Trying to Get Rid of Astrogate
ALSO: HAVE WE SEEN THE LAST OF PITCHERS AS HITTERS?
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Pregame Pepper
Did You Know?
Remembering that the late Hank Aaron wore No. 44 and that those numerals are burned into the outfield grass at Truist Park, it is noteworthy that Atlanta won 44 games before the All-Star break, 44 more after the break, waited til the 44th week of the year to win the World Series, and scored 44 runs in the Fall Classic . . .
Braves GM Alex Anthopoulos, the 44-year-old architect of the new world champions, couldn’t celebrate with the team at Minute Maid Park because he tested positive for Covid and had to stay home, where he celebrated privately with his family . . .
The last team to clinch a World Series at home was the 2013 Boston Red Sox . . .
Zack Greinke was the first pitcher to get a pinch-hit in a postseason game since 1923, when Jack Bentley of the New York Giants had pinch-hits in Games 1 and 4 of the World Series for the New York Giants . . .
Fired as manager by the Mets, Luis Rojas has resurfaced as a coach with the Padres.
Leading Off
So when does Astrogate finally go away?
Unfortunately, when the last Astrogater does
By Jeff Kallman
Carlos Correa still didn’t really get it. As gracious as the Houston Astros were after the upstart Atlanta Braves blasted them out of the World Series, their shortstop still spoke as though Astrogate was just one of those things from which the world, never mind the Astros, needs to move on, already.
“My time here was not just amazing," Correa said, after the Braves flattened his Astros 7-0 in Game Six, "but the seven greatest years of my life. I got here as a boy, turned into a man, grew up in this city, and the fans embraced me. This has been my home. This is my home now. So I'm grateful for everybody.”
Forget for the moment that speaking in the past tense indicates Correa accepting the possibility of moving on from the Astros as a free agent. Forget for the moment that he’s liable to command a new contract above and beyond what the Astros might be willing to pay even to the arguable best among the free-agent shortstops this winter.
He turned into a man? Well, now.
Men don’t partake of their sport’s arguable worst cheating scandal ever, then act and speak as though they were just going along because, well, everybody else was doing it, too. Men don’t play the whatabout game when they and theirs get caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar and pulling off a heist at the cookie factory.
Men don’t shirk responsibility for their role, whatever it was, in an illegal, off-field-based, electronic sign-stealing plot that was verified to have gone above and beyond mere reconnaissance out of the replay rooms baseball’s governors themselves installed for all teams home and road alike.
(No, folks, the Astros weren’t “scapegoated,” no matter what the stubborn among Astro fans like to shove in commissioner Rob Manfred’s face. If anything, Manfred—for assorted reasons—let most of the cheaters off the hook. He promised immunity to Astro players in return for spilling the deets while docking the organization key draft picks. He fined owner Jim Crane the maximum-allowable $5 million. He suspended then-general manager Jeff Luhnow, then-manager A.J. Hinch, and then-bench coach Alex Cora for 2020. It fell to Crane to fire Luhnow and Hinch almost on the spot after Manfred’s January 2020 report.)
Men don’t deny that their team, and its front office, engaged in an extravagant intelligence operation involving computer-generated algorithms (Codebreaker, which its creator warned Luhnow was legal before or after games but illegal during, a warning Luhnow ignored) and a camera above and beyond center field, altered illegally off its mandatory eight-second transmission delay, sending signs to clubhouse monitors for immediate deciphering—and the long-since-notorious transmission by trash-can thump to hitters in the batter’s box.
That wasn’t even close to being “the same” as the 2018 Boston Rogue Sox’s (and a few others’) replay-room reconnaissance ring—in which someone stealing a sign still needed a base=runner to send it forth for transmission to the batter. That was MLB itself, essentially, being Mom and Dad handing the kids custody of the liquor cabinet keys and trusting them not to get drunk while left to themselves for the weekend.
Men don’t abet or stay quiet about the smearings and threatenings leveled at Astrogate whistleblower Mike Fiers—who’s been verified long since as having objected to the Astro Intelligence Agency while still an Astro; who warned his subsequent teams about the AIA; who was one of several players that tried to convince baseball writers to expose it; and, who finally took it on the record to The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich a fortnight after the Washington Nationals waxed the Astros in the 2019 World Series.
Men acknowledge that being part and parcel of Astrogate-level cheating wasn’t just “foolish,” “stupid,” or “a mistake,” but inflicted a stain upon the sport that just wasn’t going to erode poof! like that when “winning fixes everything.”
Men ask themselves why it is that—despite having only five remaining or (in the case of spare part Marwin Gonzalez) returning Astrogaters (six, if you count pitcher Lance McCullers, Jr., who missed the postseason with an arm injury)—opposing fans still treated the entire 2021 Astros like a group of barely-repentant cheaters. (To their eternal credit, Braves fans saved the “cheater! cheater!” chants strictly for the Astrogate holdovers.)
Men acknowledge what Luhnow himself finally acknowledged when interviewed by the podcast The Edge in November 2020: “We should have and could have won [in 2017] without [Codebreaker and the AIA]. I apologize for what the Astros did. I apologize to . . . any team that we might have gained an advantage on during the ’17 and ’18 season because we were breaking the rules. I really want that to be out there. I feel bad and I’m sorry. I really am sorry.”
If only Luhnow hadn’t spoiled it by saying right then and there, “I wish I had known about it. I would have stopped it.” What did he think he was fostering with his since-exposed culture of organizational amorality, a pranking contest?
Correa is an intelligent young man. Such a young man must know in his heart of hearts that there’s only one way baseball fans, observers, and analysts may yet begin to treat the Astros as an untainted team. That’s when the last Astrogater standing in Houston no longer wears an Astros uniform.
Unfair? Yes. But so was Astrogate itself.
Jeff Kallman is an IBWAA Life Member who writes Throneberry Fields Forever. He has written for the Society for American Baseball Research, The Hardball Times, Sports-Central, and other publications. He has lived in Las Vegas since 2007 and, alas, has been a Met fan since the day they were born.
Cleaning Up
Say Goodbye To Pitchers As Hitters
By Dan Schlossberg
With his pinch-hit single in Game 6 of the World Series at Atlanta’s Truist Park, Zack Greinke probably carved a niche in the baseball record book.
Pitchers as hitters will soon be as extinct as the dinosaur, buffalo nickel, or rabbit-ears television antenna.
That’s because the one thing virtually certain to be part of the next Basic Agreement is the expansion of the designated hitter to both leagues.
Since April 6, 1973, when Ron Blomberg of the Yankees drew a bases-loaded walk in the first inning of the opening game at Fenway Park, hitters have batted in place of pitchers without having to play the field. But that applied only to the American League.
The tradition-minded National League used the DH only during the virus-shortened season of 2020, when teams played 60-game schedules, but reverted to previous rules once the full slate returned for 2021.
Max Fried suffered a groin pull running the bases, missed three weeks from Atlanta’s schedule, and other pitchers suffered various aches and pains as well.
On the plus side, however, Fried actually won a game with a timely pinch-hit single when Braves manager Brian Snitker needed a left-handed bat in his lineup.
With the notable exception of two-way star Shohei Ohtani, managers are always reluctant to have pitchers do anything other than pitching. They regard pitchers as fragile creatures whose routines and between-innings plans should neither be shaked nor stirred.
It hasn’t always been that way.
Though most pitchers turned into 98-pound weaklings at the plate, there were more than a handful of notable exceptions.
Think Babe Ruth, a pitcher whose bat was so good that the Boston Red Sox played him in the outfield when he wasn’t pitching. By the time he got to the Yankees in 1920, he was a full-time outfielder, in the lineup every day.
Then there was Terry Forster, described by David Letterman as “a fat tub of goo,” but actually pretty proficient at the plate. Of all players who appeared in at least 500 games, he had the highest lifetime batting average: an unbelievable .397 !!
Wes Ferrell had 38 home runs, a record for a pitcher, while Warren Spahn had 35, the most by a National Leaguer, and actually homered for the Braves in 17 consecutive seasons. Don Newcombe and Don Drysdale both had tremendous power, even more so than the still-active Madison Bumgarner.
Lew Burdette punished Sandy Koufax, beating him three times with home runs and getting the Dodger lefty to name him his toughest out.
Ken Brett, brother of one-time AL MVP George Brett, had more power than his sibling but didn’t get to show it as often.
And how about Rick Wise, the only man to pitch a no-hitter and hit two home runs in the same game?
We could go on and on about the pros and cons of the DH but its arrival is as certain as the sun rising in the east every morning. Fans like high-scoring games, hate watching most pitchers flail away without success, and have even accepted the advent of designated hitters into the Hall of Fame (Edgar Martinez, Harold Baines, Frank Thomas, and Paul Molitor for starters).
Zack Greinke won’t join them in the gallery but the bat he used to plunk his hit in the 2021 World Series probably will. Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch was in Atlanta when it happened and has probably staked his claim already.
Former AP sportswriter Dan Schlossberg of Fair Lawn, NJ covers baseball for forbes.com, USA TODAY Sports Weekly, Sports Collectors Digest, Latino Sports, Ball Nine, and more. E.mail him at ballauthor@gmail.com.
Timeless Trivia
Two Eric Youngs will be first-base coaches in the National League next year now that the Nationals have hired Eric Young, Jr. The Braves already have his dad in that job . . .
Here’s hoping the “Manfred Man” — also called the ghost-runner of extra innings — falls into the dustbin of history when the new Basic Agreement is signed . . .
Freddie Freeman grew up in Southern California as an Angels fan . . .
Since the Chicago Cubs traded away Javy Baez and Kris Bryant, they could sign the free-agent Seager brothers (shortstop Corey and third baseman Kyle) to fill those spots.
Know Your Editors
HERE’S THE PITCH is published daily except Sundays and holidays. Brian Harl [bchrom831@gmail.com] handles Monday and Tuesday editions, Elizabeth Muratore [nymfan97@gmail.com] does Wednesday and Thursday, and Dan Schlossberg [ballauthor@gmail.com] edits the weekend editions on Friday and Saturday. Readers are encouraged to contribute comments, articles, and letters to the editor. HTP reserves the right to edit for brevity, clarity, and good taste.
Great article on Astrogate, Jeff. Spot on.