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WSJ: The Origins of the Houston Astros Cheating Scheme

Discussion in 'Houston Astros' started by topfive, Feb 7, 2020.

  1. lnchan

    lnchan Sugar Land Leonard

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    I really do wonder how the posts I start just unravel uncontrollably...
     
  2. Elienator

    Elienator Member

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    It was a crime and it’s why Correa went to jail and was permanently banned from baseball.

    The Cardinals were fined two million and had to give their top two picks to the Astros. At the individual level that was harsher punishment and at the organization level it was pretty similar (despite no direct evidence of anyone outside of Correa being involved).
     
  3. raining threes

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    The Stros had to give up two years of 1st,2nd rd draft picks.

    Cards didn't have to do that and the Cards broke federal laws.

    This says all you need to know about Manfred's hopes to take the Stros down.
     
    RKREBORN and PhiSlammaJamma like this.
  4. texans1095

    texans1095 Member

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    Where the MLB really failed with the STL scandal is that they still allowed the Cardinals to sign a free agent (Fowler?) with a QO attached to him. So instead of getting their first round pick we got their second instead. Complete BS. Their punishment was nowhere near as harsh as the Astros.
     
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  5. CALI_MOST_WANTD

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    I still don't believe the Astros were the only ones "cheating" if you wanna call this cheating and not being the smartest ball club. It's not like its something the other teams don't have the possibility of doing it or have done it. Especially when you can use an app yourself. This guy help make and design app that does exactly the same thing. Predicts baseball pitches based on gathered inputed signs from someone.

     
  6. SuraGotMadHops

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    Bill Burr's take on this matches exactly with how I have felt about it from the very beginning. Burr has NO PROBLEM with the Astros stealing signs and applauds them for having the balls for "actually bringing a gun to a gun fight." He spend time going through baseball history and all the creative ways cheating has been ingrained in baseball since the very beginning. On top of that, he made one point I havent heard anybody else make...the MLB is the one league that does not give a damn about parity, they have let the New York, Boston and LA treat the rest of MLB as its farm system and does little to nothing to level the playing the field. So of course teams that cant compete for FA's find resourceful ways to gain a competitive edge. The game has never been fair, and it's hypocritical to trash a team for being unfair.
     
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  7. Snake Diggit

    Snake Diggit Member

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    My biggest problem with the narrative being crafted by the media and other teams is the focus is not on what the Astros did that was actually against the rules. Stealing signs is not against the rules. Creating an algorithm to decode signs isn’t against the rules. Using cameras to steal signs wasn’t against the rules in 2017. The only part of the whole scheme that was against the rules in 2017 was relaying the sign to the hitter during an at bat without having a man on base. Yet the narrative is that the entire idea of stealing signs and everything that follows it is against the rules.
     
  8. Buck Turgidson

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    This whole thing has completely gone off the rails. It's media-driven bullsh!t.
     
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  9. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    When NY or LA are victims, then it's OMG can we all think about the children???
     
  10. Redfish81

    Redfish81 Member

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    Part of the problem is the mlb offseason is awful. All these "baseball reporters" have nothing to talk about for 3 months so when they get a juicy story they can't let it go. Gotta get them clicks to justify their inflated salaries. In this case you know these reporters are loving the power trip of taking down the Astros with their girlfriend beating closer and former Assistant GM that was mean to female reporters.
     
  11. Buck Turgidson

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    Aroldis Chapman? Domingo German?
     
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  12. Redfish81

    Redfish81 Member

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    SHH... can't talk about that. Anything good for the Yankees is good for the reporters.
     
  13. Joe Joe

    Joe Joe Go Stros!
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    Yankees get crap for having them as well. Not as many Astros fans care about Osuna that I would have expected, but it is a larger percent than Yankee fans that care about Chapman and German's off field stuff.
     
  14. Joe Joe

    Joe Joe Go Stros!
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    Social media just keeps getting bigger, and news cycle is 24 hours a day. The Astros repeatedly F@#$ing up has made them the target at the wrong time.
     
    raining threes likes this.
  15. SS0101

    SS0101 Member

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    Uhhhh...Crane is a bit hypocritical here. You mean to tell me Crane didnt know? You mean to tell me an intern gets promoted to a senior position and Crane just skips along w/o asking? Nope. Crane is just trying to save his business and took folks down while pretending to be just as ignorant as Luhnow is pretending to be.
     
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  16. SS0101

    SS0101 Member

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    Yup, the media has basically spent 3 years leading up to this "telling the fans how they should feel." Biggest piece of evidence pointing to that is the Yankees and Red Sox already being caught in 2017, AND NOBODY CARED! The yankees made the playoffs in 2017. Likely cheating all the way up to September when they were caught. They were something like 41-40 on the road that year. Without the cheating, do they even make the playoffs? Ridiculous
     
  17. lnchan

    lnchan Sugar Land Leonard

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    Considering Crane's pre-Astros days... he is not exactly an angel himself.
     
    raining threes and SS0101 like this.
  18. raining threes

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    Very doubtful
     
  19. J.R.

    J.R. Member

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    WSJ: The Astros’ Front Office Created Codebreaker. The Players Took It From There


    On Aug. 26, 2017, Tom Koch-Weser sent an email to several colleagues in the Houston Astros front office that included an update on the state of the team’s “dark arts, sign-stealing department.”

    Utility man Marwin González, Koch-Weser wrote, was having great success with the information procured by the Astros’ illicit efforts, cutting down on his rate of swinging at pitches out of the strike zone. But somebody else was having trouble with it: veteran outfielder Carlos Beltrán.

    “Beltrán, who is the godfather of the whole program, ironically just swings at everything after taking a strike and probably does the worst with the info,” Koch-Weser wrote.

    The message clarifies a critical point about the cheating operation that has transformed into one of the biggest scandals in American sports history. Neither the players alone, nor the front office, are to blame. The Astros’ rule-breaking permeated the organization, involving executives, coaches and players.

    Until now, it has been hard to know who really drove the cheating scheme. Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred twice used the phrase “player-driven” to describe the Astros’ cheating in his public report released last month. That’s because much of the report focused on the now-infamous “banging scheme” of 2017—players watching a live feed on a monitor installed near their home dugout and relaying pitch information to hitters in real time by slamming on a trash can with a bat. MLB considered the banging scheme to be the Astros’ most egregious crime and believe it to have been primarily executed by players.

    But an earlier private letter from Manfred to then-Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, the contents of which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, revealed that members of the front office played an active role, too. They devised an Excel-based application internally called “Codebreaker” for the purpose of decoding opposing catchers’ signs.

    The interplay between players and executives was inherent to the sign-stealing program from the start. In 2016, Houston third baseman Alex Bregman, then a rookie, mentioned to video room staffers at one point that other teams were better at stealing signs when runners were on second base than the Astros, according to a person familiar with the matter.

    Three people familiar with the matter said that Bregman wasn’t telling the Astros to cheat, but rather suggesting that they could find a way to decode signs legally. The Astros didn’t provide comment on behalf of their employees. The MLB Players Association declined to comment.

    The conversation eventually led to Derek Vigoa, then an intern and now the Astros’ director of team operations, delivering a PowerPoint presentation to Luhnow in September 2016 that featured a slide devoted to Codebreaker. (Luhnow was suspended for the entire 2020 season last month and then fired by the Astros.)

    One of the people familiar with the matter said that once Codebreaker went into action, the people most interested in sign-stealing were Beltrán and bench coach Alex Cora. Beltrán, who retired after the 2017 campaign, was the only player named in Manfred’s public report for his involvement in the sign-stealing. It cost him his job as manager of the New York Mets before he ever worked a single game. Beltrán didn’t respond to a request for comment.

    Cora was let go from his post as the skipper for the Boston Red Sox. Manfred is expected to level severe discipline against Cora when he releases the league’s findings into allegations of similar cheating by the Red Sox in 2018. Cora acknowledged a request for comment but didn’t elaborate further.

    On May 24, 2017, Koch-Weser, who is still employed by the Astros, sent an email to Luhnow and others that highlights Cora and Beltrán’s roles.

    “I don’t want to electronically correspond too much about ‘the system’ but Cora/Cintron/Beltran have been driving a culture initiated by Bregman/Vigoa last year and I think it’s working,” Koch-Weser wrote. “I have no proof that it has worked, but we get real good dope on pitchers tipping and being lazy. That information, if it’s not already, will eventually yield major results in our favor once players get used to the implementation.” (Alex Cintrón was an Astros assistant coach in 2017 and is now their hitting coach. He was believed to be involved in transmitting information from the video room to the dugout, a person familiar said.)

    Koch-Weser and other Astros video room staffers told MLB investigators that they were unaware of the Astros’ banging scheme until September 2017, when Danny Farquhar, then a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox, appeared to notice the noises emanating from the Astros’ dugout. Manfred wrote in his public report that the incident caused a sense of “panic” in the Houston dugout, and a group of players removed the monitor near the dugout and hid it in an office.

    The banging scheme started around June 2017, with Cora and Beltrán among the most responsible for its implementation, according to a person familiar with the matter. It was Cora who had a tech worker install the monitor that the Astros’ players watched before banging on the trash can, this person said.

    But while it started with Cora and Beltrán, it quickly spread. Manfred’s Jan. 2 letter to Luhnow said that, “Most or all Astros players were active participants in the Banging Scheme by the conclusion of the 2017 World Series,” which ended with Houston winning in seven games over the Los Angeles Dodgers. “The Banging Scheme was so prevalent,” Manfred wrote, “that witnesses regularly describe that everyone in and around the Astros dugout was presumptively aware of it.”

    Koch-Weser’s August email that called Beltrán the “godfather” was referring to the video room sign-stealing operation. It singled out González as particularly benefiting from it. “Marwin I’d say does the best job with getting this info,” Koch-Weser wrote.

    González, who signed a two-year, $21 million contract with the Minnesota Twins last February, declined a request for comment from The Wall Street Journal. He spoke with reporters at the team’s spring training camp in Fort Myers, Fla., on Tuesday and apologized generally for the Astros’ cheating.

    “I’m remorseful for everything that happened in 2017, for everything that we did as a group and for the players that were affected directly by us doing this,” he said.

    González had by far his best season in 2017, hitting .303 with a .907 OPS in 455 at-bats, up from his career totals of .264 and .737, respectively. He also set personal bests with 23 home runs and 90 RBIs. Tony Adams, an Astros fan who watched 8,274 pitches from 58 home games during the 2017 season and logged every instance he could hear a banging sound, heard banging on 147 pitches thrown to González, the most of anybody on the team.

    “We’ve seen huge declines from him in chase and swing rates,” Koch-Weser wrote.
     
  20. Snake Diggit

    Snake Diggit Member

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    The most disturbing thing about this is that the WSJ published an article highlighting the front office’s creation of the decoder (which, they failed to highlight, was not against the rules), knowing they had this information about Beltrán/Cora being the sole instigators of the only part that was against the rules. Really scummy on their part, disparaging people and further destroying their careers for the sake of milking the story and generating clicks.
     
    everyday eddie and Chilly_Pete like this.

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