The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - Evan Drellich Talks About Everything Going On With The MLB, It's Return & The Punishments

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

is the Matt Thomas show. It is 2 o'clock on Sports Talk 790. Very excited to have our next guest with us for a better part of a half an hour. He's agreed to a couple of segments, and we greatly appreciate that. Former Chronicle Astros Beat Rider, and now making a name for himself alongside Ken Rosenthal, a dynamic one-two baseball journalism crew. We had to Ken on the show a couple weeks. We say hi now to Evan Drellick of the Athletic.

Evan, long time, no talk, how are things? And do you feel more or less encouraged every single day when you pick up your text messages, phone calls about the future of a 2020 season? Overall, I'm still optimistic, but the last week, with all the rhetoric going back and forth between the league and the union, the fact that the union hasn't gotten a response from its financial documents yet, they still have to go through all these health protocols, there's just a lot going on right now where it pushes the goal line a little bit further in the distance. I still am of the opinion, and I might just be a little naive,

that there's no way they're not going to find a resolution on the economic. And then the question becomes, we have baseball, can baseball laugh through the pandemic, through a postseason? And I want to get more into that towards the back half of the interview, but let's rewind a little bit. first of all, and this is a bittersweet congratulations to yourself because you and Ken killed it on the coverage of the Asteris stealing scandal. Unfortunately, it devastates all of us here in Houston for how things came into play. Are you finding even new facets to this, even to this day, or have things pretty much settled down when it comes to everything you want to know, need to know about what happened during that time and what the reaction around baseball is even to this day about that? I don't know if you ever know everything you'd like to know, but certainly our focus, I'll speak for kind of a little bit. You know, we've been focusing lately on is baseball going to come back?

So I think a lot of people who are paying attention to sign feeling in depth, you know, in spring training, for good reason, everybody's attention has been focused elsewhere on something that's probably ultimately more important, even inside the scheme of baseball. but there will always be questions. You know, you can never prove what you don't know with other teams. It's one of those topics that I think will remain somewhat fascinating for a time. And Ross wants to piggyback on a couple things, but I want to piggyback of what you just said.

A lot of folks here in Houston, and Ken was on with us a couple of days after the ruling came down from the Red Sox, that it felt like that part of the reason, Again, we're not trying to equate what the Red Sox are being accused of as compared to the Astros. I want to be very clear on that. I think you understand when I'm coming on this. But a lot of folks feel like Evan,

that because there wasn't somebody inside the Red Sox clubhouse, as forthcoming as Mike Fires was to you and the Astros, that we don't know all the details. And Ken was the first to admit that. What is your personal opinion about the punishment? And did you get everything you wanted to get out of the MLB's investigation of what the Red Sox did? I think there's a difference between the findings and the investigation.

The Red Sox investigation, at least by the numbers, in terms of the number of people they spoke with, length of time, documents reviewed, at its stake, seemed to have been quite thorough. It's the finding that I think leaves people uncomfortable, the notion that this was one rogue employee's responsibility, which represents a departure from their previous. punishments, the aster's punishment, and even the notice that came after the Red Sox and Yankees in 2017 with the so-called Apple Watch mini scandal. That was relying on punishing the GM and the manager and making it their responsibility. In the Red Sox case, MLB basically ruled that the Red Sox went to a reasonable effort to prevent this, although they did in the report note that Alex Corr could have communicated. better with players, what the rules were.

But so it's not so much what the investigation turned up as much as how it was ultimately addressed, if I can draw that distinction. The number one thing my audience says is if there was something in the Red Sox, that the Red Sox took a cue off the Astros by knowing that they were going to be ridiculed across America, fans would hate them, fellow Major League players would hate them, that it would be in their best interest not to be overly forthcoming. Do you assess any of that, or do you assess any of that? think the Red Sox, when asked, were given the proper answers to the questions that MLB asked of them.

MLB ended up confirming what Ken Rosenthal and I reported, that it was the video replay room scheme. The leverage for investigators in the Red Sox situation, you are correct that it was lesser because there was not a Mike fires going into it, And there was not the video evidence that turned up very quickly, thanks to people like John Boy, after our initial report on the Astros. So the starting point for the investigation was a little more difficult. That said, it's not like there was an element of it. We reported that they didn't essentially confirm in what they produced. But it goes to the nature of these schemes. When you're talking about something that is behind closed doors, the Astros thing,

in an irony in a way, it ended up being really detectable. But I'm not, I guess expressing a little bit of empathy for the investigation, but it goes to show you the power of locker rooms and the cone of silence that does exist. But again, they found it. It, to me, is more how do they handle it. And Evan Ross for your out here, and feel free, if, If I'm overstepping my bounds asking this question, I was just curious, did you guys seek out players and Mike Fires happen to be one of the only guys that was able to speak, or was he approaching you guys? Ken and I have not discussed process very much. I will say there was an investigation that we were conducting on our own that involved us reaching out to players.

So to directly answer your question, it is not as though Mike Fires called us up one day and said, hey, I got something for you guys. That is not accurate. Okay. Let me ask you, there's the perception among, again, we have an audience here having, as you know, there are Astro fans that are going to love and disappointing the actions, but the overriding sentiment for a long period of time before all this pandemic stuff came into play was that if the Astros are doing it, certainly a lot of other teams, if not every team is doing it. What do you say to that generalization? Is that a fair generalization, or is that you might have some out there,

but it wasn't nearly as blatant. It was what the Astros were doing. I tend toward the latter. If there was something that was proliferating around the league, or at least being conducted by multiple teams, we already have evidence of what that was, which would be the video replay room system. The Astros were pegged for doing two things, essentially.

They had two systems. They had the video replayroom system, and they had the trash can bang. The video replay room system is code breaker. That's all the same idea, that somebody behind the scenes is trying to pick the sign. The general feeling, inside the sport from players, you can get to a philosophical argument about any cheating is cheating. But the general feeling has long been that the video replaying, room stuff was not quite as egregious as what the Astros were doing. So the suggestion that other teams were doing something, I cannot sit here and tell you, and nobody can what every other

team was doing or not doing. You cannot prove what you do not know. So that's where it becomes very difficult and similar to PEDs. You don't know what guys are doing, and it becomes very hard to know. But logically, based on everything we have learned so far, we do not. We do not. You know, there's no evidence of somebody conducting or no evidence I can report, at least. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist somewhere. But there's no evidence of something on the level of what the Astros' garbage can banging scheme was like. That's the distinction. And I think also, Evan, one of the questions, of course, is the, how much was it happening?

How long did it take place? And then questions about 2018 and 19. Did you, obviously, Carlos Coray came out very strongly and said, we couldn't do it in the World Series because we couldn't hear them and then nothing in 2018 and 2019. Did his comments, are they in alignment for what you uncovered? It goes back to that dissension we were just talking about between the video replay room system and the trash can banging system.

With the video replay room stuff, it's at least possible that not every guy on the team was always aware of exactly who was doing what. So if it's somebody in a replay, room or video room messing around with signs and then somebody is getting those signs to the dugout. Not necessarily everybody in the dugout on a particular instance might know what's up. So that would be my intuition as to what the explanation there is, why didn't they quite grasp it? Whereas the garbage can banged system was, I think arguably required more attention from everybody on the team. But, you know, I also don't want to give too much credence to the idea of pleading ignorance because they are a tight-knit group of players.

They usually know what's going on in their own dugout. You know, the video replay room people are traveling on the road with them. But there is at least some plausibility that the 2018 video replay room stuff might not have been quite as widely grasped as the trash can band. hanging system was. Evandrelic from the athletic with us to the bottom of the hour. We're going to talk more big picture things on the baseball side of things

the next break, but I want to get one more two things in on this. The buzzer stuff, and a lot of other things that through the internet, social media, John Boy, whatever the hell is name. I mean, it took us to a different world.

What did you make all of that, of all of that, after y'all's reporting and after the subsequent interviews that Major League Baseball conducted with the Aster's. Yeah, I have no proof of it, and it doesn't seem like anybody else has any proof of it, but this is kind of the damning problem with this sign-stealing issue overall,

and particularly the wearable technologies. It allows your imagination to run wild. You don't know unless you set up some sort of TSA-style pre-check scanner, what somebody has on their body going to the plate. And you can have that worry or fear now going forward. And the argument for why people wouldn't do it, particularly now, would be the punishment should serve as a deterrence. And at some point, it was supposed to come in spring training. At some point, there's probably going to be outlined here going to 2020 of what the science ceiling violations would be like for players.

It will be agreed to that players can be punished going forward. It's at least my expectation. It's the power of the imagination. It goes back to what I said earlier, you don't know what you don't know. You don't know what you can't prove. And so it's where the integrity of the game was hurt in this situation because you start to think about what people could do if left unchecked. And the failure in a lot of ways here certainly was on the teams that conducted schemes like this,

but also on the league. So to allow something like this to kind of fester. Two more questions on this, and we're going to retire to the big picture. If the Astros had not taken the immunity card that Major League Baseball was offering to them, how would this investigation have ended, do you think? Well, they had the video evidence, as we talked about earlier, and they had Mike Fires quotes to us as well as the rest of our reporting. The story we published, not the Tudor-on-Horn, but it was thorough.

It wasn't like it was just Mike Fires' account and nothing else. It was a in-depth piece of reporting. So when you have those two things as your starting point, I don't think immunity reasonably would have helped there. And the thing to understand about immunity for the players, even if the commissioner hadn't granted it, he would have had a near impossible time effectively punishing them because they had not previously bargained with the union over this as punishable activity.

In addition, the commissioner's office had previously stated that he was going to hold the GMs and the managers and the clubs essentially responsible. So it's not even a scenario that would have been successfully pursued or would have been likely successfully pursued if they had decided to go that. route. Lastly, in five years getting your crystal ball out, will A.J. Hinch be back in baseball, and if he is in what role, will Jeff will No be back in baseball, and if he is in what role? I think A.J. Hinch will be back in baseball as soon as he wants to be once the suspension is over. And that could be manager. He's got front office experience as well. Either path if he wanted, I do believe will be there. Jeff Luno is the best. matter question because of the way the commissioner's office indicted the culture of the Astros

under Jeff. And he only has a year suspension as well. So time might heal that, but if I were to say who could more easily return sooner, it would be hinge. And it always goes back to a question of what does either of them want to do? Does Jeff Luna want to come back into baseball? Jeff did a lot of really smart things as well as some things that weren't so smart. But there's no question either of them could add value, and time seems to heal a lot of wounds like this. All right. Evan's going to hang with us in another segment on the show.

We're going to talk about the big picture and the hopeful return of baseball. We'll do that next. Evendrelick from the athletic, he along with Ken Rosenthal, doing a fantastic job of handling the big picture items of what has turned out to be a very, very interesting offseason for Astro fans, and for all of us as baseball fans, trying to get this sport back up and running. More with Evan coming up.

This is Carlos Correa. Back to Matt Thomas. It's your home of Astrosol's baseball. It's your home of Astros baseball. We are pleased to have Evendrolick with us from another couple of segments, or like another segment here on the show. He is with The Athletic, former Houston Chronicle and Astros Beatriders.

Speaking of Beatwriters, did you see your boy Channel Rome did his story about the number of times the Astro has spit in two games last season? You know, he deserves some kids. Kudos for that. That's some real elbow grease. There it is. A little bit of creativity there. I think he did a good job there. Evan, he needs to know how to touch a woman. I'm serious.

We need to get him out of the date or something. This is just ridiculous. But to the big picture, I mean, poor Chandler. I mean, just sat there for hours and watched Jose El Tubei chew his fingernails. It was really interesting story. Did you read all 67 pages of the MLB report that you and other newspaper or news organizations were able to receive last week? I did. I can't say I've memorized every page of it. It's a lot. And what we're waiting on now is for the union to send back some revisions as well as teams. So it's not final. That's important to understand. Yeah. Does it seem like it's going to be preposterous to try to watch over everything, or do you think that Major League Baseball and the cities themselves will make sure that these boys behave themselves? if all these rules are put into play, like spitting and water bottles and showering and fist bumps?

I mean, how do you police such a thing? Well, that's a really good question. And at this point, I don't know the specifics of it. My gut is that it's not going to go off without a hit. You're not going to have perfect behavior because you're asking people to relearn ingrained behavior. It's stuff that they've done their entire baseball playing careers and lives. So I don't think it would go down perfectly, and maybe in the revisions it'll reflect some changes. You know, it could go both ways.

There could be things that are added, even further restrictions, or maybe some restrictions are lifted from the initial proposal. Anything that seem patly absurd to you, or does it all make sense? Here's the one that I, and again, it's just logistically for me. One of the things was they don't want them eating buffets, and they want the pre-package, meals. They don't want them leaving the hotel to eat. They don't want them to go to the restaurants in the hotel. Are they assuming that every meal should be served and consumed in their own hotel rooms? Is that we're talking about? I mean, literally ballpark and dressing in your room, eating in your room, going to the game and coming right back. Is that how we're going to see this

for a while? Well, that's what they're proposing, but I think you're touching on something that will be addressed in your revisions where maybe the food is indeed. something that is that is watched closely. They are permitted to get in-room dining, you know, room service, but the idea that they're going to kind of be isolated in these hotels, I imagine that something that's going to be somewhat pushed back on the shower restriction that you're not allowed to shower at the ballpark. Why couldn't they limit the number of people on a shit? You know, these are kind of like open wide showers, I think, in most cases. So, you know, say three guys in their entire.

But those are all the little logistical harangings that they happen to go through right now. And how, I mean, what is the punishment going? Let's say somebody takes a shower in the facility. Are they going to get fined? Are they going to get fined it? How is this going to be enforced? And what are going to be the penalties if somebody just says, you know what, screw it, I'm going to the bar tonight. My guess is, and remember, the union will be involved with this,

that punishment of that nature is not going to be. on the table. I guess there could be a scenario and I'm just speculating that, you know, somebody were to kind of very deliberately and continually break the rules that maybe there would be some sort of, you know, form of a reprimand that's like a fine, but that's not really the intent of any of this, right? It's not something, you know, theoretically they're doing it for their own good and the good of their teammates. So I don't think they're going to approach it with a and trying to slap some back of the hands here. I would hope not, because there's bigger fish to fry, so to speak.

Let me get, let's get to the nuts and bolts of it. So the players are asked by the owners, Evan, and please, pardon my eighth-grade economic skills on this, they were asked to take a pay cut. And did the owners at that time presume the pay cut was going to be just for a period of time, and then when baseball resumed, whenever that was going to be, they were going to be in full stadiums because the notion I'm getting from a very simplistic view of mine on this is they're now going back to the players and saying we thought we were going to have stadiums full of fans we were going to be able to pick up and that we were going to ask you to make a prorated salary based on the

number of games now they're asking to revenue share which the players believe is a salary cap did the owners misstep by not thinking that fans may not be able to come back I mean where did the well you backed out of this and part of the reason why some baseball players have been vocal about already taking the cut and then saying, well, now you're asking us to take another one. Where do the owners, if you believe they did, misstep on this? The agreement in March that is guiding how they're moving forward outlined pro-rated player salaries elsewhere in the agreement, not in the compensation area, but in the scheduling area as well as at least one other area. It says there will, it basically says there will have to

be a conversation about the economic feasibility of playing without fans. So the basic way to look at this is the owners have the power to not start the season. That is ultimately in their control. The players indeed have a pay amount mapped out. So they're kind of talking past each other right now. The players saying, well, you read the past. The owner's saying, well, we don't have to start the season. The argument, particularly from ownership, would be that the intent of that agreement was to kick the can down the road on player compensation. There's nothing that I'm aware of stopping the league at this moment from making a new proposal in economics. And we thought, the general week, we thought that was going to come last week. MLB had a meeting with the union digitally on Tuesday.

It was the Monday and the days leading up to it where the revenue sharing plan got floated. The revenue sharing is just one way of asking players to take a pay cut. The issue, they don't like that form of a pay cut, but they don't like the idea of a pay cut, period. And so they've asked for these financial documents to prove the owner's peril, and the owners haven't responded to that yet. at some point, presumably owners are going to make a new proposal, and then a negotiation would ensue. They're not really negotiating in this moment. They're kind of talking about whether they have to negotiate. And you believe they do go. They're going to have to because it feels like

every report I'm seeing now in the last handful days is the owners are like, we're going to take it in the shorts big time if we don't have fans in the stand. So help help the audience here, because there's a certain notion of players are being greedy. There's a certain notion of, well, the owners should have thought about this ahead of time before going to the union and asking them for the pay cut knowing that there probably were going to be fans in there. And I think people are trying to draw sides on this, although, as I've said before, many times on this show, the court of public opinion is going to crush the players if they don't take further cuts. Do you believe in that? Or do you think at some point, the players are going to be like, you know what? you were making a lot of money off of us and your revenues were way higher than you ever anticipated.

And then you had one down year because of this. Why is it on us to take the brunt of this fall? The answer is yes to all of that. Yeah. All of these points are valid. The argument for the whole situation is colored by the labor tension that's existed in recent years. So, yeah, if I were to guess, I would think that the ultimate result here is some sort of negotiation that might result in the players taking some sort of percentage pay cut as opposed to agreeing to a revenue sharing system here. But it is the players prerogative whether or not they engage in any sort of negotiation, whether they are willing to take even less money.

and it's complicated because you're going to have guys who feel like they're putting themselves at risk, they're putting their families at risk by playing, kind of an argument for hazard pay, basically. So it's not simple, but the thing that would, to me, seem to move things along would be if the league were to, in fact, make a new economic proposal, which at this moment has not happened. Last question for you. Are there some owners, and I don't mean you to speak on behalf of 5, 10, or 20 or none of them, are there some owners that are preparing for not there to be a season because they just feel like there's going to be an economic impasse between themselves and the players?

I don't know at this point if anybody's kind of shut the door on anything. They have a little bit of time, despite the fact that it seems so near where they want to do spring training in June and start a season in July, They can probably drag this economic discussion right up to the start of June or maybe even into it a little bit. The owners, the dynamic amongst owners right now is, it might even be more complicated than it is normally, where normally you have the big market and the small markets and big markets are in better positions of strength. It's reversed here to an extent because the big market teams, despite how much money they get from TV, are going to be, hurting at the gate more than the little market teams.

A team like the Rays, which has an above-average TV deal for its market, but doesn't do much in attendance, is ironically in a better position, or at least in several ways in a better position, than a team like the Yankees. The Astros are in a bad position because they don't have a particularly good TV deal for the market, and they are reliant on the gate. So owner interests are more fractured in this situation, at least arguably than they are normally. We'll leave with that. I feel like I could ask you 75 more questions, but we'll let you get back to you writing great stuff on The Athletic.

I'm a subscriber, and you and Ken have killed it with all your baseball coverage. We continue to look forward to seeing more and more things. Very last question, what's the drop dead date in your mind whether that we'll have a baseball season or not? Well, I think they would probably have to start playing games no later than, let's say, August 1st, because at some point you need a regular season to feel somewhat substantial. You know, 82 games, you're already at half the normal load. You know, like, you would just feel kind of silly if you played 30 games in a regular season and then went into an expanded playoff format.

But my feeling is they'll get the economics done, And the question is, does the health impact the sport? Can they play through the pandemic? Great stuff, Evan. Thanks again. Congratulations on all your hard work. We look forward to seeing you at some point in regular baseball stadium here in the not too distant future. Again, we appreciate the time.

Thanks, guys. Thank, Matt. You got to take care of us. Evan Drellick, whether it's from The Athletic.