Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1456: Sign Language

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the latest linguistic crimes by Scott Boras, then discuss the Astros sign-sealing scandal, touching on Mike Fiers’ role in the revelations, whether sign-stealing actually benefited the Astros, the immorality of sign-stealing, what the Astros’ punishment should be, the history of sign-stealing, whether the Astros sign-stealers acted alone, whether […]

Hello and welcome to episode 1456 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, joined by Sam Miller of ESPN. Hello, Sam. Hello, Ben. Just before we started recording, Scott Boris gave a quote to many reporters gathered around him at the GM meetings. It is time for Scott Boris to start holding court. Of course, he represents Cole and Rendon and Strasburg, so he sort of has the free agent market cornered this year. And regrettably, Jeff is not here to analyze this latest quote, so you will have to fill in for him or we can both do it together. But his analogy this year, he's moved away from the nautical analogies, and now he's moving into wildlife.

So he says, when you go to the zoo and half the bears are asleep, you're not able to enjoy the zoo. And in this analogy, the zoo is baseball, I guess, and the bears are the teams. And he is saying that teams are tanking. This is his latest way to saying that teams are tanking this is his latest way to say that teams are tanking and i guess he is making it into a hibernation analogy here so half the teams are hibernating and they're bears also so if the teams are the bears yeah who are the giraffes maybe cole and rendon and strasburg because they tower over the rest of the free agent class who are the flamingos oh that's a good one I don't know to me half the bears is such a small

portion of the zoo that true that you can you can definitely enjoy the zoo I'm not sure that he I'm not sure that one had the impact that he was looking for. Yeah, because some of the bears are always asleep. Exactly. You expect half the bears to be asleep probably. If some bears are awake, how many bears do you need? There's a real like the returns get smaller with each awake bear, right? Yeah, right. Unless they're fighting or something.

If they're just wandering around then i don't know that a lot of bears is that much more entertaining than a few bears all you really need is a few bears to be awake and alert and active to make it worth going to the zoo i think so yeah not sure that works i mean it's not the worst i understand what he's going for. But yeah, I think as long as you have some bears awake and he's not saying they're all asleep, only half of them are. Yeah, it's more like if you go to an Avengers movie and Mark Ruffalo has not signed on for that one, you're not getting the full Avengers. Yeah, right. Yeah, that's true. Although he's the one who always spoils the movies in the press junkets beforehand. So I would miss that. But yes, you would not really miss. Well, you cameras are around him, or microphones, I should say, are around him. I was thinking of putting you in an isolation cage, like in 21, and you would not be allowed to see his analogies. And then I would write three fake ones and then read three fake and one real and see if you could spot the Boris.

Yeah, let's try to do that if we can figure out in advance. Yeah. Yeah. So this is just the first draft. He's just warming up. He's workshopping it. I doubt he'll stick with the bears when the winter meetings roll around, but we'll see. It's not his worst, but not his best work either.

All right. It's not his worst, but not his best work either. All right. So I figured we could do some emails today. But before that, it's time to talk about the Astros again. Just when we thought that we were finished talking about the Astros for at least a little while, the Astros are back in the news, this time for sign stealing. stealing. So there is a report this week from Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellick at The Athletic that confirmed that the Astros were stealing signs in 2017, at least according to Mike Fiers, who was a member of that team, and many anonymous sources, not clear, presumably front office sources or uniformed personnel sources. It's hard to know because there aren't

that many people who would know about this and be motivated to talk about it, at least on the Astros. So I'd love to know who is talking about it. Mike Fier is probably not very popular right now with that team and some other teams perhaps. But this gave us some details. And obviously there was a lot of smoke here and really more than smoke i mean what rosenthal and charlotte reported is that the astros were using a camera in center field that was focused on the catcher signs and that camera's output was being relayed in real time to a screen like in the tunnel and between the clubhouse and the dugout and then Astros players were banging on trash cans to signal whether there was a breaking ball coming or a fastball and those

trash can sounds were audible to the batters in Minute Mead Park so it's kind of a mix of high tech and low tech you've got the cameras and you've got the video feeds and then you've got a bunch of guys just banging on trash cans. So sort of somewhat half elegant and half inelegant solution to sign stealing. But this is the most detail that we have had about this. Not completely new. In fact, Jeff Passan reported back in 2018, I believe, that this was happening. He wrote that the Dodgers believed that the Astros were stealing signs during the World Series, and he said two major league players said they've witnessed the Astros hitting a trash can in the dugout in recent years and believe it is a way to relay signals to hitters.

That was last postseason. But this has fires on the record and more details, so it's pretty compelling. And now the question is, what do we think about it? What do we do about it? What do we do to the Astros? What does it mean for the 2017 Astros championship? Is it tainted?

How much did this actually help? How unethical is it? So I guess we can tackle all of those questions. Is there anywhere you want to begin? I would like to start with Fires, who is interesting to me because he left the Astros, went to Detroit, and then he got traded to Oakland, which was independent race with the Astros in 2018. And then he was with the A's, who were independent race with the Astros all last year. And I know the prevailing rules about, you know, stitches vis-a-vis snitches. And so I get why I get, this goes back to the unwritten

rules, right? That it was considered, well, who knows? We're, we're going to litigate whether this is acceptable violation culturally to, to, to cheat, to steal signs. But something about this made Mike Fiers, who was in a position to help his team defeat the Astros by whistleblowing much earlier, made him not do it. And this goes back to my theory that unwritten rules, that these cultural pressures are primarily a way to get players to act against their own self-interest or their team's self-interest, that we tend to think that unwritten rules are sort of a mutually assured destruction. Like we're going to let each other get away with it, or we're not going to behave in a certain way because we don't want other people

behaving that way to us. But in this case, I think that it is clear that Mike Fiers, to the degree that he did not speak up earlier, was only hurting himself and was, or was hurting the A's, specifically in competition, in competition with the Astros. And we have already established through the Astros as a precedent that teams will break rules to help their team. The Astros broke a written rule to help their team, maybe broke an unwritten rule. I don't know what the unwritten rule is about using electronics to steal your team's signs, but certainly broke a written rule to help their team. And Mike Fiers, given the opportunity for two years to break an unwritten rule to help his team he did not in a pennant race raise this issue when he had i mean you would think that the best policing of unlawful and unethical behavior

in baseball would be uh player mobility or or employee mobility that any rule you break is not going to be a secret beyond that year and maybe even beyond that month because players are going to be moving traded waived etc and you would be worried that they would be able to blow the whistle or take advantage of your unethical behavior and yet mike fires uh let it go for two years and the a's you know finished somewhat closely behind the astros in both of those years so i think he should have i i think that he would have been perfectly justified to have blown the whistle right away. I mean, this was, this would not have been tattling just to get attention or to get another

person in trouble. This would have been a competitive advantage. This feels like it's within the bounds. Anything to help your team is what the Astros are saying. And, but not that is what Mike Fiers was saying. And I think that he missed an opportunity. I would have, I would have blown the whistle much earlier if I'd been Mike Fiers, especially if you're going to do it two years later anyway. Yeah, I wonder what it was that convinced him.

I mean, maybe no one asked him. I don't know. It could be as simple as that, that Evan or Ken went to him with their suspicions and they had enough information that he just felt like, yeah, okay, well, you've got the story, so I'll confirm it for you. It may have just been that. Very common in reporting. If someone's got the dirt, they'll tell the reporter, but say, you know, you can't use this unless you get confirmation from other people. And then once you get the whole story, then other people will sign on to be part of that

story oftentimes. Yeah. All right. So the Astros part of that story oftentimes. Yeah. All right. So the Astros to the Astros. Yes. To me, by far, the most frustrating thing about this is that this pitch sign stealing did not seem to work that well. Yeah.

So I went, I watched about a dozen games today from that year to check, to see what was going on. today from that year to check to see what was going on. And it seems pretty clear to me from watching those that up through mid-May, late May, they were not doing this. I think there's a specific homestand where they weren't doing it at the beginning and they were doing it by the end. And then every game I checked from then until the rest of the year, you could hear the thumping. Regular season only or also postseason? Regular season only that I looked at. I didn't look at the postseason.

So you could hear the thumping. Now, sometimes you couldn't hear it all that well because the broadcast was just a little different. There was more ambient noise, whatever. And sometimes it was extremely clear, such as the video that was going around that Lucas Apostolaris found for Baseball Perspectives found and tweeted out of a game in late September with the Mariners. This is the game that Danny Farquhar was demonstrative in the middle of because he knew what was going on. But you could find in most most games, well, in every game that I looked at, at least,

In every game that I looked at, at least, this was going on. And it was for most batters and most pitches. Like most pitches that you watched, that I watched, I don't know, 100, 200. I don't know how many I watched in total. Several hundred maybe. You had a pretty good chance of knowing what the pitch was because you could hear the thump. Every time it was a slider or a changeup, you could hear the thump every every time it was a slider or a change up you could hear the thump or actually two thumps in a lot of cases two thumps for a change up one thump for a slider often seems to have been the code anyway then you look at the astros splits and i don't know if everybody remembers this but one of the great storylines

of that year was how good the astros were on the road that year. They had incredible road numbers. They were one of the great, up until, you know, the very end of the year, I think they were the best road offense in history. They dropped second or second since integration, at least, I believe, or something like that. I'm off in my details a little bit, but they were not better at home. And you would just think that they would be, I mean, this was such a fun experiment because we were going to learn a lot about the value of deception,

about surprise, about knowing what was coming. We were going to really be able to take this apart and figure out something about hitting. And instead we did. We learned something about hitting, but to me it's an unsatisfying thing. We learned that somehow knowing the pitch doesn't do that much. And that, to me, is frustrating. road 2017 regular season so identical wrc plus 121 home and road but everything else is skewed toward astros being better on the road so weighted on base average 344 at home 353 on the road

expected weighted on base average 328 at home 349 on the road hard Hard hit percentage, that's the percentage of balls hit 95 miles per hour or harder, 34.2% at home, 35.9 on the road. And then whiff per swing percentage, 20.8 at home, 20.1 on the road. And lastly, chase rate. So how often you swing at pitches outside the strike zone, Often you swing at pitches outside the strike zone, 27.8% at home, 27.1% on the road. So everything, everything is better. Whether you think that knowing what's coming would make you hit the ball harder or chase less or with less, whatever you think, it's just not backed up by the stats, which doesn't mean that it couldn't have worked in some instances i'm sure that it must have worked in some instances but it just didn't work on the whole i think we can say and and because it is unfathomable that it didn't work in some instances then you have to then conclude that it hurt in an equal number of instances. True. Yes, right.

Like guys were so distracted by hearing the trash can banging that they couldn't concentrate or they just get in their heads because it's, oh, this is coming and you get away from just your instinctual kind of I'm going to see the pitch and hit it or something. It's really hard to see why it would hurt you or not help you. Like my default assumption, I think whenever we've talked about this, it's really hard to see why it would hurt you or not help you. Like my default assumption, I think, whenever we've talked about this, whether it's with you or with Jeff or Meg,

we've talked many times about pitch tipping and sign stealing, and I'm always just kind of agnostic about the effect that it might have. It just doesn't really seem that credible to me that it would make you dramatically better, but on the other hand, I understand why it's also sort of strange that it wouldn't help at all. Because, for one thing, players down the decades keep doing this, so they seem to think it helps, or at least some of them seem to think it helps. They wouldn't do it if they didn't think it conferred some kind of advantage. Granted, players over the years have also worn magnets on their necks and refused to change their underwear when they're on hot streaks or shaved or not shaved as a way of enhancing their performance and plotted sacrifice bunts that actually hurt the team instead of helped it so there are a lot of misconceptions and superstitions in baseball but beyond that it seems like so much of the difficulty of hitting is not knowing what's coming and not knowing what speed even is coming and it would seem that if you could just rule out a breaking ball or rule out a fastball that almost has to help you. How could it not? Yeah.

Oh, it's just, especially like, look, if it's an O2 slider, you almost can just like rule it. Like you don't, you can put your bat down.

It's not going to be a strike. Like the pitchers primary weapon is O2 sliders. You take O2 sliders out of the sport and it's like 11 runs a game like that's how teams that's how pitchers get by is they get you to see a pitch that looks like it's a fastball in the strike zone but it's not and by the time you figure it out by the time you figure out it's a slider well away you've already committed that's like the whole thing of pitching get two strikes throw a slider have it look like a strike have it not be a strike and yeah like knowing that i just can't believe that it isn't just like i can't believe it doesn't turn the game into a total joke of course hitters are smart too and they know that if it's o2 that

there is a pretty good chance that it's going to be a waste pitch it's just going to be something that they shouldn't swing at and so they do swing a lot less often, but they still do get fooled sometimes. And you would think that if you knew what was coming, you'd just never get fooled. So I've seen many videos going around that make it look like this worked because, you know, you show the trash can pegging and then someone hits a home run or something and it's very clear and convincing. And so I take it that you watched many examples and that it didn't reliably work, which is... Yeah, well, I watched many, many examples. And I saw a lot of like weak grounders on sliders.

I saw, I mean, I also saw it quote unquote work. I mean, I saw every time it worked, I thought, of course it worked. How could it not work? But there were lots of times that it didn't, you know, you'd see batters take fastballs down the middle. You'd see batters swing and miss at sliders that were not strikes or changeups that were not strike. You'd see them make bad contact.

And there is a lot of noise in offensive production, a lot. And so if we were just talking about runs, well, runs a lot of times are skewed by sequencing of offensive events. If we were even talking about just home runs, then I mean, the difference between a home run and a fly out is often minuscule. But chase rates, in particular, I just like that seemed like it had you had to have a lower chase rate if you knew what was coming. And yet. Yeah, right. work, or at least it didn't work in any kind of dramatic across-the-board way, then does that affect what you think of the morality of doing it? Because, of course, you can do something that's against the rules, and it can still be something that you should be censured for and punished for,

even if it didn't work. But if we conclude from this that sign stealing just doesn't matter, period, then the question is, well, why is it even against the rules? Who even cares? Why bother to police this if it's not something that even benefits the team? Which sounds like a radical thing because, again, it's very confusing that this wouldn't help at all. But this is the clearest evidence we have of sign stealing. This isn't just like a story about someone seeing something through a telescope.

We know all the stories, and we can talk about those and how they compare to this. But this is kind of a unique situation where we have these details, and we can hear it. We can just go back and call up the mlb tv and we can actually hear this happening and i have no doubt that it did happen that it was happening as described and so we can actually confirm or deny it and it just seems like the evidence kind of points toward it not mattering all that much. So it was still against the rules. It doesn't change my opinion about whether it's ethical or whether you should get away with it at all.

To me, the only thing that would change my mind about that is if basically literally every ballplayer in the sport knew this and that all the teams were doing this and that they only kept it secret because they were sort of keeping the facade, which is essentially the sunscreen defense. You know, the sunscreen on your arm that pitchers use to get a better to get more tack on their fingers, which I think they should clean that rule up. I don't I don't like the way that they are all breaking a rule and we just we just ignore it. But I don't think that they're, I don't think pitchers who do that deserve any sort of shame.

Like that's just the way that this game has developed. Everybody puts sunscreen on their arms. But if you are, if it's not that, and I don't think that it's that, I don't think that it's that, maybe it is. Maybe we'll find out in the next couple of days that in fact all 30 teams had a trash can and the Astros are the only one that you could hear or whatever, but presuming that's not the

case, they're still doing it because they think that it's helping them there. They were doing it secretly. They had a, a system to avoid detection and, um, and they were, it was clearly against the rules. And so, uh, yeah, I mean, I mean, look, I don't think that money can buy happiness. But if someone commits robbery, I don't say, ah, well, in a couple of weeks, they're not going to be any happier than they are now. It's still against the rules. And I think that the Astros did a dirty thing. I do, too. But if it doesn't work, then does it matter that they thought it worked? Look, it was against the rules, so that's it. You broke the rules. You should be punished for it. But do we need to make it be against the rules? Do we need that rule? If it just doesn't work, then the whole point of having a rule that says you can't do this is the idea that it helps, that it's an unfair advantage, right?

So if it's not, then why even have a rule? Why say it's bad to do it? Well, because we can't—this is part of why it's so frustrating, is that we can't rule out that it did give them an advantage. For one thing, we can't rule out that it didn't give them advantage in certain situations. give them an advantage. For one thing, we can't rule out that it didn't give them advantage in certain situations. I mean, there was a, I wrote, I've written, I'm writing about this topic. And one of the starts that begins this whole sequence is a start against the Orioles in which a rookie named Alec Asher was pitching. And Alec Asher at the time had had a nice little start to the season for the Orioles. He had a 2.17 ERA going into his start against the Astros.

They knocked him out after two innings. They scored six runs. They bumped his ERA way up high. And, you know, like a month later, Alec Asher was in the minor leagues. And right now, Alec Asher is an independent leaguer. And no, I can't. It is hard in the aggregate to prove that this is a consistent way to improve your offense. But again, it just seems impossible to imagine that it never helped. And therefore, I can't rule out that they ruined poor Alec Asher's career. Alec Asher's career and so uh you I do want them to enforce that rule I want them to enforce those rules again assuming that we don't find out that you know the Orioles weren't doing this and everyone

wasn't doing this and that it was just kind of a thing that like literally every team looked the other way to make the game go faster or whatever which I don't think is the case but the other thing about it is that there is the possibility that this is just that the reason that it looks like the Astros did not benefit from this is random fluctuation. So some years teams for no good reason perform worse on the road than at home. And some years they even perform a lot worse at home than on the road. And if you play, you know, 30 teams schedules for 150 years, you're going to have these outlier seasons where a team has all their bad days at home and their numbers look much worse for no reason, for no sign stealing variable or any other variable.

It just is the way that some bad days group in ways that look like a signal, but it's really just noise. And so maybe, you know, maybe the Astros did benefit. Maybe if they had not been doing this at home, they would have been even worse. Maybe their road numbers were the outlier. Not that it wasn't so much that it made them worse at home as that for no good reason, they were outlandishly good on the road that year when they weren't, you know, when they didn't apparently have a sign stealing system in place. And so even looking at even everything we've said, even the frustration that none of this showed up, even the way that it is quite convincing that there isn't a clear advantage that they

got from this, you can't rule out that they did get an advantage from it. True. And it's not impossible that they were also cheating on the road using some other system. We don't have evidence of that, but no one would put it past the Astros at this point to have figured out some other way to do this. So that's possible too. If they got used to it at home, if they thought it was really helping them, then that may have made them more likely to try to do it on the road too. So yes. so your point about, well, as long as not every team is doing this. So just a few days ago when we had Eddie Robinson on in the outro to that episode, I read an excerpt from

his autobiography where he talked about how his 1948 Cleveland championship team stole signs using a telescope and he didn't want the signs and some people on the team wanted the signs and that old story. And we know that the 1951 Giants did that and we've heard many other stories. And of course, very recently, and even the same season that the Astros were doing this, the Red Sox were stealing signs using their Apple Watch scheme, which was very similar, less effective, I suppose, in that it relied on relaying signals to the runner on second base who would then relay them to the batter. And so if there was no runner on second base, I don't think they were able to

relay the signs. So less effective than the Astros system, but obviously similar and same goal and just as ethically, morally questionable. So they were doing that and the Yankees reported them for that violation. And then the Yankees, who had turned the Red Sox in themselves, got fined by MLB for some undisclosed chicanery that was going on with the bullpen phones. They were evidently, I assume, relaying signs from the bullpen somehow. So they were doing it. Everyone was doing it, or at least three teams were doing it. Three of the best teams in baseball that year were doing something, and maybe the Astros did it better, and maybe they took it further. But that's the question, I guess. How many teams are doing it? Is it every team? How many teams are doing it? Is it every team? How many teams are doing it electronically? Because, of course, just about every team is doing it in some form or another, and I have no problem with that.

Of course, players have problems with that, and they police that within themselves, and they try to protect their signs by whatever, brushing back someone who they think is stealing signs against them. But there's no rule against doing that. And that's kind of fair game if it's something you can just pick up with your eyes. So the distinction is technology. And I don't know, does a telescope count as technology back in 1948, 1951? Probably. That was the technology they had at the time. And this is the technology they have now. And there have been some reports. There was a beat writer tweeted that he's heard that the Brewers and the Rangers have been doing something similar, like not substantiated the way that this Astros report was. But it seems much more likely that many, if not all teams are doing something like this, then just that one team was doing it. So, but again.

That said though, that said, if you didn't know those other examples and if you had not heard about the widespread paranoia in the league, you would bet on the Astros being the first team to do this. Yes, definitely. Yes. Yeah. And that was kind of what Ken and Evan wrote in their article was like, well, is this something the Astros were doing only and taking it further than anyone else? Or do we just know about it because the Astros now have this justified reputation for exploiting every edge and going further than other teams are willing to go. And so they have ruffled a lot of feathers around the league. A lot of people don't like them. And so they're more likely to report this or to be vigilant and to spot it. And that's part of it.

And maybe the fact that people have piled on them so much in the last couple days is because we're just a couple weeks removed from piling on the Astros for something that was even more disturbing and terrible, I think. So the fact that it's the Astros, if this were just some other team, if it were, gosh, I don't know, if it were, I was going to say the Marlins, but then we would all just laugh that the Marlins were still so bad, even though they were doing this. But, you know, some other team that did not already have this reputation for doing this and for doing all of these iffy things probably wouldn't have been as big a deal. But it still should be a big deal because it's the Astros and it's part of their pattern of behavior that just takes things way too far.

Yeah. And I think, you know, people have, there have been people who've said, well, we should take their title away. And I just can't imagine anything like that ever happening. There's no precedent for that. There's not enough compelling evidence that this benefited them, I think, to taint it to that extent where it would be a bigger stain on the sport to leave things as they are than to change retroactively. I mean, there's just no mechanism for changing who won the World Series or who the champion of a season is after the fact. Would you do that for every team that we know has cheated in the past or only some? And look, they won the AOS that year by 21 games. So it's not credible that they made the playoffs because of this sign stealing system. And then once they get into the playoffs, so there's some question in this report about whether they continued to do this in the playoffs. Some people say they didn't. hand, it's pretty hard to believe that if they thought this was working for them, that they would suddenly stop of their own accord in the playoffs. But of course, by that point, the Red

Sox had been caught doing their Apple Watch thing. So it's possible that they just got paranoid that they thought that people would be watching more closely and they stopped for that reason. Or maybe they stopped because they didn't think that they would be able to hear the banging in sellout playoff crowds. And it's also possible that they did continue to do it. And they did hit better at home in the playoffs. But again, that's, you know, home road splits in the postseason is such a small sample that I don't know that you can make anything of that and and there was a wave of dodgers fans apologizing to you darvish because you know they had held him responsible for pitching poorly in the world series and now they were saying oh well the astros were stealing signs and there was even an andrew friedman quote

to that effect where he said i think that one of their players are an experienced you know manual sign stealer or pitch tipper wasn't able to pick up any pitch tipping that Darvish was actually doing. And the implication was that the Astros were cheating in that series, which is possible, of course, but Game 7 was on the road for whatever that's worth. And Yu Darvish, because he was getting all these tweets, he addressed this on his Twitter account, which is just one of the best off the

field things in baseball these days and he replied to some people who were saying you know sorry for blaming you for this and he said please don't say that i sucked that's it yeah he said i sucked that's all this is multiple tweets which is good i think i mean i don't know what he actually thinks in his head whether there is some question about whether the Astros were doing something, but I think it's good that he came out and said, no, I was just bad. And I think he probably was just bad. I mean, I don't know, maybe the Astros knew something or saw something as well, but I doubt that was the whole story. So putting aside what MLB will or could or should do to the astros specifically do you think that there's i mean given how fast we can send information yeah now from you know from

either on a camera or just like from the stands you know via a watch or whatever this seems like not the last time that we're gonna have this happen is there anything that major league baseball that you would expect major league baseball would do to protect the integrity the integrity of the catcher pitcher communication yes i think there is more they could do and they have what they have done it they did the reverse. Like two years ago, they limited mound visits, which is a way, part of the reason that we saw so many mound visits, I think, was that it makes it easier for pitchers and catchers to talk over pitches without having to worry about Rosenthal and Drellick mentioned in the report. This started in the 2018 postseason and continued in the spring of this regular season. So among the rules that were sent to teams, no camera installed beyond the outfield fence and between the foul poles may capture an image of the catcher's signs. Any camera in that area needs advance approval from the commissioner's

office. The league has also set rules about the placement and use of monitors and TVs, mandating that virtually every screen be on an eight-second delay. In addition, MLB placed league employees at the park to attempt to monitor what teams are doing. So it is possible that this is fixed, that this is no longer a problem, that we're finding out about something that happened in 2017 that was against the rules that were in place even then, but was before these new stricter rules were put in place. And no one is saying that the Astros were still banging trash cans this year, although they were saying that the Astros were whistling or doing other things. So there is a chance that this is just fixed, that MLB solved the problem. But you'd probably have to be pretty naive to

think that's the case. Well, they were much better at home this year than they were on the road. So that suggests that they were not stealing signs. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how you could completely stop this behavior. Like, even these rules, how strictly are they enforced? Is someone from MLB going out to the outfield before every single game and making sure that no camera is trained on the catcher signs and checking in-game too and then checking all the TVs during the game? all the TVs during the game. I mean, it's good that the rules are stricter, and maybe it would just dissuade players from attempting to do it, just knowing that these rules are on the books. But I don't know.

There's probably a way around them. And it may be that there is just no way to completely police this because we've got cameras everywhere. Everyone has a camera in their pocket. And cameras can be tiny, and they're getting better better and better and they can be unobtrusive. And it just seems like given the amount of technology that's out there today, it would be pretty difficult to completely prevent teams from doing this as long as catchers are still putting down signals with their fingers. So then the question then becomes, well, can we do away with catchers putting down signals with their fingers? Exactly. Then it's, well, do you try a headset where you have the catcher is able to say what pitch he's calling and the pitcher has something in his ear and he can hear that and he can shake off if he doesn't like it.

Even then, maybe you have some risk of the batter being able to overhear what the catcher is saying. So then maybe can you go with some kind of tactile thing where, I don't know, maybe the catcher has a watch or some sort of device that transmits a signal that the pitcher can hear, and there's no sound, but it's just, you know, whatever, Morse code or something. It's like a pattern that you just feel on your wrist or something, and you know. As long as the catcher is actually operating something with his fingers, then there's some risk. Like, even if he's just tapping something on his wrist, then presumably that's not so much different from putting your fingers down or something. But it's 2019 and it's almost 2020. I think we can figure out a way probably to relay signs from one person to another across a vast gulf of 60 feet without that being detectable from afar so i think that's probably the next step and a sensible step and and we've seen teams go to greater lengths to vary their signals you know just to throw teams off the send disguise what they're doing use alternate signs and that

sort of thing which has slowed the game down in kind of an annoying way, but probably has worked. So again, maybe this is partly solved. But yes, I think it's probably time to explore some other method of transmitting those signs from the catcher to the pitcher. Yeah, or not to the, I mean, it seems like... Or from the dugout to the pitcher. Yeah, it seems like the simplest thing to do would be to just give each of them, each the catcher and the pitcher, you know, a watch. Gets a message from the dugout and that you have a coach who specifically has the job of calling pitches.

I don't know if teams would think that that would not be worth the effort because maybe you give up too much in having somebody who's not down there with the batter behind the plate calling pitches. And yeah, I guess then you wouldn't have the back and forth between the pitcher and the sign caller, which would be a problem. You want the pitcher to feel confident in the pitch he's doing. And so, yeah, actually, my idea sounds terrible. Well, you could still, yes, you'd want it to be someone who could actually see the field and what's happening. But if you're in the dugout, then you could hide what you're relaying, right?

And you could have, I don't know, there's gotta be some way to just like have the catcher tap something behind his back or whatever and have it be less obvious than a number of fingers, I would think. Or maybe he can whisper or he can make sounds under his breath like he doesn't have to say, hey, slider now or whatever. He can just say something and make some sort of sound that the batter, I guess, might be able to hear, but wouldn't be able to have help from someone elsewhere in the ballpark picking up on what that means.

All right. Well, here we go yeah so we'll see by the way i i think you know joel sherman asked carlos beltran about this yeah carlos beltran the new mets manager and beltran denied that he had any knowledge of this which is his strange credulity i think right i mean the thing thumped while he was batting. We could hear it. Yeah, it was thumping while he was batting. So, you know, it was thumping while he was batting, that's all.

Yes, it doesn't mean that he was using it, that he was one of the people who asked for it, although I will say that— It was thumping while he was batting, although that. Yeah, and like he was around and he was walking in the tunnel and like he was a DH. He was probably spending as much time back there as anyone was. And also, this report says that this started as a result of two uniformed Astros. One was a hitter who was struggling at the plate and had benefited from sign stealing with a previous team which is interesting i don't know if that means illegal electronic sign stealing with a previous

team or just regular old sign stealing but and then the other was a coach who wanted to help there weren't that many astros hitters who were struggling at that time because again very good team carl's beltron was struggling at that time he He had like an 80 WRC plus in mid-May. So if you were going to come up with a short list of asterisk hitters who fit that description, Beltran would be on it probably. So Beltran said, I'm not aware of that camera. We were studying the opposite team every day. We took a lot of pride studying pictures on the computer. That is the only technology that I use and understand. Wasn't Beltran the one who was credited with cracking

the Udarvish code too? I think so. Yes. Naturally, just seeing it with his eyes and being a wily veteran, but yes. It is hard to believe, I think, that this would have been going on and that he wouldn't have known about it. And you could say that about, you know, A.J. Hinch, for instance. Is there any way that A.J. Hinch could not have known about this? He's in the dugout every day. Did he just think his players were banging on the trash can for fun? I mean, if you could hear that in the batter's box and on the broadcast, then for sure you could hear it in the dugout. So it's pretty hard to believe that he wasn't aware that this was going on.

And by the way, Red Sox manager Alex Cora was the bench coach that year. does this go and whom can you punish? Because it's possible that this is something that the team just did on its own, that it was something only players and coaches knew about and front office people weren't aware of. Although again, given that it's the Astros, that's the question. It's like, should we lump this together with anything else that we know about the Astros culture? Is it part and parcel with the whole, well, we're going to exploit every possible advantage we can and Brendan Taubman and Jeff

Luno saying something makes it more permissible or holding that attitude makes it more likely that the players will say, well, if our front office is going to do this or that, then we have license to do this because it's part of the same thing. Or does it mean that if the Astros front office was encouraging the team to exploit every possible edge it could, then they may have been the ones to suggest this to that player and the coach? I don't know. I don't know. player and the coach i don't know i don't know but if mlb is investigating this now with the astros cooperation supposedly then the question becomes well can you hold a person responsible for this do you ban someone like john capolella was banned with the braves international spending scandal to try to dissuade other teams from doing it in the future? Or do you just say, well, we'll take draft picks away and we'll fine you, which is just about the only mechanism that MLP really has to punish

teams? Yeah, I'll admit, I don't really have a great sense of where I fall on the morality of this because the, you know, because something like this, the, because it only takes place on the field, because taking advantage of both loopholes in the rules and your opponent's distractedness and all of those sorts of things are sort of intrinsic to gameplay generally like i don't feel great about it but i also don't know that i feel like this is not this is not i'm so glad we signed osuna you know like this is not anywhere near that right so i don't know how I would feel. I don't totally know how I feel about it.

I do think that the way that gameplay has to work is that there has to be some leverage that you have against the person who is caught cheating. And if you're caught cheating, if it's an amount of social shame that keeps people from being able to cheat relentlessly and with impunity then that can work

or if there's some sort of rule the tricky thing is that once you've won the championship there really isn't much you can do that's going to make it not worthwhile and maybe that's just how it is maybe the Astros maybe they got away with it

and maybe they're willing to absorb the shame of this. Maybe they're willing to absorb whatever game specific penalties that you put in place going forward into the future. But here's my question. I don't know what you, where you fall on the morality of this either, but let's say that, let's say that your team, you're, you're a, you're a baseball player and you're on a team that's doing this. your team, you're, you're a, you're a baseball player and you're on a team that's doing this. How many other teams would you have to know were doing this before you felt no guilt whatsoever? Is it, is it zero? Is it totally fair game and you'll suffer the consequences when they come? Or because really that's the thing. That's the thing about breaking rules. It's, it's only a lot of times it's only wrong to break break rules if you're not paying the consequences when you get caught.

Like, civil disobedience is cool if you're willing to, like, pay the price a lot of times. Cool, like, you know, like, fine, right? But if you're not paying any consequences, then it becomes quite annoying and nobody wants to play with you. So, I forget what my question was. How many teams would you need to know were doing this before you didn't feel guilt about your team doing this? I think probably as soon as I saw a team do it against me, I would like one team. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I wouldn't know how many teams are doing it really. There's no way to know, but even if you were omniscient or something as soon

as yeah as soon as it was being used against me it would feel like self-defense i think which is i don't know that that's actually ethical like one person doing something wrong doesn't mean that it's okay when you do it but it's a very competitive game and i would kind of feel like now you know maybe i would blow the whistle or something. Maybe that would be a better response instead of doing the same wrong thing that your opponent is doing. Just point the finger at your opponent and make them stop doing it. That might be a better way to respond to it but yeah i i think as long as you know like in the heat of the moment that the other team is using this tactic against you it would take quite uh i don't even know what to call it a

moral backbone or or something to say no i will refrain because this is not an ethical good well the tricky thing about it is that the astros do not appear the astros do not appear to have been doing this primarily as a team-wide effort to win games i mean they they were like that was part of it obviously but they were in a non-competitive division they were at the time that this started they were up 10 games in a non-competitive division the clip that lucas found with the danny farquhar situation that that was in late September and they were up 17 games at that point. They did not, this was not, well, the White Sox are cheating us and so we need to cheat them because that's the only way

this division race has any merit. I mean, I guess you could say that they were playing for home field advantage or whatever, but more it was the hitters wanted their stats, right? This was about hitters getting their stats. And in that case, you're not playing your stats like the pitching side does not have an equivalent way of cheating against you. Like if an Astros hitter goes up there and is like well everybody's cheating me so i gotta cheat them except for the pitchers don't have this they're not cheating you like so now you have

taken unless they're using sticky stuff on their fingers which oh so maybe maybe but hitters claim that they actually like that i don't know if i believe that but all right so put aside the sticky stuff for a minute so then you uh now you have taken now you have taken a interaction a combat which is supposed to be kind of equal footing and now you have taken you have unilaterally taken an advantage from the pitcher and so it doesn't matter how many other teams are hitters are doing this if none of their pitchers have the equivalent now but you could say that in a way you're competing with the other 29 teams hitters because your stats are only impressive relative

to the league average to your peers when you're a free agent they're valuable only in as much as nobody else has stats as good as you when historians write about you you're impressive only in as much as in your era nobody else else had stats like yours. And so then maybe you could say, well, if I know one other team is doing this anywhere, even if it's not against me, then their players are diluting the impact of my performance. And therefore to get equal footing, I, I, I deserve, deserve these signs. Yeah. Huh. It's tough. I don't know. What do you think, if it were just the culture of baseball going back to the beginning, that you could just no holds barred, just, you about it it's on you to protect your signs to make it sufficiently impenetrable that no one can figure it out because i could imagine that version of baseball where it's like hey yeah do your worst you know bring your cameras and your telescopes out there we

will just encrypt our signs so well that you can't steal them and we'll change them every game and we'll spend some time memorizing the unique signs for this day's game or whatever and that'll be that i could imagine that being i could definitely imagine that but i don't think it's a better version of baseball i think one of the reasons that we have the um the rules against against sort of like you say not no, no code is impenetrable. But the reason that we don't demand teams have extremely complicated signs is twofold. One is we don't want to have them take a lot of time on these things. It makes the game go faster if you don't have to worry about three levels of deception for every pitch. And the more complicated the signs, the more likely

someone's going to get hurt and that someone is the catcher or the umpire, because if you cross up your catcher, then someone's getting a fastball to the face. And we generally don't want that going either. I mean, it is, it is sort of, it is unavoidable that this communication is taking place publicly. And the only way to really, to defend that communication would either be to have a mound visit every pitch and discuss this with your, uh, your mouth behind a glove or else to, um, you know, to, to get really complicated with it, way too complicated, more complicated than anyone probably wants to get. And then wouldn't necessarily be safe.

And I think that especially now, while that might have been, that would have, you could have done that, I think, up to televised games, probably a lot more recently than that. You probably could have gotten away with fairly simple signs for much of baseball history. But now, just given how good cameras are and how fast communication is, I think that it would be very difficult to create. I mean, it would be, it would be tough to create any, any set of signs that is truly impenetrable to, you know, four Ivy league grads on the fourth floor of the stadium with, um, like a, uh, extremely fast computer and expertise in this area. And I mean, anything you devise halfway through the inning,

isn't it going to be cracked? I mean, there's only four pitches. Yeah, right. I guess so. Remember there was that report like a few years ago about some undisclosed team had a supercomputer, a crazy supercomputer. And everyone was wondering,

what do they need a supercomputer for are they doing something in game are they analyzing in game i don't know i wonder whether that has anything to do with breaking science just like feeding in video or something and here crack the code supercomputer although cray the company in 2015 confirmed that the team was not the astros so So I don't know. Do you remember when we were doing the Stompers and we had introduced a center field camera to the, what was that league called?

The Pacific Association? Because we were charting pitches. And so one day I was looking at them and I thought, oh, I could steal every team's signs with runners on second. And so I spent like an hour and I got all their signs, which it would usually be like, I forget. It would be like, I think it was count plus one would be very common. So however many strikes there were plus one is what sign you were doing. And so like if it was a one, two count with a runner on second, then it would be the third sign you put down.

And then one pitch earlier, it would have been the second sign you put down. And everybody was pretty simplistic, but they did have this one trick to make it so that you couldn't steal the signs when you were on second base. And so I spent an hour and like watched the video and realized very quickly what every team's sign was. And we didn't know if that was unethical because everybody knew we had the camera out there. It's not unusual to have cameras in baseball, generally speaking. We were not relaying signs right away. We were simply using information from one game to give our base runners

a guide to what they could pick up quickly once they got to second base if they wanted to relay them. And so I had no idea what the ethics of that were. And so then I took it to the team and said, do you guys want this? And they said, no, that's Bush. They all got very mad at the Bush behavior. So I said, all right, cool. And then I put that piece of paper away. Pacific Association is Bush, though.

Yeah, it's okay. In the Bushes. Yeah. it's okay. In the bushes. Yeah. Scott Boris on Nick Castellanos. Old St. Nick delivers once a year. Young St. Nick delivers all season. Oh, my goodness. Is this improv, do you think? Does he come up with these things off the top of his head?

He's just rolling and the cameras are rolling and the mic's in front of his face and he just spontaneously generates these things off the top of his head? He's just rolling and the cameras are rolling and the mic's in front of his face and he just spontaneously generates these things? Or does he really work on this? Does he sit down and say, here's the analogy I'm going with this year. Here's the line I'm going to use on this player. And he writes it down and he practices it in front of the mirror. Maybe he delegates to Boris Corp and says, hey, give me 20 analogies about this year's free agent market and I'll pick the best one. How does this work?

I'd love to know. I don't know. But Nick Castellanos was an all-bat right fielder who was hitting 259, 314, 440 in late June last year. He was like he was replacement level until he got traded. Half the year, yeah. Oh, he was replacement level until he got traded. He delivered only half the year. Yeah. Oh, goodness. Old Saint Nick.

Do you have a stat blast? Did we do it, basically? We're doing that. Well, if you made one. I could give you one. Yeah, sure. Then I gotta go, though. Would you rather have a stat blast or would you rather do one email? Well, I don't want to waste your work and I kind of have a quick stuff myself oh i can use this i can use this anytime mine is i i would rather save it i'd like to refine it a little bit okay

well i'll i'll do a stat blast it's barely one sorted by something like ERA- or OBS+. And then they'll tease out some interesting tidbit, discuss it at length, and analyze it for us in amazing ways. Here's to Deist-a-plast. You are probably hearing this, everyone, on the day that the MVP awards will be announced. I don't really have an MVP take. I haven't had to have one, although I'm going to be on MLB Network, so I guess I should probably come up with one before I go on.

But one of the reasons why I don't really have an opinion on who should win these awards is that it's so incredibly close. Alex Bregman and Mike Trout are virtually tied in war, at least according to Fangraphs War, and Christian Jelic and Cody Bellinger virtually tied in NL War, the top two in their respective leagues. And I wanted to see if this is the closest year ever for the top two finishers in war. So just the smallest difference, the smallest combined difference between the first and second place war finishers in each league. And it's very close.

Like the combined difference between Trout and Bregman and Jelic and Bellinger is 0.17 war. That's the difference between both of them put together. So the only year that has had a smaller difference, at least in the modern era, is 1989, where there was a.14 war difference versus.17. And that year in 1989, it was Lonnie Smith was the NL war leader over Will Clark by about.06,

and in the AL, Ricky Henderson led Wade Boggs by about.08. And this year, Jelich over Bellinger is like.009, which is the smallest difference between a first and second place finisher in fan graphs war in any year except for the 1945 AL where Hal Neuhauser finished over Stuffy Sternweiss by 0.0038 war. Obviously once you get down to 0.0038 this is meaningless. Once you get down even to tenths of a win it's meaningless but to the best of our abilities to estimate the actual value of these players, there's essentially no, who was it? Ricky Henderson finished ninth in MVP voting. And Wade Boggs finished 21st, named probably on a single ballot in the eighth spot.

Yeah. And the number three finisher in MVP voting in the National League that year was Pedro Guerrero with 1.9. Ugh. War, 1.9. and number 11 in the al oh number 11 in the al just behind ricky henderson and way ahead of wade boggs was dave parker oh yeah who hit 264 308 432 741 OPS as a DH for a war of 0.3. Man, those 1980s BBWA votes are really something.

Yeah. So these days it does go more according to war usually, but this year war is essentially no help. I mean, it probably varies. I know that some of the other wars have bigger gaps between candidates, but there's just really nothing to get exercised about whatever the result is. So I have a question going back to the thing. So Marcus Stroman, since this article about the Astros came out, has been has been tweeting a lot about it. He's been retweeting things about it. He is clearly upset about this. He does not like batters cheating pitchers. I don't blame him.

And in fact, he tweeted, wow, wow, wow, this is bad, awful for the game of baseball, man. Sheesh. And Marcus Stroman's manager is now Carlos Beltran. Do you think that there's any, I guess, I can't speak to whether there's any intention on his part to, um, to be tweeting about his new manager, but do you think that there's any awkwardness there?

Or do you think that baseball players just don't really care about what each other tweet? And also a lot of, a fair number of baseball players have been tweeting about this. Does that convince you? Does the fact that they're tweeting about this convince you that this is less widespread than like, uh, well, less widespread than very widespread? Hmm. Well, I don't know. You've certainly had players in the past saying that PD use is terrible for the game and saying similar things about PD use. And there was a lot of PD use in those eras too, I think. So although maybe players are more outspoken about that now,

So although maybe players are more outspoken about that now, now that it's less common than they were at that time. So I'm sure that a lot of players are totally angry and up in arms about this and they should be. I understand why they are. So if some particular player does it, like is Stroman trying to send a message to Carl Spelj? Like, hey, you better not bring this into our clubhouse, Skip. Yeah, I kind of more mean like, okay, Marcus Stroman played for two major league teams last year. Can we say with confidence that this suggests that at most 28 teams were doing this because the Blue Jays and the Mets were not? That Marcus Stroman wouldn't be tweeting this if he knew that the teams he was on were doing it as well? Well, maybe your current team, I could buy that you wouldn't want to say something to expose your current team, but I don't know. It's not necessarily the case that every member of the team knows that it's going on. I mean, the Black Sox threw a World Series and not everyone on that team knew that they were doing it, although they certainly had strong suspicions and they were wondering what was going on. But no one knew about that conspiracy except for the players who were involved in it, and others had

suspicions and everything. But you could imagine something similar with sign stealing where it's restricted to certain people, or least like hitters know about it but the pitchers don't because they're kind of different clicks anyway and there's no point in telling the pitchers really so i could imagine that he just might not know about something happening right in his own clubhouse and i guess he might just be saying it because he personally objects to it even though his own team was doing it. I don't know. And also, again, he's a pitcher.

Maybe he feels more identity as a pitcher than he does as a Blue Jay or even as a Met. I mean, pitchers might find this to be really, really, really obnoxious. It is incredible that the Astros, I don't know, having watched, again, a dozen of these games, that the Astros, I don't know, having watched again, a dozen of these games, it is incredible that nobody figured this out in real time because it is so obvious now that there's this big systematic, I mean, it is a pattern. Like it's not obvious immediately what the pattern is, but I mean, these are weird, loud thumps that come in singles and pairs right before a bunch of pitches and if you're down there on the field you would think that over the course of a four game series it would be very hard not to go well who's the new yeah right you'd think that you'd go who's

the fan who's banging the trash can and you'd kind of like start looking for the fan and you'd gradually figure out it's not a fan that this is always coming at the same time right before a slider but uh again the astros made this so frustrating by not playing better at home i feel like in a normal universe you would imagine that the astros would have had really good home numbers and jeff would have written about. Jeff would have figured this out. This is exactly what Jeff, I think, would have figured out and written about. But even if you thought what's up with that thing, you'd quickly glance at their home road splits and go, well, it's not that. Yeah. By the way, I've seen also, like I'm reading a good Barry Svrluka article in Washington Post right now about how the Nationals went into the postseason prepared to counter this sort of thing, and they took steps to try to safeguard their signs. But he writes here, there is some circumstantial evidence that something was up with the Astros in 2016. Their

hitters struck out 23.4% of the time, the fourth highest rate in the game. In 2017, the year the athletic reports that the cameras installed, that rate dropped to 17.3%, the game in 2017, the year the athletic reports that the cameras installed, that rate dropped to 17.3%, the lowest in baseball, which, I mean, it was a different team. Like they clearly went out and they got players who struck out less. And I guess it's possible, like you can't rule out again, if they were cheating on the road as well as at home then it's possible that that could have been part of that strikeout rate decrease but I know they were doing some different things with training too and bat paths and swing paths and also just like the personnel changed and they got rid of a lot of big strikeout hitters and brought in more contact oriented hitters so I don't know that the team strikeout rate decrease and brought in more contact-oriented hitters. So I don't know that

the team strikeout rate decrease from one year to the next is all that compelling to me. But anyway, it's a good article about the Nationals trying to combat this and do some counter intelligence. And I'm sure that teams were doing this. We're aware of how teams have been switching up their signs against the Astros and everything over the past couple years so they didn't need this athletic report to sense that something was going on and so maybe everyone knew like you were just wondering why we didn't pick up on this maybe we didn't but maybe the players did and for whatever reason there's a code of silence where they just didn't want to

out the astros even though they were playing them yeah well they also didn't adjust i mean for the most part they let all the games i watched it was still just one finger down for the sign and um there wasn't uh there wasn't there there was no apparent subterfuge going on to to counteract it at the time uh-huh yeah okay all right jeff by the way just responded to a tweet someone said all i want for christmas is an effectively wild episode of jeff and ben getting together to talk about this saint nick quote and jeff says this one would be witty but for being undone by the faulty premise of sainthood so he objects to sainthood i guess more so than the analogy itself wow he likes this one huh yeah doesn't hate it it feels to me like a uh like a yankees home run call kind of a thing like it takes a long time to get to the pun yeah like i

what that started with i mean it takes so long that that when you were reading it, I thought, huh, I wonder why he's saying that Nick Castellanos only produces once a year. And then it's like a whole second clause, oh, and then I just wanted to groan. Yeah, there's still the question, the eternal question of who this is for, who is this serving to come up with these quotes. Like, clearly it's not persuading someone in a front office oh wow young saint nick delivers all year let's sign him yeah it's probably not even going to work on an owner but i guess it's maybe just to like it's to get it mentioned it's so that we will talk about this this weird thing that porus said and so then people will think about Nick Castellanos more and they'll, I don't know. I don't know. Why do Meg and I do so many bad puns? Who is that for? Well, you're writers. Boris is an agent. I don't know how it furthers his job. I mean,

I don't know. Maybe it hurts your job too, but people seem to like Meg's pun tweets. At least some people. do like the dj lemay who won yeah i know you do i love that one all right all right thought this was an email episode turns out it's an astro sign stealing episode but oh well all right we'll get to them later okay all right that will do it for today thank you for listening we should have mentioned that if we do get some sort of rf bluetooth system set up headsets or watches or whatever then the next question will be well as a team hacking the sign signaling system are they somehow intercepting the signals using technology in their ballpark maybe the astros are already on that other developments after we stopped recording

rosenthal and relic released a follow-up report about how three major league managers are connected to the Astros' sign-stealing, not just Hinch, but also Beltran and Cora. So as we were saying, Beltran sort of fit the description of the player that Ken and Evan reported was the instigator of this, and in this follow-up article, they write, Hinch was the Astros' manager in 2017, and sources said both Cora and Beltran played a key role in devising the sign-stealing system the team used that season. So it sounds like they may have been the initial culprits. And I saw Mets beat writer Tim Britton tweet an excerpt from a recent Rustin Dodd story on Beltran's time with Houston. This article came out just after the Mets hired Beltran.

just after the Mets hired Beltran. I'm quoting here, Bregman had spent the 2017 season watching Beltran leave his fingerprints all over the Astros' clubhouse, exhibiting professional habits, extolling the virtues of careful study, and offering mentorship to the club's young players. He had also watched Beltran retire

and return to the Yankees' organization as a special advisor to general manager Brian Cashman. Quote, I think Carlos Beltran helped out the Yankees this year a lot, Bregman said, like a lot a lot. The statement came accompanied by a wry smile and a lack of specifics. A follow-up inquiry was unsuccessful. He helps a lot behind the scenes, Bregman said, holding his expression. So that's pretty suggestive that Beltran may have been the ringleader here.

All the veteran acumen and clubhouse leadership he was credited with. Maybe it was sign-stealing. Maybe it was devising a sign-stealing system. Should also note that the Cy Young voting results came out after Sam and I recorded. And that was all Astros too, so Justin Verlander did beat Garrett Cole and win his second Cy Young award. It was very close. I'm semi-surprised. I kind of thought Cole had the edge, but not shocked. And of course, Jacob deGrom won handily in the NL. It's just strange where we're now one Bregman MVP award win away from the Astros sweeping the major awards

and winning the MVP Cy Young and Rookie of the Year. they'd be the first team ever to do that. So even as we're discussing the Astros cheating and the issues with their culture, we're sort of celebrating their great individual performances. Kind of uncomfortable, kind of awkward timing. One more thing I wanted to mention on our last episode, I talked about Neil Payne's article about how often the best team in baseball does not win the World Series. And we talked a bit about how it takes much longer in the playoffs to have a series that's reflective of the two teams' relative talents. Well, I was listening to Hot Takedown, the 538 sports podcast on which Payne appears, and he cited a stat that I thought was interesting in the same vein. he cited a stat that I thought was interesting in the same vein. So the point at which a team's performance half reflects luck and half reflects its talent, it takes only 12 games to get to that

point in the NBA, 11 games to get to that point in the NFL, and 67 games to get to that point in MLB. So you need 67 games before you can say that a team's record is half skill and half luck. And that's, I think, the issue with saying that MLB season should be shorter, which I'm sympathetic to because the season is so long and there are so many games. But in baseball, you need a lot of games to actually reveal what the best teams are. Like the MLB season is only about twice as long as the NBA season, but it takes about five and a half times longer to provide the same indication of a team's true talent. So you really need a long season. The NBA season is too long, at least when it comes to

showing who the best teams are. And so the regular season is really devalued and taken a lot less seriously than the playoffs. But in baseball, you just need a really long regular season unless you want it to be largely governed by luck and random variation. You can support the podcast on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going. Maximiliano Burgess, Grant Morris, Nick Hatley, Mike Anderson, and Ryan Quans.

Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to effectively wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Sam and Meg coming via email at podcastfangfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Sorry we didn't get to those emails today, but Meg and I probably will next time. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, and we will be back to talk to you again very soon. A cheating situation A stealing invitation

To take what's not really ours To make it through the midnight hours It's a cheating situation Just a cheap imitation. Doing what we have to do when there's no love at home.