The Houston Astros Shouldn't Want Jeff Luhnow Back
Today, we consider the potential that the Houston Astros may take a step backwards in its search for a new general manager.
IBWAA members love to write about baseball. So much so, we've decided to create our own newsletter about it! Subscribe to Here's the Pitch to expand your love of baseball, discover new voices, and support independent writing. Original content six days a week, straight to your inbox and straight from the hearts of baseball fans.
Pregame Pepper - Fun With Baseball Cards
Leading Off
Losing GM Click Shouldn’t Mean The Astros Resurrecting His Tainted Predecessor
By Jeff Kallman
Barely a week after the Astros—the un-shifty (except for infield defensive alignments), un-canned, un-sneaky, un-tainted 2022 edition—won the World Series, owner Jim Crane elected to let general manager James Click go. At the time of this writing, nothing from behind those scenes has emerged. But something did emerge around social media's dubious precincts: a consummation devoutly not to be wished.
As of this writing, updates have been scattered but troublesome. There are people out there who really think Crane would do the newly-crowned world champions the solid of the month, if not the year, by restoring Jeff Luhnow to the GM’s catbird seat. Well, despite the anticipated Red Tsunami proving a red sprinkle on Election Day, there are people out there who want Donald Trump back in the White House, too.
Neither should be desirable. The latter for reasons that ought to be obvious to all but the protagonist of a certain rock opera. The former for reasons that ought to be obvious likewise, even accounting for a baseball nation inflicted often enough with short-term memory loss. These Astros need Luhnow’s return the way the Ford Motor Company needs to revive the Edsel.
Because, after five years away from baseball to achieve even a modicum of perspective, Luhnow still doesn’t get it.
As the Astros geared up to play the Phillies in Game Six, Luhnow had a talk with New York Times columnist Tyler Kepner—from Madrid, where he now presides over soccer’s Leganes team. Lest you think that things such as applying his once-fabled analytical mind to scouting players and building a team in a different sport have taught Luhnow some things, think again. Hard.
Invariably, the conversation between Luhnow and Kepner turned to Astrogate. Even as the current Series was on the threshold of its climax, the winners’ former GM couldn’t bring himself to admit that the 2017-18 Astros’ illegal, off-field-based, electronic sign-stealing scheme was the net result of a dehumanizing organizational culture he fostered.
“I was in charge of the organization,” Luhnow said, “and I should have known—and had I known I would have stopped it. That’s as far as I will ever go, because that’s the truth.” It’s easier to believe in a year to come during which a two-man crew navigating by leaky boat will haul the Loch Ness Monster in.
Either Kepner didn’t think to ask, or Luhnow chooses to forget, that the Codebreaker algorithm, developed by a staffer under his watch, began the shenanigans that turned into Astrogate. The sign-stealing algorithm was legal to use before and after games but not during them, the staffer warned. Luhnow elected not to heed the warning.
From there came the conception of, and apparatus for, the 2017-18 cheating—the illegal real-time camera behind center field. The camera feeding the closed-circuit real-time action to an illegal extra clubhouse monitor. The assorted personnel deciphering the pilfered intelligence and banging the (trash) can slowly.
“I’m not going to admit I knew something I didn’t know,” Luhnow told Kepner, “and I’m not going to apologize for something I didn’t do. I was punished because I was the general manager, and I understand that.”
The Athletic’s Evan Drellich—one of the two reporters (with Ken Rosenthal) who first exposed Astrogate, after pitcher Mike Fiers went on record following long, futile hope of provoking an MLB investigation otherwise—published an excerpt from his forthcoming (and twice-delayed) Astrogate book in late August. The excerpt revealed Luhnow wasn’t just a bystander, especially when Astrogate hit the fan.
Among other things, the excerpt quoted from commissioner Rob Manfred’s January 2020 letter to Luhnow fanning his behind (and suspending him) over Astrogate. Including that Luhnow attempted a Watergate-style coverup as MLB investigators started to sniff and bark around the organization after the Fiers revelation exploded in late November 2019:
“Your credibility is further impacted by the fact that you permanently deleted information from your phone and its backups in anticipation that my investigators would seek to search your phone,” Manfred wrote to Luhnow.
You did not tell my investigators that you had done this until they confronted you about it in your second interview. While you explained that you were simply deleting sensitive personal photographs, I have no way to confirm that you did not delete incriminating evidence.
According to people with direct knowledge of the Astrogate probe, Drellich writes, Luhnow “wiped every back-up from his phone, beside one, and other data was missing as well.
. . . Investigators found that Luhnow’s phone had no standard call logs, even though Luhnow had known phone calls with A.J. Hinch that should have been there. MLB also could not locate known email exchanges that should have been on his phone that were found on others’ devices. But as MLB’s investigators saw it, if Luhnow had been trying to delete a large amount of information, he didn’t do a perfect job: the phone had Skype and WhatsApp call logs dating back to 2009.
It's bad enough that there remain those who held the 2017-18 cheating against this year’s Astros. It’s bad enough that one of the two men who did the heaviest lifting yanking the organization back from that disgrace, and to an untainted World Series triumph now, has now been shown the door.
The last GM or higher team official to leave immediately following a World Series triumph? Larry McPhail, after his Yankees won the 1947 Series. After being rebuffed from a congratulatory handshake by Dodgers chieftain Branch Rickey, who despised him, McPhail went into the Yankee clubhouse bombed out of his trees, hollered loud insults, punched a sportswriter, and declared his resignation. The next day, Yankee partners Del Webb and Dan Topping bought him out.)
Those clamoring for Luhnow’s return as the Astros’ GM are like those Yankee fans who begin bleating, at the drop of every little hiccup or short losing streak, What would George do? What George did as well as would have done, especially from 1979-1995, was bad enough, yet contained almost exclusively to Yankee precincts.
“To ask what [Steinbrenner] would have done now or to wish that he were still around to do it,” wrote Baseball Prospectus’s Steve Goldman two Julys ago, “is a fundamentally masochistic wish that suggests just how many toxic fathers have damaged their kids along with passing on their baseball fandom.”
Wishing Luhnow’s re-installation at the top of the Astro bean hill is light years beyond a masochistic wish. Some dare call it moral idiocy.
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, where he plays the guitar and writes music when not writing baseball. He remains a Met fan since the day they were born.