The Astros and José Altuve have gotten a lot of attention in spring training—for all the wrong reasons.
Photo: Jeff Roberson/Associated Press
Remember when baseball was boring? This was a grave concern, not long ago. If one wanted to bash Major League Baseball, the easiest button to push was its alleged boringness: How the game’s analytic and strategic evolutions had conspired to make nine innings an increasingly unwatchable endeavor. If you wished to be fancy, you could layer a cultural point on top, arguing that baseball’s languid pace was out of sync with need-it-now modern life, and, because of this, it was losing younger eyeballs. MLB was introducing new wrinkles, but it was probably too late. Nobody was talking about baseball. It was dull, dull, dull—a sports dodo, puttering toward extinction.
How times have quickly changed. Everybody is talking about baseball—even LeBron James, not a baseball player—and they’re not even playing real games yet. A scandal involving the sign-stealing 2017 World Series champion Houston Astros, and MLB’s scattershot approach to punishment, has roiled a sport accustomed to little scrutiny before autumn. Baseball is burning, ESPN baseball writer Jeff Passan wrote the other week. Burning! For years, baseball could barely nudge itself to roll over and tap the snooze bar. League commissioner Rob Manfred, a low-profile exec suddenly on the hottest seat in sports, is taking shots from aggrieved players and comically apologizing to the World Series trophy for calling it a “piece of metal.” Manfred must lie awake at night and say: Sheesh. I wish someone would complain to me about how boring baseball was. Those really were the days.
Let me be the 10,000th person to tell you how unusual this development is. Baseball, with its powerful players union, isn’t a sport accustomed to internecine finger-pointing. Now it is a free-for-all. The Dodgers, who lost to the Astros in the World Series in 2017, are furious: furious that the Astros kinda-sorta-didn’t-apologize for what they did; furious that MLB didn’t punish any of the players; furious that there are a bunch of dudes in Houston walking around with what they believe are their rings. The Yankees, also 2017 Astros roadkill, are mad as well, and they also have some questions about the 2019 playoffs. It’s hard to imagine a worse pair of cities to alienate than the country’s two frothiest media markets, but the anger isn’t contained to the coasts. Everyone’s mad. Even the Astros are mad, because they’re mad that everyone’s mad at them, which, well, boo-hoo-hoo and a tiny violin to that.
Perhaps the surest signal this controversy had jumped the tracks was when Mike Trout—the most inoffensive superstar in sports, Mickey Mantle reincarnated as a vanilla ice cream cone—jumped in to voice his displeasure at MLB’s handling of the Astros’s cheating. A couple of seasons ago, Manfred had tweaked the historically talented Trout for his low profile, saying the recalcitrant star needed to decide if he wanted to put himself out there, and engage more. Manfred even suggested the league could help Trout improve his brand.
Well, he’s engaging now! The Mike Trout Brand has some thoughts!
Since spring training broke a week ago, a few items have become glaringly obvious. The first is that this scandal isn’t going away. Baseball wanted a quick resolution to the Astros mess—it’s why they made the contentious decision to award immunity to players in return for testimony; it’s why they moved quickly to finish their investigation and suspend Houston’s GM Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch. There was even a dutiful round of coverage praising baseball for moving decisively.
But then it was like: wait a minute. When the smoke cleared on Luhnow and Hinch’s ousters—and the collateral cannings of Alex Cora in Boston and Carlos Beltrán in New York—it started to look as if the Astros got away with something. Instead of players holding back, following the twisted tradition of sports omertà, they began to let it rip. Cincinnati pitcher Trevor Bauer went scorched earth: “What’s going on in baseball now is up there with the Black Sox scandal, and it will be talked about forever—more so than steroids,” Bauer wrote in The Players Tribune. He’d later call the Astros “cheaters” and “hypocrites.”
What really set the sport off was Houston’s Feb. 13 news conference, when a franchise that had weeks to prepare a contrite gesture appeared to have composed a half-baked My bad in the parking lot five minutes beforehand. Worse, the Astros seemed to imply that their sign-stealing—electronic monitoring, garbage can banging—may not have really impacted anything, which was spurious position to take about an operation they used all the way through winning a championship, and beyond.
It was a real whiff. And it’s quite apparent baseball underestimated the fury of its players, that they believed Major Leaguers would be reluctant to go after their own because of A) of loyalty, or B) because the Astros may not be the only team out there to engage in tech-driven sign-stealing, or C) some combination of both.
Instead, here we are, a week into spring training, and it’s all Astros, all the time, with players ticked, Manfred hosting a pair of defensive news conferences, and voices like LeBron James—an avatar for the empowered modern athlete—piling on:
“Listen I know I don’t know play baseball, but I am in sports, and I know if someone cheated me out of winning the title and I found out about it, I would be [expletive] irate,” James tweeted. “Listen here baseball commissioner listen to your players speaking today about how disgusted, mad, hurt, broken [they are] about this.”
In a way, it’s refreshing. Throughout society, we’ve become so accustomed to wanton rule-breaking, that seeing anyone held accountable for their actions has to be a positive. But baseball still can’t figure out the next step. With MLB dead set against dramatically sanctioning Houston—stripping trophies, etc.—it appears we are heading into a long, tense season of credibility damage and fan blow back, not to mention the sport’s own brand of frontier justice (That isn’t any kind of answer, either. It isn’t great to hear people openly lusting for brushback pitches.) All this agitation must make baseball nostalgic for the simpler days, when it was merely too boring to watch. Boring sounds great right about now.
Share Your Thoughts
Will the Astros scandal impact your interest in baseball this season? Join the discussion.
Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
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