THE WICKED FLOURISH (continued)

 

               It’s baseball playoffs time again and the Houston Astros are in them. No surprise there—they’ve qualified for seven consecutive postseasons now. That’s the second-best such record extant, behind only that of the 11-straight Los Angeles Dodgers, a bigger-payroll team. And if they were asked, the Dodgers might opt to swap records with the ‘Stros, because the Houstons have won two World Series (in 2017 and ’22) during their streak, to the Dodgers’ one (in 2020).

               You might think that such excellence would be celebrated widely, but cheers are pretty much limited to in or around the East Texas metropolis. The Astros go about their business wearing a scarlet letter, albeit a “C” instead of Hester Prynne’s “A.” The “C” stands for cheater, which is what the team was for all of its championship 2017 season and a good-sized chunk of the next, before its misdeeds came to light.

               Short memory is a lamentable modern condition, but I’d wager that most folks—or, at least, most baseball fans-- recall what the Astros did.  That was to carry out the most egregious scam in the history of American team sports. Some Astros’ brains devised a computer program that doped out the signs of rival catchers and named it “Codebreaker.” It then set up video systems in their home and some other ballparks that would beam the stolen signs to their team’s dugout. From there the scheme went low-tech: the pitches were relayed to batters by bangs or lack therof on a dugout trash can, silence meaning a fastball and one or two bangs, variously, meaning a curve or changeup.

               Almost equally mind-blowing was Major League Baseball’s response to the wrongdoing. The Astros were allowed to keep their ill-gotten 2017 trophy and fined a few draft choices and a piddling $5 million, which is the cash maximum the game’s owners allow themselves to be penalized no matter what they do. Worse, a review ordered by Commissioner Rob Manfred wrote a report calling the program “player driven and executed” even though it named for blame only one player, Carlos Beltran, who at age 40 was in his last season anyway.   A coach, Alex Cora, was suspended, along with manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow.  For one (1) year each.

               Such leniency should have been expected; it’s well known in other contexts that firing or otherwise penalizing managers or execs is cheaper and easier than doing the same to players. Further, our team sports have a complicated relationship with rule-breaking; as the jocks put it “if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’.”  Baseball outfielders can be counted upon to signal catches after they trap line drives, and all good football offensive linemen have a few artful holds in their bags of tricks. Sign stealing is a feature of both baseball and football, and it’s okay if done with the naked eye instead of electronically.  On another level, the taking of performance-enhancing drugs is treated as an individual offense, with no responsibility attached to the takers’ teams.

               The Astros’ sins were of a different order—obviously planned and carried out by a team’s leadership with the intent of securing a competitive advantage over a long period of time—and if that’s not condemned nothing is. But after their brief penance manager Hinch reemerged as manager of the Detroit Tigers, coach Cora popped up to manage the Boston Red Sox and player Beltran, hired and later quickly fired to manage the New York Mets, now is in that team’s front office.

               The only cheater still out of baseball is GM Luhnow, and one can deduce that’s mostly a function of his personal unpopularity. An engineer and management consultant by trade, he came into baseball in 2003 as a data analyst with the St. Louis Cardinals, having no baseball background and evincing open disdain for those who do. That image was magnified when he became the Astros’ GM in 2011, already carrying the nicknames “The Accountant” and “Harry Potter.” His claim to ignorance of the sign-stealing plot is ludicrous given the fact he was the only top Astros’ exec with the technical chops to put it together. Over the last few years he’s busied himself with soccer teams in Mexico and Spain, but he’s said he’s had feelers from several MLB clubs.  No one would be surprised to see him back in the Bigs soon.

               Baseball man or not, Luhnow’s path to building the ‘Stros was tried and true. The team tanked seasons 2011 through 2014, averaging just 58 wins (and 104 losses) a year but accumulating prospects and prime draft choices. Except for a stutter during the plague year of 2020 it hasn’t had a losing season since, meaning it knew what to do with the players it acquired.

               The team knows when to hold, as it has with the infielders Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman, lineup anchors who have been in Houston for 13 and eight years, respectively. Under Luhnow’s successors it has shown it can identify hitters, such as young-vet stars Kyle Tucker and Yordan Alvarez. It’s had good success developing pitchers, and when in need it can pop for veteran help, as it did in August when it assumed more than $50 million in salary obligations to reacquire the Hall of Fame-bound pitching ace Justin Verlander, whom it had let go to free agency the year before.

               This year’s Astros lack the oomph of previous editions, having snuck into the playoffs via two last-games wins, but once in them there’s no telling how far they might go.  Virtue may not be rewarded in sports but talent always is, and there’s still no lack of that in Houston.