Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1486: MLB Bangs the Gavel

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s report about the findings of the league’s investigation into the Astros’ sign-stealing activities and the firings of Jeff Luhnow and A.J. Hinch, touching on the appropriateness of the punishments, the new details revealed in the report, where the report fell short, why players weren’t suspended, […]

Oh, every night and every day A little piece of you is falling away But lift your fires, the rust is wailing Build your muscles as your body decays, yeah Throw your line and play the game Let the anesthetic cover it all Till one day they call your name. You know it's time for the hammer to fall.

Hello and welcome to episode 1486 of Effectively Wild, a Fangraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Maeve Rowley of Fangraphs, and I am joined very early to talk about the Astros, as always, by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. I guess we don't always talk about the Astros, as always, by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. I guess we don't always talk about the Astros, but I'm very often joined by you. Yeah, and it sort of seems like we always talk about the Astros. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? We've been waiting to have this talk about the Astros for a while. So the last 24 hours or so have been a whirlwind. Monday started out slow.

It seemed like any other normal day, and Sam and I actually recorded a non-time-sensitive episode, which you will hear at some point in the near future. And there I was just writing about The Bachelor, not seeing any big baseball news. And all of a sudden, the temporary banhammer dropped and Rob Manfred's report was released. And the findings that we've been awaiting for the past two months are here. So we're going to dissect and discuss them. Yes, we are. So I guess I should go over the big picture penalties here.

Although I would think that everyone knows. I won't assume that everyone knows because I actually had a friend who doesn't follow sports that closely and was texting me to tell me that he thought the Astros were stealing physical signs and hiding them somewhere which uh would have been fun wait what did he think like i don't know definitely didn't know enough to have an informed opinion but uh he thought the signs were actual literal signs in the world and that they had stolen them. And I guess he thought like maybe they flashed the signs. Like in college football? Yeah, maybe. I don't know that he knows anything about college football either. But I guess if I knew nothing about sports and I heard that some team was stealing signs,

I don't know, it would be a reasonable interpretation, maybe. The Astros are stealing signs they have taken the left field sign and the right field sign every fan is now deeply confused they don't know where to go they can't find the taco stands can't find the exits they can't even get into the ballpark it's a safety hazard and also a tremendous inconvenience. Yeah, sounds dangerous. Anyway, not that sort of science. We all know what sort of science they stole. So the punishments here are, well, on the one hand,

they are harsh and shocking, I guess, and on the other hand, not shocking at all because, A, we've been kind of conditioned to expect this. All of this would have been mind-blowing in October, obviously, but because of the athletics reporting and because of the subsequent reporting that sort of primed us for a stiff penalty, this is, I think, more or less in line with what we were expecting. And when people asked us what would the punishments be, we'd say, well, there will be fines and draft pick penalties

and maybe suspensions of managers or front office people. And that's pretty much what happened. But still, it is one thing to project that that will happen and to read that it will happen and then another for it to actually happen and for it to be in black and white. So Jeff Luno, Astro's GM, and A.J. Hinch, Astro's manager, were suspended effective immediately through the end of the 2020 World Series. They were then subsequently, almost immediately, fired by Astro's owner, Jim Crane, which to me was maybe the most surprising thing that happened, that that happened and happened

so quickly. And then the other penalties, $5 million fine to the Astros, which is the maximum allowable amount, and two draft pick penalties, I guess four draft pick penalties. And this was pretty significant. They forfeit their next two first round and second round picks. That really sort of lops the head off of a draft of their next two drafts. So that's not nothing And there will be more Punishments pending Alex Cora former Astros bench coach and current

Red Sox manager is deeply Implicated in this report but He has not been disciplined yet Because there's still a Red Sox sign Stealing investigation in progress And when that wraps up Presumably Alex Cora's suspension will be even stiffer than AJ Hinch's and Jeff Luno's will, and presumably he will be fired just as

quickly. But we shall see what the details are there. Yeah, just to add a little bit of context to the draft pick. So I thought the way that they, you know, I shouldn't be surprised by cleverness, I suppose. But, you know, they make a point of clarifying that if for whatever reason the team doesn't have a, these are draft picks in the regular first and second round, so they are not supplemental picks or compensatory picks at all. free agent who comes with a qualifying offer and lose picks as one way that they might, this penalty will fall to the next draft in which they actually have a regular first rounder and second rounder. So it is both, you know, they are keen to make sure that they suffer the full consequence of this. It is also potentially a place where the Astros might spread out some of the pain over years. I think we'll talk about that a little bit. But in 2019, when Craig Edwards did some estimation around the present day dollar value of the top 70 picks,

based on where the Astros have sort of picked lately, this pick, this set of picks, at least in the 2020 draft, would be worth probably about $28 million in future value. Obviously, they are not paying that as a fine. But in terms of the magnitude of the loss, at least for just one year, that's sort of the neighborhood that we're looking at in terms of the impact to their organization on the draft pick side. So I saw some analysis floating around just looking at the slot value of those picks. And obviously there is value to be had there. But when we think about the actual present day dollar valuation, we're thinking about numbers much larger than the actual slot value there. Right. Yeah, good point. And then I should also note that Astra's former assistant GM, Brendan Taubman, who had been fired already, of course, was also suspended through the end of the 2020 World Series.

Not for sign stealing, but just for his conduct during last year's playoffs, which we have, of course, discussed at length. So I think one of the takeaways from this for me, first of all, is just that I think none of this would have happened if not for, A, the reporting of Evan Drellick and Ken Rosenthal, which has been sterling, and also Mike Fiers coming forward. And, you know, I guess you could say that he could have come forward when it was still happening. And I don't know how noble his motivations were, but he did come forward and no other

player has even now. And it was really that, I think, that launched this whole thing. That's what made MLB take this seriously, because Jeff Passan had reported in 2018 that anonymous major leaguers had told him that the Astros were banging on trash cans to relay signs and nothing happened. And then there was no investigation, at least. And I think MLB was not eager to stir this up into a scandal because they knew that things were happening. Obviously, they knew in September 2017 about what the Red Sox were doing at that time. And they issued a warning to all these teams. And there were rumors swirling subsequently.

And MLB made the regulations stricter after that, which seemed to suggest that they had heard that things were still going on. So they knew, I think they had tips, they had some inkling that this was happening, but they were not going to launch a full-scale investigation unless it became a public scandal, unless a major league player came forward and put his name and said, yes, this was happening on my team. And it was reported by someone in the public and became a sensation. So I think that's really what prompted this whole thing. I think even when they launched the Asterisk investigation, Rob Manfred said that he had no reason to believe that this extended beyond one team, which was very hard to believe

at the time. And then the subsequent Red Sox investigation, that was also not acknowledged by MLB until Ken and Evan reported that publicly too. So a lot of this goes on and we've talked about how sign stealing has happened with whatever technology is available at the time going back to the beginning of baseball, but the league is always slow to acknowledge it and do anything about it. And I think that was the case here too. So it's nice that they came down hard on this and they're taking it seriously now, but I think they would have been happy to not sweep it under the rug, but let it stay under the rug if that's where it was. So

the reporting and the testimony from fires were really crucial here yeah i think it is a testament to the good work that ken and evan did and how carefully they went about the reporting that they had and sort of the the bar that they felt seemed to feel i haven't talked to them about it but they seemed to feel they needed to clear to to bring this forward and yeah i'm feeling pretty good about my take that Fiers' no-hitter will not be the thing about him that we remember from the 2019 season. Yeah, I think that his motivation is probably complex, a blend of things that we find very admirable and things that might be construed or thought of as a bit more petty. But I totally agree.

I don't think that it catches in quite the same way. I don't think that the subsequent analysis that has gone on of either the effect that it might have had on the quality of hitting from the Astros hitters, the sound analysis that Rob did, the clips with the banging. I don't think that any of that carries quite the same weight or sings in quite the same way if you don't have a player who was witness to it coming forward and really giving public voice to what we had long suspected but couldn't quite prove. So yeah, I think this was good work. They did good work. prove. So yeah, I think this was good work. They did good work.

And the MLB report, which was based on interviews with 68 people, including 23 past or present Astros players, it basically backed up everything that Ken and Evan reported about the sign stealing scheme, like all the details matched, although it did offer some additional detail we can discuss. So I guess the big questions I had coming into the report, given what we knew already, what was the role of the front office? What was the role of A.J. Hinch? Did the sign stealing extend beyond the trash can banging? Ben, the banging scheme, the banging scheme. We're going to spend like five minutes talking about that phrase. We're not going to do it now. But you mean the banging scheme, Ben?

Banging scheme is fine with me. That's appropriate terminology. It was just like it was Monday. I was drinking coffee. It was slow, as you said. I was like, this is something of a day. And then this little gift gift this little gift came into our lives the banging scheme yeah so there are details on all of these things and i would say

that there's no smoking gun linking the astros front office to this in sort of a directorial way, in an orchestrating way. Luno was suspended, I don't know, maybe for multiple things because the report is quite critical of his actions and the front office's actions in the wake of the Taubman scandal and also just the front office culture as a whole. So I think he's kind of being punished for multiple things. But in terms of sign stealing, he is basically found to have been negligent. He reportedly did not forward along MLB's memo saying in September 2017 that we're not going to tolerate this anymore, that everyone has to stop all of this stuff. He evidently didn't do anything, didn't take any steps to ensure that that memo was followed.

And whether he knew or not what was happening, it doesn't establish that he knew about the banging scheme. It does suggest that he was maybe copied on some emails or something that mentioned the subsequent scheme, the additional scheme, which is sort of what the Red Sox, it seems, were doing, and perhaps other teams, although we don't know that now, using the video room monitor to steal signs and then relay them manually to the dugout and then kind of decode them and then put that information in the hands of the players who could then have them on second base. And when a runner was on second, they could use that information to

decode signs. So the report specifies that the Astros were doing that also. And so it suggests that Luno had some knowledge of that, although his subsequent statement that he released denies that he knew any rules were being broken and that he's not a cheater, etc. He's not a crook. We'll get to that. Yeah, we can get to that. But there's no real concrete link that says this was conceived and directed from on high. And that's one of the things that we were wondering if that would happen. Doesn't mean that it wasn't the case, but there is no cooperation of the idea that that was the case. And then A.J. Hinch, I think, comes out of this looking quite poor. I've seen

distinctions between Hinch and Cora, and certainly there are distinctions to be drawn there. Hinch, according to this report, was against the sign stealing, didn't conceive of the sign stealing, disapproved of the sign stealing, and yet did nothing at all seemingly to stop it. Except, bizarrely, like the most bizarre detail in this report is that Hinch on multiple occasions sabotaged the video room monitor. Yeah, broke them. He broke the monitors. Broke the monitor in this strange attempt to stop that form of sign stealing and yet did not even say to anyone,

apparently, that he disapproved of this. And there are players in the report who say anonymously that if Hinch had told them to stop even once they would have done it right away who knows if that's the case I don't know that I believe that necessarily but if Hinch had been strongly and vocally opposed to this I mean he's the manager he's kind of the the force in the clubhouse and I think that would have stopped it. It certainly could have stopped it. And for him to take the step of breaking equipment to put a stop to the less elaborate

and one would think effective method of science doing the answers we're doing and yet not to say anything about it. I don't know what that says about clubhouse culture, but it's sort of fascinating. That was the line that made me do a double take. Yeah, he is portrayed throughout both Manfred's report and I think portrays himself in his subsequent public statement as it was sort of markedly more contrite about what happened, certainly than Lunau seems to be. And so I think that he has gotten some credit for that i you know it is a fairly low bar to clear to not to not throw the your underlings sort of under the bus when you're apologizing for this sort of thing i i do think that it's sort of the monitor breaking is such

an interesting little wrinkle to this because on the one hand he could have just said as you said as manfred says in his report that he could have just said hey knock it off we're not doing this like this is in violation of the rules and he could have managed right yes right there right there in the title on the other hand i think that perhaps the the astros players need a bit of a lesson in the difference between, say, showing and telling, and that both things communicate. Like, if I were at work, and David Appelman broke my computer, which he would never do, because that seems drastic and out of- Go against his interests. Exactly, and out of character. But let's say he came up and i just have this

vision in my head it does not specify in the report than the i don't think anyway unless i'm forgetting this detail uh the the means by which he broke the monitors no i think uh so i just have this vision of him with a baseball bat we just like mashing them just going to town on the monitors going bat bat bat anyway so if i saw my boss do that to a piece of equipment i would say hey boss what's up what do you think what you thinking about boss what's what's rolling through that noggin i probably wouldn't say it quite like that because I'm not like from the 1950s. But I would say this probably merits a conversation with my supervisor because he's clearly frustrated by something. I would take that as a clear sign, except that it doesn't say that anyone saw him damage the monitor. So I'm going to guess that he just snuck in under cover of darkness.

Was he sabotaging them with no one around? I assume so because it says that he didn't tell anyone to stop. And I mean, if he had broken the equipment, I would interpret that as telling them to stop in a way. So I would assume that no one knew that he was the one who broke these things. And I mean, it really just it seems sort of spineless. Like, I mean, it's nice that he is remorseful, I guess, that he felt bad about it. But on the other hand, like I would consider him based on what we know now to be more directly responsible for this than even Luno was. Because he's in the dugout.

He's in the clubhouse. Like he was hearing the banging every day so and it's his job really to police the clubhouse like the gm hires the manager hires the players but to a certain extent like that's his fiefdom there he's the one who is supposed to lay down the law and for him to say nothing just tacitly i mean that kind of condones what was going on right so yeah the fact that he was like riddled with guilt about this doesn't really do anything for me and and he did like dissemble about this publicly because he was asked about it by the media and he cast doubt on the idea that this was going on. I mean, granted, like part of

the manager's job is to protect the players and I wouldn't necessarily advocate that he just come out in the press and throw them all under the bus. I would say that he should handle that privately, but he didn't handle it privately at all. So, I mean, I don't know. To me, the fact that he felt bad about it, it's like, well, I already had the impression that Luno had no conscience, really. So if Hinch did and still didn't do anything, despite being very, very capable of doing do think that there is something to, you know, there is a confirmed culpability on Hinge's part that there, I will say it strains credulity to my mind that Lunau was not aware of any of this in a more direct way. I know that they were not able to find documentary or testimonial evidence that he knew about some parts of this.

He didn't know about the banging scheme it's never gonna get old i will be delighted for the rest of my career just the rest of my career anyhow so i think that there is you know there there might be this distinction to be made about sort of confirmed culpability versus assumed culpability or ought to have known or what have you the contrition is nice because it's good to know that people aren't like, I don't know, what's the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath? Anyhow, that's not the purview of this podcast. But I agree. I think that if there is one thing from this that we can be heartened by, and I think we'll talk a little

bit more about sort of how satisfactory we find the punishment, but it is that baseball is making clear that you just, as you do if you're running an organization of any stripe, you have managerial responsibility to know. You have a responsibility to know what is going on in your organization and to create a culture in which people are accountable. And so how much they knew didn't really end up mattering for Lu now, I think in a way that is good and feeling bad about your underlings misbehaving wasn't sufficient to inoculate, hinge from responsibility. And I think that both of those things are good precedents to set because baseball organizations are so sprawling and you do have people like literally all over the country,

right? Not everyone is even physically proximate to you. And it is the sort of thing that, you know, I would imagine keeps folks who are running tight organizations up at night, right? That someone somewhere is doing something that's going gonna tank all of your hard work because they're unscrupulous. But like it should keep you up at night. That should be a thing you feel nervous about because the stakes are so high and the technology makes bad behavior

both easy and really tempting. And so this is the line we have to draw if we're going to have any semblance of fairness in the way that organizations conduct themselves. This is what we have to require. And sometimes it's going to catch people who do, I think, I don't have any reason to doubt how sincere A.J. Hinch's remorse is know, from people I know who have covered the organization, I think that he has been, he has conducted himself, say, with respect to the press in a way that it has been better than other parts of the org.

Again, like low bars to clear. So I think that he is generally well-liked, but that isn't enough to and shouldn't be enough to sort of give you immunity from responsibility either. So I think that part of it is heartening. Like I can see a situation, you know, it would be one thing if he had sort of gotten down the road with this hench hat and like learned that this was happening and was like oh no and then had taken like real concrete steps internally to combat the behavior but then say perhaps hadn't reported it then we're in sort of an area where it's like well did did this work exactly the way that it was supposed to

should he still said something that didn't happen he's just like coming into minute made in the dead of night and taking out his frustration and guilt on some monitor. Like I still think it happens with a bat, even if it's in secret. Yeah, how else would you break it, I guess. Was there a memo that went around being like, hey, we need to find the monitor bandit. Like this guy's out of control, man.

Who's doing this? And AJ's sitting there like, I i don't know it's really bad i guess they thought it was some hitter who was upset because he struck out or something yeah probably went back and took it out on the video monitor yeah is there is there a is there a memo that's like hey guys i know that like you know an o for 35 is really frustrating but you gotta quit it with breaking these monitors we these monitors. We're a cost-obsessed organization, lest we forget. Yeah. Yeah. To me, it's like, what does that say about clubhouse dynamics and leaderships and all that? Because at that time, A.J. Hinch was not yet a World Series winning manager when this started. He was not a manager who had finished high in manager of the year voting.

He was fired from his first managerial job after two years. The Astros missed the playoffs in 2016. So I guess when this began, he wasn't the A.J. Hinch we think of now in terms of prior to this scandal was revered as one of the best managers in baseball. And so perhaps he didn't feel like he had the standing. He didn't have the confidence to say something. Like maybe he thought that the players would turn on him. He'd lose the clubhouse if he curtailed their activities, if he scolded them, if he was like, you know, Mr. Goody Two-Shoes and said, no, we're not stealing signs, then maybe he would lose the respect of the that. I wonder if that was what he was thinking or that maybe because of the asterisk culture, he thought that this was something that was front office directed or that the front office knew and that they would be upset with him for trying to

intervene. Again, doesn't excuse his inaction. I'm just trying to think about what could have been going through his head that he would physically damage the monitors and yet say nothing. And I would guess that it was that, that he just felt it was like some Lord of the Flies situation or something, and he just couldn't control it, which I would think that he could have. But I guess at that time, maybe he was not respected enough or something to feel secure in being able to say something and keep his job and you know he's a young manager he was not as young as he had been the first time around but he was still in his early 40s like he was you know basically carlos beltran's age at that point and so maybe he still felt like attached to the players in some way or not different enough from the players to

really discipline them like some some old square who's coming in and laying down the law so i don't know i wonder if that was what was going through his head at the time yeah i don't have a hard time believing that based on i don't have a hard time believing that Hinch would both assume that this was front office directed and that based on sort of reporting that we've heard over the years of his relationship with Lu now that there would be moments where he that relationship seemed at times complicated and sometimes strained and so that the sort of channel of communication might not be clear and as productive as it ought to be to clarify is this an organizational policy is this like a thing that we're all doing but you know he got the same memos that lu now did about the permissibility of this behavior and you, it is the job of the manager to create a culture that is in compliance with those rules, regardless of sort of the messaging that there may be getting from baseball ops. I know that they're, you know, based on reporting, we've heard that there have been

places where he has felt comfortable pushing back on some of the directives that Lunau, you know, sent down. And so I just find it hard to believe that there would be places where he could have, you know, engaged in some push and pull. But in this place where there is a, you know, in bold letters, don't do this, it will be very bad for your org memo from the commissioner's office office that and then subsequent to that from tory that he he wouldn't sort of muster the leadership to say we're done with that so so yeah yeah and cora comes off as like johnny apple sign here in this report like he is he is intimately involved with the planning he presumably ported this over to the red sox although of course they were doing their apple watch thing before he got there but he is deeply involved with conceiving

both of these systems and just the participation of a coach a bench coach a a uniformed person who is not a player i think that really just sort of like puts the seal of approval on this for players and kind of, you know, made it okay or made it seem like the team approved of this behavior. Because if you're a player and you see the bench coach not only knowing about it, but like suggesting it or figuring out how to do it better, then I would think that, you know, you'd be worried about other teams finding out about it, but you're no longer worried about your own team finding out about it. And so I think the role he played was pretty important, and we'll find out about what he may have done with the Red Sox,

but the punishment will be pretty harsh. And I don't know if it'll be a lifetime thing or just a multiple year thing I think he's going to be fired and unemployable for a while regardless but yeah it's such a it's a swift fall for him to go from 2017 winning a world series as a bench coach 2018 winning world series as a rookie manager with one of the most successful teams of all time and then 2019 missed the playoffs and now get implicated in this science dealing in a very big way and and presumably lose your job and and get a suspension that's uh it's quite a fall but it's it's interesting because like he was really i mean so much was written about the impact he had on the red sox when he went over there and

what a great leader he was and so inspiring and all of that. And all of that may be true, but I guess one of the ways that his ability to lead people manifested itself was his ability to lead them into science dealing. So that can be a good thing or a bad thing. Well, Ben, you know the old adage, you can't pull off a bang scheme without some charisma. Right, exactly. Never will get tired of it. We'll always take joy. It brings me joy. Sparks joy.

The only player, the only former player actually named in this report is Carlos Beltran, who is named as having been among a group of players that sort of sat around a couple months into the 2017 season and discussed how they could steal signs better and I assume he was only named because he had already been named in the athletic reports there's no additional detail in here he was not disciplined by MLB because he was a player at the time but of course he is now a recently hired manager with the Mets and they have not disciplined him yet I don't know what the odds are of them doing that but obviously he will be facing a lot of questions about this as he should I mean bad PR nothing new for a Mets manager or

Mets personnel sort of makes him fit right in I guess guess. But it's kind of concerning, I guess, given that he was one of the players involved in making this happen, that he is now the person leading your organization in a sense. And he also denied any knowledge of this when the initial report surfaced a couple months ago. And again, that seemed far-fetched at the time but now seems even further fetched so i don't know whether he will come out and acknowledge this or whether he will continue to say he didn't do it and what impact that will have but that will linger over met spring training presumably and you know no discipline for players in this report even though i don't know if it's clear that they thought what they were doing was morally wrong, but they certainly knew that it was against the rules and were wary of being detected and were stressing about other teams finding out about this.

And like after the Danny Farquhar incident, they ran and removed the monitor just in case they got inspected or spot checked or something so like clearly they knew what they were doing and they were the ones benefiting from it and other than Cora it seems like the ones actually coming up with this whole thing and so it probably seems strange to a lot of people that they got off scot-free here that there's no punishment for players the thing is though that it just it would have been really complex to try to punish players because i mean a they're scattered across different teams now so do you punish their current employer for something they did for a previous employer b it's hard maybe to assess blame to individual players and know who did what, when, and were they actually listening to the banging or not, and were they relaying the banging, and then C, like, I guess Manfred may have decided, well, we need to know what was happening here, and our best source is going to be players, so we have to assure them that they will be protected, that they'll be anonymous and won't be punished if they come clean.

And D, of course, if you discipline players, they have protections from the CPA and the Players Association and they can appeal and they can minimize that discipline and it could drag on for months. And so MLB probably did not want to even attempt that and keep this story constantly in the news. So I think for all those reasons, I understand why players were not punished. But I also understand why some people might look at this and think, really? No, no players get punished at all for doing this other than, I guess, in the court of public opinion, because all the players on that team will be forever associated with that team yeah i am sympathetic to the like the actual uh legitimate logistical challenge of like you know what is like you're gonna hold i guess that the hitters are really the guys we're worried about here but like are you gonna hold guys responsible for knowing man the Mets have they doubled up right didn't Jake Marznik end

up on the Mets this offseason yeah that's true too yeah did a little did a little unintentional doubling up there so I think that there is a an actual sort of difficulty in metting that stuff out because you are going to have players who have since moved on to other teams some of which are going to play the astros you don't want to suspend those players because you end up inadvertently advantaging the team or they did the bad thing let's have jd davis too yeah oh yeah huh oh man getting back together man you're so Metsy. You're such Metsy Mets. So I think that there is that challenge. I would imagine that the desire to have a transparent and honest interview process probably, which is not a part of this that I think got discussed all that much,

but I would imagine was a not insignificant part of their motivation because otherwise you're going to have people sort of hedging in order to protect themselves or protect teammates who they liked. But I think mostly, despite the fact that we have a pending Red Sox investigation, and I still think that the idea that this was limited to these two teams is probably going to be proved false. I think the league is very keen to move on. And so the idea of appeals and a drawn-out protracted process, because this would be a place where I would imagine players would not have a strong incentive to settle

because they did have their bench coach helping them to orchestrate their bang scheme the bang scheme and so this might be a place where the union says now we're gonna we're gonna push back so i think that it is it is understandable that they would be keen to move on and and look at this and just say it's just a big it's just a big mess because you want the you know i think it probably also reveals something about the league's understanding of what this stuff what punishment in this situation ought to accomplish right is it meant to deter is it meant to be punitive just for the sake of that so i think that they are seemingly quite keen to deter future behavior

like this. And that if what they need to hand down punishments to do that is, you know, they don't tell us who they talked to, but Alex Bregman telling them the truth in an interview about what he knew and when that they're going to do that and sort of guarantee that he doesn't face repercussions. I'm picking a guy. I'm just picking a guy who, of all the guys, went from having a 114 WRC plus to a 123 WRC plus. One of the guys. Well, I think another interesting thing is the detail that we got about when this stopped, supposedly, or what else was happening so we found out that this video replay room stuff was happening which presumably was also happening on the road it doesn't really specify there but one would think but there's no indication in the report that they

were doing something akin to the banging on the road that they had a camera that they were relaying signs in real time again doesn't conclusively mean that they weren't but there's no corroboration of that here because there was a whole lot of speculation about you know wearing bandages that buzzed or whatever or having cameras you know people would believe anything about the esters as we've discussed and so there's nothing here that suggests that they were using something equally sophisticated on the road in 2017 but it does confirm that they were using this throughout the 2017 season and postseason yes including after the teams were all warned to knock this off and that the replay room strategy continued for some portion of the 2018

regular season. And one of the interesting things in here is that Manfred cites multiple anonymous players saying that the Astros stopped in 2018 because they felt like it just wasn't effective, and that multiple players told him that they felt that it actually made them worse that it was a distraction and obviously consider the source here these are astros players saying this and so they would have incentive to minimize this and rationalize it and you know mark mcguire said he took steroids but it didn't help him hit homers i mean this is the kind of thing that we hear. On the other hand, I think the statistical record is mixed enough that it's hard to say what the effect was. And Man going to get caught just allegedly because they thought it didn't work or it didn't work as well as they wanted it to. And that was interesting to me both for what it revealed about, I guess, the Astros' motivations and how they felt about this whole thing and also about the effectiveness of it.

And then there's no evidence in here that this continued into 2019. By then, MLB did have monitors, human monitors in the video room and were sort of regulating this more closely. So maybe it stopped. Maybe this is not quite an ongoing ongoing concern at least to the degree that it was you know or i suppose it's possible that there was some other double super secret method that still hasn't come out but uh at least these ways that they were cheating it doesn't seem like they continued to cheat that way in this most recent season yeah Yeah, I think you start a banging scheme, you want to see it through. You want to see your banging scheme through to fruition.

I think that there is, I actually don't have a hard time believing that at some point very good hitters would just say, is this stuff and nonsense all worth it? I don't have a hard time believing that, but I do have a hard time believing that but i do have a hard time believing that there wasn't one guy on there who in a sea of hyper competitive dudes was like i want every edge i can get because i just you know i'm in an offer and that feels yucky i think that it does

show that like the degree of observation that is likely needed to hem in bad behavior is just probably a lot more than we are comfortable with or might be practically feasible. to watch that you might have a super secret method of doing your sign stealing counteracted by AJ Hinch's super secret monitor banging. So many bang schemes, a lot of different bang schemes. But like what happens when the monitor has to go to the bathroom? Right, yeah. Well, I hold it for three hours, I guess. Wait for an innings break. Bring a cup.

Oh, gosh. So like the, yeah. Anyway, I don't know what else I have to say about that other than I think that the degree of observation that you would have to have for the league to successfully stamp out that behavior just by its very presence is probably on some level impractical. And so you're going to need to have organizational culture do some heavy lifting to make people behave ethically. But yeah, the revelation that it continued into the postseason, because we had sort of

gotten mixed reports on that in the athletics reporting, right? They had unconfirmed sources, or they had some sources saying they thought it went on, but they weren't sure. And now it feels very asterisk-y. Yeah. Because we just know that it was going on during the World Series and that they had a method that didn't require a bang scheme. They had a non-bang scheme method at their disposal. Didn't need any banging. Yep.

And we've talked about, I guess, how much of a penalty it is to sort of have your title tainted. Of course, Jim Crane insisted that the title was not tainted, but the title was tainted in everyone else's eyes. And I still don't think you can vacate a title. I would not have approved of that. I mean, you'd have to vacate two titles now and who knows how many more. So I think the fact that we will all associate this very closely with that team and these players, I think that's a pretty big penalty. I mean, I don't know. Like if I were an Astros fan, I had a couple Astros fans tweet at me and say basically that like they feel terrible about all this. And yes, they presumably enjoyed that title very much at the time. And you can't really retroactively take away joy that fans got from that team then. But if it really is soured and curdled after the fact, then but if it really is soured and curdled after the fact because a you're getting taunted by every other fan base which you know they should maybe uh think twice about that because who knows which which team will be implicated in the future but this is what i'm saying let let ye who does not have a replay room cast the first stone yes right but you know the Astras are an object of scorn, an object of derision, and that will continue to be the case. Like, there won't be a literal asterisk, and I don't think there should be, but everyone is free to apply one in, I think. If I were a fan of that team, I'm pretty sure that would affect my connection to that team

and certainly my enjoyment of the memories of that team and that title and those players. So that's not nothing. But it is interesting just mentioning Crane that this report seems to go out of its way to absolve him. I want to talk about this. Paragraph one great guy knew nothing not not guilty at all right and uh you know i mean look it obviously owners delegate things to their baseball operations people and they aren't aware of all the minutiae and so it's plausible i suppose that jim crane did not know about the banging scheme but if you are going to criticize astro's culture then it seems like jim crane is probably about as responsible for that as jeff luno he hired jeff luno and oversaw jeff luno so it's you know kind

of inconsistent to say aststerisk culture is toxic and we're suspending Luneau and Hinch, but Jim Crane, what a great guy. Yeah. So this, this is the part of the report that, and the approach that I have the greatest issue with, and there is both a specific sort of concrete part of it that I find to be logically inconsistent. And then there's the broader issue of, so let's take the broader one first, which you've just alluded to, right? If Lunau is responsible regardless of how much knowledge he had, then Jim Crane ought to be also because it's his organization. He's reaping the benefits in much the same way that we can't take away the joy that fans felt in that moment ain't ain't nobody

taking back the gate receipts right they have a five million dollar fine because that's the max allowable under mlb's constitution they made significantly more than that after this post season run after their world series championship but so there's the part of it that is if we're going to talk about leaders being responsible for the culture of their organization and the behavior of the people who work for them then we all have to look at jim crane and be like but what about that guy and the answer is that he's one 30th of rob manfred's boss and so that probably exactly you know factored into this so there's that part then there is the more concrete inconsistency in this,

which is that, and this is where I think that baseball gets into a little bit of trouble by, I think you have to talk about the culture of the organization to account for this kind of leadership failure. But I think that bringing Taubman's outburst after the ALCS into this in such specific detail gets you into a bit of trouble because the report specifically talks about, you know, they talk about how this is about baseball ops. This is just about baseball ops and the culture of baseball ops. But the organization's response to that culture wasn't confined to baseball operations, right? Indeed, the public response that they had, the media response that they had was directed by PR and marketing people who fall under Jim Crane's part of the

organization. If we're going to say there's the business side of the org and there's the baseball ops side of the org and those things interact with one another, but the real bad apples were sitting over here in baseball ops, the toxic part of the culture was confined there. Well, if you have a business side part that is reinforcing that culture publicly, the business side needs to be scrutinized, right? We need to interrogate how those things interact with one another in much greater detail. And we need to hold accountable the folks on the business side who are responsible for reinforcing that culture publicly. And however, Jim Crane has wanted to characterize that as a misunderstanding or a lack of information or what have you, the fact of the matter is that the business side led by that PR staff smeared a reporter in public and was very slow to apologize for that.

So I think that Manfred does himself and the league a disservice by not addressing how those things interact with one another. I know that Taubman got put on the ineligible list as a result of that incident, but I was also disappointed to not see his role in all of this in the sign-stealing portion of it in the Bang scheme more specifically interrogated because I think that this is probably appropriately cynical. He will be eligible to apply for reinstatement at the conclusion of the 2020 season. i don't know that he will be in a position to be hired immediately but i think the unfortunate fact of the matter is that if he were you know specifically implicated in the sign stealing in a way that we know about that probably makes him

a harder hire yeah than all of the nastiness that he directed at Stephanie Epstein and the other women who were standing there in the locker room after the ALCS. So not teasing out his culpability when we know that he was on the periphery of the Yankees incident, right? He was there when the Yankees were maybe getting up to nonsense and the Red Sox. And he was sort of on the edge of a lot of these previous sign stealing moments prior to the bank scheme. Pre-bank scheme moments. Yeah.

It is disappointing because I think that if the report came out and said, you know, he was a real jerk at all. So you're never going to believe the emails he sent about the bang scheme. Bang scheme. Bang scheme. Yeah. So do you think that these guys will get hired again? Like it's a case by case thing. And I was semi-surprised that Crane did fire Luno and Hinch immediately.

And just because of how much success the Astros have had during their tenure, it would not have surprised me if they had kept them around. And I would guess that A, this was an attempt to kind of correct for the inadequacy of the Astros' response to the Taubman incident. And maybe they felt like, okay, this time we'll act quickly. and maybe they felt like okay this time we'll act quickly and maybe they thought well these guys will not be able to help us for the next year anyway which is a an appreciable portion of the time that they're actually under contract i don't know how long they were under contract but quite a bit longer yeah right but still if you're going without them for a year and during that year, I mean, A, like you have to make sure that Luno is not secretly passing messages or something. Right.

And B, like, does it hamstring your organization more to sort of have the past and future boss like waiting in the wings? And meanwhile, his underlings are trying to run the ship, but not really feeling like they have free reign to do so. And it's an important year for the Astros. So, you know, maybe just even competitively, he felt like this was the right move. And beyond that, has, in one sense, a worse strike on his record and yet not really the sign-stealing strike. Lunau has, I guess, multiple strikes on his record, but in a less direct way maybe than some of these guys do. Like he's not as directly implicated in the sign-stealing as Hintra Korra, and he's not as directly implicated in the sign stealing as Hinch or Cora, and he's not as directly implicated in the Taubman incident as Taubman himself. And then, you know, there's Cora, who I think is another level of guilt and responsibility. And then there's Hinch.

And like, obviously, historically, teams have a track record of employing people they think will help them win almost regardless of what they've done. So, you know, domestic violence suspensions and managers who have not handled domestic violence incidents well, those guys get jobs if people think that they can still help a team. And Jeff Luneau, even in this report that suspends him, it goes on about how respected he is as a GM and how successful he's been in all of that. And if some other owner is out there thinking, well, maybe he'll be more careful next time about actually getting caught. And meanwhile, look what he did for the Astros competitively. I would like all of that money in those championship rings. So do you think these guys get hired? And if so, how long does it take and in what type of role?

Well, I'll start with the most speculative part of that first. And I say this without any inside knowledge. I would not be shocked to see baseball take the potential future employability of Cora out of anyone's hands. I would not be surprised if he just receives a lifetime ban based on this. It's repeat offenses, super involved, multiple opportunities to stop based on league directives and just a failure to do so. And then a subsequent organization that implicated it. So just a lot of lessons not learned. So I wouldn't be surprised if he's just unemployable because baseball says he is. ban after the next offense, the year spent away will not be sufficient to sort of launder

anyone's memory of this incident. I think that it is going to be incredibly difficult for Jeff Lunau to make a credible claim that he didn't inspire the culture that created both the circumstances under which a group of players engages in a bang scheme and also that he did not create the front office culture that allowed someone like Brendan Taubman to think this is fine like this is behavior that is with within the acceptable range so there's there's that I think that yes there are going to be a lot of organizations that want a World Series. They want the money that comes with a postseason run. But I think that in much the same way that these guys and that World Series will be forever tainted for a lot of people. the fact that the report says that this behavior seems to have ceased i don't know how you ever convince i don't know how you ever convince anyone that that's true and i think that people care more about cheating than they care about domestic violence right like they just do and that's

yucky but it i think is true and so this is not you know this isn't Gabe Kapler getting hired despite us knowing that he mishandled player behavior with the Dodgers I think that this is the sort of thing that you know if you have a successful run you're going to get asked about every time right if you have a turnaround in the organization let's say the Lunau goes to a club that is down on its luck and has been for a while, and suddenly they start winning again, every beat writer, every fan is going to ask, well, are those gains, you know, fairly gotten? Or is this, you know, what's the new bang scheme?

What new bang scheme have they brought to, I don't know, the Seattle Marin mariners right or whomever so my instinct is to say that they are done but i've been disappointed before yeah so so i don't know i mean like the mets didn't fire beltron right after this no i'm not necessarily i don't know it's a weird thing to like call for people's jobs. So I'm not necessarily sure that I think that he should have been fired, but like he didn't get fired yesterday. So I think the people's ability to forgive this stuff is significant,

is too great a capacity. But I also think that an owner looking at someone like Luna is going to say, this is not worth it, right? And I do think that this betrays, like if you take him at his word, and we do have his word, right? He's not a cheater. Then if I'm an owner looking at that, I'm like, well, then you're also not a leader, right? Your whole thing has been organizational efficiency and being able to know all the stuff and put that knowledge to good baseball use to win games. But you didn't know about this? Right. Yeah.

Yeah. that he throws everyone under the bus but himself in his statement i think is i mean really his from a pr perspective purely his response to the taubman incident and really everything over the past couple months has just been pretty incompetent like every time he opens his mouth he makes himself less sympathetic which uh if you're an owner and you're looking to employ a public face of the baseball side of your organization, that's a concern in itself. So in his statement, he accepts responsibility for the rules violations, but then he goes on to say he knew nothing. He did not personally direct, oversee, or engage in any misconduct. nothing he did not personally direct oversee or engage in any misconduct you know that part is not impossible but then he goes on to say the sign stealing initiative was not planned or directed by baseball management the trash can banging was driven and executed by players and the video

decoding of signs originated and was executed by lower level employees working with the bench coach i am deeply upset that i wasn't informed of any misconduct because I would have stopped it. Shocked. Shocked to find out there was gambling going on in this establishment. Yeah. So anyway, that's just, you know, I mean, he didn't even have to say that. You know, he could have stopped it. I'm not a cheater and I didn't know.

He didn't have to say. But all these other people knew and they didn't tell me. Sure knew about it. Yeah. Soater and I didn't know. He didn't have to say, but all these other people knew and they didn't tell me. Sure knew about it. Yeah. So anyway, I don't know. I think Hinch is probably the most likely to be employed again just because people think he's a good guy and I guess at least he feels bad about it and he could say, well, next time I've learned from this, I'm chastened, I'm a new man, et cetera.

next time I've learned from this, I'm chastened, I'm a new man, etc. And, you know, no one's mad about him really about other things, I guess, although, you know, it could be it's not like he was outspoken about Osuna or, you know, getting that type of player in his clubhouse or something, but I guess no manager really has been. So I think he might get a job again, although like the upside of a Hinch hire is, I guess, probably lower than the upside of a Luno hire. If you think that Luno is a great GM, that can turn around your entire organization, whereas a manager just doesn't really have that capacity, I think. But I don't know. They're both young-ish guys. They probably won't be unemployed for the rest of their lives if they don't want to be. If they want to work in baseball again, I could imagine maybe a less public role, especially for Hinch, but maybe a special assistant or something where you bring them on in a less visible way and, you know, try to get

whatever insights they have or whatever and kind of make them do penance in that way for a few years. And maybe that's it. Maybe that's all they'll ever do. Or maybe you can, as you said, sort of launder them through that less visible role and say, well, he's been a model citizen so far, so we're giving him another shot. But yeah, I don't know. I would guess that of all these people, someone will work in baseball again, but I don't know that it will be, you know, I don't think teams will be lining up on the day after the 2020 World Series to compete for their services. No, I think that it will take something far less public. It will take something that has some very real distance from sort of decision making at an organizational level,

because you're going to want to be able to say, no, he's just helping us think through some things. He's not empowered to make choices, because the last time he was empowered to make choices, we saw his underlings yelling at reporters and engaging in bank schemes. Right. Yeah. And so the other implications like for the future of the Astros, let's say, I mean, it's going to be sort of strange because the Astros are still really good and they are projected

to be the best team in baseball right now by fan graphs, even after losing Garrett Cole. And so they're going to be good all year. And that will be kind of weird and awkward for baseball because obviously there are a lot of 2017 and 2018 holdovers still on this team. And the team is still going to be good. on this team and the team is still going to be good like i mean look obviously people differ on how much the sign stealing helped but the astros just got within a few innings of winning the world series in 2019 when we have no confirmed knowledge that they were stealing signs obviously they have not earned the benefit of the tout here but as far as we know thus far they were not cheating in at least those specific ways in 2019 and they were still the best team in baseball arguably one of the best teams of all

time and probably the best astros team during this entire run and they still project to be very good so in terms of 2020 i don't know that this really hampers them because there's only so much you can affect the competitive landscape if you're not going to suspend players like players are responsible for most of the performance of the team so I think long term maybe there's an impact in the sense that the Astros have been getting older and pricier and their farm system isn't what it was and now they're essentially just getting the knees cut out for them in in two upcoming drafts which is big like they will not be able to replenish these players who are aging and leaving nearly as well as they would have with these draft picks yeah although notably they did not suffer any loss to their international signing capacity. So that was an interesting sort of punishment omission by the league. Obviously,

teams are not allowed to spend as much internationally as they used to be, but it's still a place where you can see an organization like Houston being both very active and demonstrating their baseball acumen. So they are not without that as an avenue to try to improve things. I think that it will be interesting. You know, the loss of Luna was hitting the organization at an interesting time relative to some of the brain drain that they've had in the last couple of off seasons, right? So like, you know, it used to be that if something like this had happened, you would look at someone like an Elias and be like, well, you know, Mike Elias will just be the GM now.

He is gone. You know, Taubman obviously is not eligible to participate in the organization. And so you don't have him heading things off. So it'll be interesting to see, you know, they have taken pains to contain and limit information internally to a small group, at least some of their most sensitive stuff. And a lot of those people are gone now. So it's via one way or another, right? So it's going to be interesting to see what their approach is.

They clearly need to have a really significant course correction on the organizational culture, a really significant course correction on the organizational culture, which seems like the work of someone from outside the organization coming in and sort of saying, hey, we're going to – I have a vision for what a baseball ops group should look like in terms of the way it conducts itself. Let me install this more productive, respectful, whatever, however you want to call it culture i don't know that that person is necessarily if you're being hired to do that is that then the person who is you know gonna lead the next great astros team i don't know the answer to that so they they are at an interesting organizational inflection point and you know crane made a point of saying in his presser

yesterday that they've already done a thorough cleaning of house, but it would not surprise me if whoever comes in, if they have an outsider come in, if there are subsequent dismissals. Not everyone who got let go from Atlanta after copy's ban was let go right away, right? There was a further wave of dismissals subsequent to new organizational leadership coming in just to say we don't want to have to deal with any potential perception of taint with these guys. So it would not be surprising to me if we see additional firings in the months to come. Although I would imagine the extent of that is going to depend a great deal on if they look internally and say, okay, this group of folks is going to be our leadership in conjunction with, you know, Crane is saying that he's going to oversee baseball operations.

So I guess like now he really will be culpable for the culture. I don't know, man. But, you know, I would imagine that if an outsider comes in and is suddenly riding the ship, and it's not an unappealing job, like the farm system sure has fallen off relative to where it used to be, and they do have players who are, you know, they are a sneakily older roster than they used to be, but like they're still like

you said going to be really good and i can't think of many situations where you have a similar competitive situation even if you factor in the loss of draft picks and in future years so it won't be a job that doesn't have appeal to people working in baseball, but it'll just be really interesting to see what subsequent reshaping we end up seeing within baseball ops for them. And the sort of, you know, do they have other people who depart the organization wanting to distance themselves from this? I don't know. We're going to have to see. And, you know, I would imagine that every org that has Astro's DNA in it, they're going to have to talk about this stuff in spring training because we saw how portable that DNA can be to the Red Sox. So, you know, if I'm a, and I don't say this with any knowledge that they have engaged in a similar bang scheme you know i don't

know how contagious the bang schemes are i don't see this is this is quickly getting very dicey as a as a turn of phrase um but you know if i'm a an orioles beat writer if i'm a brewer's beat writer i have some questions in spring training you know the timelines aren't necessarily perfectly aligned but you know like uh i would have some questions about about bang schemes as it were you can come in and consult on all this as an aside like the luna statement i'm just like my guy be less of a management consultant good grief right yeah yeah the in-house replacements the people who would be next in line if they do decide to stay and if Crane doesn't decide to bring in someone from outside are very desirable and sought after people. Hinch's bench coach Joe Espada who was hired by the Astros I believe after 2017 so he wasn't there for the banging I guess although maybe he was there when they were still doing video room stuff and Espada is very respected and he I think made it to multiple interviews with the Cubs and Giants

just this offseason so he was very much looked on as a managerial candidate. And then the next in line for the GM job would be Pete Petilla, who is the AGM, and he is also very respected. He's an Ed Wade hire. He was hired by Ed Wade as an intern, although obviously he rose through the ranks under Luno, and he was one of the people most directly responsible for all the player development innovations of the past several years and he also was interviewing for top jobs he interviewed this offseason for gm or president of baseball ops jobs with the pirates and giants so these guys were going to get these jobs somewhere and i don't know whether they will

decide that they want a fresh start or whether craneane will but you know the fall off from Luno and Hinch in terms of brain power or leadership ability just in terms of winning baseball games you'd think it would be big just because of how successful those guys have been but if you have these two desirable replacements who have learned whatever Luno and H hinge had to teach presumably hopefully the right lessons not the wrong lessons yeah then uh i don't know competitively speaking how big that gap is but you know long term the draft picks hurt and maybe there is some just organizational kind of dysfunction or lack of clarity or direction for a while that could potentially hamstring the team. So if anything, it could maybe make the Astros window close more

quickly, but it's certainly not closed now. I do kind of wonder, does this make the players more or less motivated for 2020? I don't know that it matters, but if you're the players, motivated for 2020 I don't know that it matters but like if you're the players maybe you're feeling some shame and embarrassment now do you feel like a a lack of organizational pride and camaraderie because uh your your team now has the stain on it or do you feel more motivated because now you want to show that it wasn't just the sign stealing, that you're actually good even when you don't cheat. And so you'd have even extra incentive to perform well. I wonder what the mentality of an Astros player who's been there throughout this run is right now. Like if you're George Springer or Bregman or Altuve or those guys, you know, what are they thinking right now?

guys you know what are they thinking right now i would imagine that this ends up being motivation because that is the way that professional athletes view anything right no one believes in us everyone wants us to fail so we'll use that as motivation yeah i think that it ends up being a you know it'll be pinboard material who's doing arb man who's doing the arb for these for these cats true they got some they got some not small some some pretty important uh some pretty important arbitration hearings that they gotta sort out yep yep who's doing that regular baseball business that goes on even while you're being investigated for sign stealing so yeah i don't know and also like in terms of other implications like other teams does this go beyond here like clearly mlb would like it not to but on the other hand if other reports surface they're sort of

obligated to pursue them right now it's like yes whenducci reported on the Red Sox sign stealing investigation, he reported that when Manfred called Red Sox owner John Henry to tell him that he was opening the investigation, Manfred said, I've got no choice here, which doesn't make it sound like Manfred is eager to follow this trail, but he has to now because it's public.

And so we've heard various whispers about other teams. Obviously, every team had a video room and video monitors and human fallibility and temptation so yeah it's uh certainly not improbable that other teams were doing that at least and like we've heard specific teams accused without substantiation like even on monday logan morrison came out and said that he's heard that the dodgers and yankees have done things and in 2018 people on the brewers suggested that they thought the dodgers were stealing signs then and then just this past november there was a writer jeff jones who reported that he'd heard from multiple players that the brewers and the rangers

in addition to the astros have stolen stolen signs electronically. And then there was the whole you Darvish, Christian Jelic, Twitter interaction that cast further speculation on the Brewers. So, like, you know, there's no hard evidence here. There's no player from those teams coming forward. And if we don't get that, then maybe Manfred can just kind of not launch another investigation. But, you know, if you're a Dodgers fan or a Yankees fan crowing or complaining about this right now, like, I get it. I get it.

But, you know, be careful thinking that your team was pure and without sin because who knows what we might find out or even if we don't find out what was happening at that time. Yes, I think that everyone would be well served to just think about how their sass will read in hindsight when it's your team. I think we should all just the same yucky incentives exist across baseball and I can't imagine that the Astros or the Red Sox were alone in their inability to resist those incentives

the siren call so I think everyone should just chill out I think that ball players should be very careful about being sassy in public too I think we ballplayers should be very careful about being sassy in public too. I think we should all stop thinking that players squawking at each other over this stuff is interesting. We should encourage young men to develop real personalities instead of doing whatever they're doing on Twitter.

I am going to stand by this take. I can't tweet it because I don't want to have to deal with some of those dudes. I don't want to, but I'm going to stand by this take. I can't tweet it because I don't want to have to deal with some of those dudes. I don't want to, but I'm going to say it here. Being a jerk is not having a personality. Stop finding it interesting. The coffee has officially kicked in. Is this the second cup or still the first cup? Well, now this cup is getting cold.

So in addition to being caffeinated, I'm a little irritated that my coffee is not warm. So I will say to all of you, being a jerk isn't interesting. It doesn't make you interesting. It just makes you a jerk. I'm alluding to tweets. Here we are. Yes, there were tweets. There were tweets. maybe is just how do we stop sign stealing in general in the future? Because on the one hand,

this is a disincentive, I guess, but who is it disincentive for? It's disincentive for managers and front office people to do nothing. And so maybe they will look at this and be more proactive about making sure their players are towing the line. But on the other hand, players got off without punishment here, and there wasn't anything that I recall seeing in the report that was like, next time, players, you're going to be disciplined too. So any players might look at this and think, well, they did this. And it does say that it says something about how most of the players were participating in this. So on the one hand, it does implicate them.

But no one except Beltran is named. No one is punished. And so does it stop because of these penalties? I don't know. So I think you have to change the system. And to some degree, the system has already changed. And it's possible that this is less prevalent in 2019 than it was in 2017 2018 and it's possible that teams have developed countermeasures and defended

against this such that even if teams are trying to steal signs it's just not possible or not as easy as it was but i think you just have to go beyond that because, again, like the history of science dealing using whatever technology is out there goes back in, you know, three centuries at this point. So I think that you have to just remove that temptation to the extent that you can. And Manfred has talked about that. He talked to Tom Verducci and Verducci reported on Monday that he's thinking of either restricting access to these video tools so like lock the video room have the monitor in the replay room just don't make cameras and monitors available to teams during games there's no right written in the constitution that says that they have to be able to look at those things

during games so you can close and lock the doors and make sure that they're closed and locked but then i think hearteningly to me manfred wrote the idea of having a technology solution that eliminates some guy putting fingers above his cup might be a better answer and i do agree with that and i i think it's totally plausible to do that i think there's a system mentioned in this verducci article of of colored lights that the catcher could trigger and then these lights would be visible only from the mound which i guess would be an improvement but like i don't know couldn't you look at the lights somehow get get a blimp over the stadium that can see the lights? I don't know.

It seems like as long as there's something visual, someone could conceivably steal that. So I would rather just go beyond that and have some sort of wristband system, you know, vibrating wristbands. Like in football, they have wristbands. Quarterbacks have wristbands. We do have wristbands for catchers that have certain information on them. so just have a thing where you press a button and it vibrates and yeah the pitcher can have that the fielders maybe could have that too for positioning purposes but there would be nothing to steal nothing to see nothing to overhear as there might be with headsets and it seems to me like that should be totally achievable. And that might finally perhaps put a stop to this.

I'm very tired of the argument that like when presented with incentives for a particular set of behavior that it is just as long as the incentives are present that you are free to act upon them. Like that is not how ethics work. This is not how they work. So everyone do a little work to be a good person. I don't know. That what we should assume is that presented with both a means to skirt the rules a little bit in the pursuit of winning and very high stakes that we will have bad actors in the game. And that isn't to say that everyone who works in baseball behaves that way or finds that behavior acceptable. that way or finds that behavior acceptable. But we should assume that the average theoretical manager, player, front office person has the capacity to find a bang scheme compelling. We should just assume that. And we should construct rules and technology and incentives to try to countermand that bang scheme impulse.

Because baseball has, and it's funny how some of this stuff has really concentrated around replay, baseball has underestimated the distance that individuals will go in pursuit of potentially very small shreds of wins, outs, efficiency. potentially very small shreds of wins, outs efficiency, right? Baseball failed to anticipate that managers would see an out in the teeny tiny little bit of space between a guy's foot and the bag when he overslides. And so they failed to anticipate a major use of replay, right?

They failed to anticipate this use of replay. They maybe should have thought more about replay, right? And so we should, when we are constructing new rules, when we are thinking about the implementation of new technology, we should just have a person in the room who says, I am your resident theoretical bad actor, and here is how i would put this stuff to use in pursuit of an out in pursuit of a run in pursuit of an additional win here's how i would do it it's like when companies or governments hire like hackers hackers right then you know bring them in and say crack our system yeah yeah find find the the back door we all know from

watching the movies there's always a back door so find find it for me, right? Go find it. Go find your way underneath or around it. So I think that baseball should, you know, and I don't say that like they don't think about that stuff now, but I think that they are perhaps not as either attuned to those motivations because some of those motivations are being built into the system by the boss or because they you know in the face of new technology it is not uncommon to sort of fail to anticipate all of the ways in which it will be utilized but i think that you know like they should be sure that that is a lens that they are applying to the construction of the rules and that they should think very carefully about how they use technology to address this problem because implementing and introducing technology help to create a more efficient way of doing this. But I think that if we can measure the spin of a baseball, we can figure out a way for a pitcher and a catcher to talk to each other without everyone knowing what they're saying. So I am confident that we have the ingenuity to do that. I am also confident that people who have the stakes that baseball employees of every stripe have will also demonstrate their own ingenuity, perhaps to more nefarious purposes. And so we should just think

about that push and pull every time and try to push back on the push and the pull. I don't know what direction we need to go, but it should be maybe a more paranoid one. Yeah. And as Bauman brought up when we were talking about this at the ring around Monday, and as Preston Wilson tweeted, MLB should have extra motivation or probably does have extra motivation to make sure this goes away. You'd hope that they'd want to just to avoid this negative PR

and to ensure that the game on the field is on the level. But also MLB has big gambling partnerships and gambling is legal now. And MLB has partnered with casinos and MGM. And given that and given all of the money that they hope to attract from people wagering on these games and perhaps even individual pitches, they would want to assure all of those potential investors that the pitches are being determined by the players on the field and not by people stealing things and banging. So I think that is part of the desire, perhaps, to ensure that the game's integrity is unquestioned, although they should be motivated to do that regardless.

Yeah, for sure. But the potential for it to go very quickly awry in a serious way seems to just increase with every day as soon as you're introducing additional, as if there weren't already financial stakes, but additional financial stakes that are realized much more quickly than the financial stakes of winning a World Series. The integrity is very important. the integrity is very important it's very important regardless and i have publicly said on this podcast and will say again that i don't want to know about the gambling stuff and i'm gonna have to learn about and i don't like it but it is it just seems like an additional set of we don't want to introduce more profit incentives to bad behavior and the league is willingly doing that and so we need to make sure that we're countermanding that kind of potential intersection because it could get real gross

real gross yep all right well i think we have covered this and uh we've talked about it a bunch we will continue to talk about it as as new news arises Ben. Yes. He called it a bang scheme. He called it, he had all the words in the English language, and he was like, it's a bang scheme. And here's what I'm saying. Banging scheme, I guess, but still. This is not a critical note on my part. I think this is some of the best writing I have seen.

Yeah, it's well written. In 12 months. 12 months, a bang scheme? A bang scheme. I am surprised as a lawyer who was writing something that presumably was vetted by many lawyers that they didn't go with a less colorful phrase. But I'm grateful that they did. I know that it is technically a banging scheme. I'm grateful that they did.

I know that it is technically a banging scheme, but now it's just a bang scheme because I am going to – it's a friendly amendment. A banging scheme, a scheme for banging. We got Grand Junction Chubs. We got the gas station – I'm going to say a word that sounds crass, dick pill story. We got the banging scheme. And I have too many reply guys to make all the jokes I want to on Twitter,

but I want people to know that I made a lot of jokes to friends and family. Some of them were uncomfortable, but I made them, and I was allowed to do that because the banging scheme. Yeah. At least something positive came out of this. Yeah. You know, it's like we're just trying to hurdle through time and space and not feel miserable the entire duration.

And stuff like this, it helps. It helps. Yep. Banging scheme. A banging scheme. A bang scheme. A scheme to bang scheme a scheme to bang bang bang bang this was a good parenthetical in the report too witnesses explained that they initially experimented with communicating some information by clapping whistling or yelling but that they eventually determined that banging a trash can was the preferred method of communication i wonder just like how many meetings yeah Yeah, what were the meetings?

I don't need the TikTok of Lu now learning stuff. I'm satisfied. I don't care. I want the TikTok of that meeting in much the same way that I want to know the details of the marketing meeting where they designed Mrs. Met because they sat there and

they thought we need to make her suggestive but not too suggestive because that could go fast in a bad direction uh yeah you know we're gonna get more details maybe not immediately but like you know when these players retire and start writing memoirs or oh yeah because all this stuff comes out usually long after the fact and that's what made this scandal so spectacular is that it came out just a couple years after it started. And so all these players were still there and it was still potentially happening. Whereas usually it's like it's an old man telling tales about when he was a young man or something. So we're definitely going to get more of that at some point. Like when enough time has passed that maybe some of the stain has like faded into history a little bit and people feel comfortable

talking about it we'll find out more we'll we'll get more anecdotes and details i would think at some point yeah and this is why your sense of humor should never mature because you know it will be years from now and i'll you know i'll be by age too old to think that a banging scheme joke is funny but you know what if you stay young at heart you live longer never too old yeah banging scheme banging scheme all right i guess we can end on that note bye ben that will do it for today thank you for listening you can support effectively wild on patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pledge some small monthly amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks michael hamilton hart allison organ brad gersh sean mckelvey and ian gural thanks to all of you you can join our facebook group at

facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild there are about a billion astros threads in there if you want to jump into the discussion you can rate review and subscribe to effectively wild on itunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcastandfangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance. And we already have another episode recorded, so you will hear it soon. Talk to you then. Good angrily I get even I tell you boy You best be believing All the stars in the sky Someone will pay

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I'm Meg Rowley of the... I'm Meg Rowley of the Ringer. Nope, that's wrong. That'd be nice, but... Let's try again, shall we? Sure. Don't want to leave anyone having a panic. Or we can leave this all in. I don't know. I work for

Fangraphs. That's where I work. Work over there. You're Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. That's where you work. That's the place you work. I don't work there.