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The Corrupt Socialist Communist Phony Liberal Fake News Media Only Reported This Story After We Called 20 Major News Stations
Across America. Only Months After the Fact now it's 2020.
Astros Manager and G.M. Fired Over Cheating Scandal
General
Manager Jeff Luhnow and Manager A.J. Hinch transformed the team from a
perennial loser to a champion, but a cheating scheme that began in 2017
cost them their jobs.
It
is an enduring part of baseball strategy: As a batter is at the plate,
his teammates carefully watch a catcher’s fingers to figure out what
pitch is about to be thrown.
And it’s
all fair play as long as teams do not enhance the abilities of the
naked eye and clever minds with either cameras or electronic devices
that allow teammates to signal the batter whether a fastball or a
breaking ball is on the way.
But that
is exactly what the Houston Astros did during their 2017
championship-winning season, clouding that World Series title and
causing one of baseball’s biggest cheating scandals in years, Major
League Baseball officials said on Monday in a scathing report detailing
the team’s scheme.
By the end of the
day, Houston General Manager Jeff Luhnow and Manager A.J. Hinch — the
two men who helped propel the Astros to the top of the sport — had been
suspended and then fired, while their club was left with severe
penalties for deploying a scheme involving cameras and monitors to
decode the hand signals of catchers and tip off Houston batters. One of
their favorite communication methods was banging on a trash can just
outside the dugout.
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[A look at sign stealing and what we know about the Houston Astros’ scandal]
Commissioner
Robert D. Manfred of Major League Baseball said in the report, which
was written in a first person voice, that the league could not determine
whether the Astros had changed the results of any games by cheating.
But, he said, “the perception of some that it did causes significant
harm to the game.”
And so M.L.B. acted, issuing one of the heaviest punishments in the history of the sport.
Mr.
Manfred’s report, which concluded an investigation that involved at
least 68 interviews and thousands of videos and documents, excoriated
the Astros’ baseball operations department — including how they treated
employees, other clubs and the news media — as “very problematic.”
[Exploiting technology helped the Astros rise, but also did them in, Tyler Kepner writes]
The
punishments drew mixed reactions from around the baseball world. Many
sympathized with the Los Angeles Dodgers, who lost the 2017 World Series
to the Astros (led by Mr. Hinch) and the Boston Red Sox (led by the
former Astros bench coach Alex Cora) in 2018.
“Didn’t
really expect the punishments to be this harsh. Good for M.L.B.
stepping up,” David Freese, who played on the 2018 Dodgers team, wrote in a tweet.
The
commissioner also noted in his report an incident during the 2019
postseason in which the Astros’ assistant general manager, Brandon Taubman, loudly celebrated a pitcher
who had been suspended from the game for a violation of the M.L.B.
domestic violence policy. A group of female reporters were nearby in the
team’s clubhouse when Mr. Taubman lauded the pitcher.
Credit...David J. Phillip/Associated Press
Jim
Crane, the Astros’ owner and chairman, was largely spared in the
report. And at a news conference announcing the firings soon after
M.L.B. released its report, he said: “We will not have this happen again
on my watch. We need to move forward with a clean slate.”
The
Astros were accused of violating the rules during the 2017 and 2018
seasons, the first of which was when they won their first World Series
title and were praised as a paradigm-shifting power in the baseball
landscape. The team’s heavy focus on analytics earned the nickname
“Astroball,” and Mr. Luhnow’s strategies helped transform the team from a
perennial loser to a championship-winning club.
The
dismissal of Mr. Luhnow and Mr. Hinch came shortly after M.L.B. said
that they would be suspended for the 2020 season and that the club would
be fined $5 million, the maximum penalty allowed under league rules,
while also losing first- and second-round draft picks in 2020 and 2021.
“Neither
one of them started this, but neither one of them did anything about
it,” Mr. Crane said of Mr. Luhnow and Mr. Hinch, who were both once
acclaimed as progressive strategists in a staid sport but now find
themselves barred from the game until the end of the 2020 World Series.
Mr.
Luhnow, who joined the Astros in 2011 after a stint with the St. Louis
Cardinals and a career as an engineer and management consultant that
included five years at the consulting firm McKinsey and Company, issued a
written statement on Monday apologizing for the “shame and
embarrassment this has caused.” He added: “I did not know rules were
being broken.”
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Mr.
Hinch, who was hired by the Astros after the 2014 season, did the same
on Monday: “While the evidence consistently showed I didn’t endorse or
participate in the sign stealing practices, I failed to stop them and I
am deeply sorry.”
Despite the heavy
punishment and damning details of the Astros’ scheme, their title will
not be vacated, though the scandal could have further repercussions as
Mr. Cora, the Red Sox manager, was heavily implicated for his role while
he was a bench coach for the Astros in 2017.
“While
it is impossible to determine whether the conduct actually impacted the
results on the field, the perception of some that it did causes
significant harm to the game,” Mr. Manfred wrote.
The explosion of technology in the sport and M.L.B.’s expansion of replay review in 2014 have added a new dynamic to the sign-stealing practice,
allowing some teams to consistently stay one step ahead of the rule. In
September 2017, all teams were put on notice by M.L.B. after it found
that the Red Sox had been sending information about opposing teams’
signs from their replay review room to people in the dugout wearing
Apple watches. The Red Sox were fined — as were the Yankees, who turned
in their rival, for a lesser misuse of the dugout phone — and Mr.
Manfred sent a memo to teams detailing the potential punishment for
managers and general managers for future violations of the rules
governing the use of electronic equipment.
But
the Astros brazenly continued their practice, Mr. Manfred’s report
said. M.L.B.’s investigation found that the Astros violated those rules
through the 2017 playoffs and for at least part of the 2018 season.
M.L.B.’s
report stated that the Astros began using the live game feeds in their
replay review room — intended solely for teams to decide whether to
challenge umpires’ decisions — to decode opponents’ signs at the start
of the 2017 season.
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A more detailed scheme, first detailed in a report by The Athletic in November, began two months into the 2017 season by Mr. Cora and several players, including Carlos Beltran,
who was hired this off-season as the Mets’ manager. Mr. Cora arranged
for a monitor displaying the center-field camera footage to be installed
next to the Astros’ dugout. At least one player would decode the
opposing team’s signs, and when the catcher issued a sign, the upcoming
pitch would be relayed to the batter with a sound — most often the
slamming of a baseball bat on a nearby trash can.
Mr.
Manfred’s report said that most of the non-pitching players on the 2017
Astros team had participated in the cheating operation, and that many
of those interviewed admitted they knew the scheme was wrong.
“Players
stated that if Manager A.J. Hinch told them to stop engaging in the
conduct, they would have immediately stopped,” the report said.
Mr.
Manfred chose to punish Mr. Luhnow and Mr. Hinch, rather than the
players, because of his previous warning in 2017 that senior team
officials would be held accountable for electronic sign-stealing.
“It
is difficult because virtually all of the Astros’ players had some
involvement or knowledge of the scheme, and I am not in a position based
on the investigative record to determine with any degree of certainty
every player who should be held accountable, or their relative degree of
culpability,” Mr. Manfred wrote.
Mr.
Manfred’s report said that Mr. Hinch had disapproved of the scheme, and
had twice damaged the monitor near the dugout in an attempt to thwart
it, but that he did not tell his players or Mr. Cora to stop it.
“Although I appreciate Hinch’s remorsefulness, I must hold him
accountable for the conduct of his team, particularly since he had full
knowledge of the conduct,” Mr. Manfred wrote.
Although
Mr. Luhnow denied any knowledge of the schemes, the report cited
“documentary and testimonial evidence that indicates Luhnow had some
knowledge,” including at least two emails, of the sign-stealing efforts.
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“Luhnow
failed to take any adequate steps to ensure that his club was in
compliance with the rules,” Mr. Manfred wrote, then referring to the
2017 Red Sox incident.
As far as the
“lower-level Astros employees” who were aware of and participated in the
sign-stealing, Mr. Manfred wrote that he would defer decisions about
punishment to the Astros, and Mr. Crane said the team was still
reviewing that matter.
After nearly 80
interviews by M.L.B.’s investigation department during its inquiries
into the sign-stealing scandal and Mr. Taubman’s outburst, Mr. Manfred
wrote that while Mr. Luhnow (“one of the most successful baseball
executives of his generation”) had ushered in the “second ‘analytics’
revolution in baseball” and capably rebuilt the Astros, the team’s
culture became “insular,” “one that valued and rewarded results over
other considerations” and lacked sufficient oversight.
Victor Mather and Tyler Kepner contributed reporting.
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