enough. Knowing what pitch is coming is a huge advantage to the hitter. There is no defense for this one.
Attempting to mess with a game that was, in my opinion, perfectly planned 150 years ago, gives us some evidence. We don’t need pitch clocks. Instant replay is good, I think, if managed properly and not allowed to consume more than 2-3 minutes. If the umpire can’t decide with all of the camera angles now in that time, the call stands. We don’t need a three-batter minimum for each pitcher. We don’t need robot umpires. Stop messing with the game. If you want to do something, clean it up. Oh, and figure out to make the baseball less like a Super Ball.
We need a clean game. Instead of manipulating so many of the things mentioned above, how about cleaning up the cheating? It would be easy to do. Assign an extra person to the umpiring crew, and allow this person access to all of the video operations and the dugout for each team. You can nip the cheating before it starts. In education we refer to this as proximity control.
My fear is that this scandal goes far deeper that anyone thinks. The Red Sox were allegedly using smart watches to “communicate information” earlier this year. I am guessing the Astros were the only team that got caught, but that many others are or were doing similar things. And what’s worse, they kept on doing it even after Manfred warned all 30 teams of the consequences.
My point is this: baseball is a game that has survived all attempts to ruin it. See my earlier paragraph on the scandals throughout the decades. We must have integrity. This must be led by the players. We talk often about trying to market the game to young kids. We hold up players like Altuve and Bregman as examples for our kids to watch, to admire, to imitate, to be like.
Look at Altuve. He’s 5’5” and was signed as a minor league free agent for $2,000. We want to believe that anything can happen with hard work and dedication. That if one works hard enough, size doesn’t matter. That it’s the size of the fight in the dog, not the size of the dog in the fight. Now my son is going to hear about this, and I have to tell him that maybe Altuve has been augmented by technology. Maybe his victory is hollow because he’s been cheating. It turns my stomach, and I know it should not. But even as 46 year old man in middle America, I want to believe that miracles like Altuve can happen, but with hard work, with integrity.
The players need to police this stuff. We will lose a generation of fans to the game if the players, and MLB, don’t figure out ways to get this game out to kids, and hold up the stars as models. The players get paid handsomely, and I fully believe they have a responsibility to be role models to kids with their play on the field. If the players don’t take this seriously, and fix themselves, the game could be ruined. That would be a tragedy. We’re going to lose kids, and even some diehard fans, if something isn’t done about it, and now.
I’m sad. It’s January 2020, and pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training in less than a month. And my beloved White Sox look like they will be competitive again this year for the first time in ages. But this will linger. I know I will probably come back, but after every scandal, it takes me longer to believe and trust again.
What do you think? Is my reaction out of proportion? I am curious to know what readers think about this one. Thanks for reading, and please make comments on this blog.