On Hinch and Morton and “Codebreaker”

Four weeks.  It’s been almost four weeks now since Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred issued his report finding my Houston Astros guilty of cheating in 2017 and 2018 for using technology to steal signs from their opponents, and only now does former manager A. J. Hinch agree to an interview on the subject.  Coincidentally, it was released the same day we learned more about how the cheating may have gotten started, revealed thanks to that stalwart of baseball journalism, the Wall Street Journal.  No kidding.

The commissioner’s report found that the Astros players were behind the scheme, and that the manager was aware of what was going on but didn’t do anything to stop it.  You’ll get no argument on that point from Hinch, who talked to Tom Verducci of MLB Network.

“I wish I would have,” Hinch said. “I really do. I think that’s a big question that I’m going to process over what’s now a season-long suspension. It’s something I continued to think about certainly through the investigation, when you have to openly talk about it. I wish I would have done more. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and we were wrong.”

(snip)

The Commissioner’s report said that Hinch twice took a bat to monitors that were used to steal signs, an indication that the manager did not approve of the players’ methods. In hindsight, Hinch said, he should have taken further measures to stop what was happening.

“I should have had a meeting and addressed it face forward and really ended it,” he said. “Leadership to me is often about what you preach. Leadership’s also about what you tolerate. I tolerated too much.”

(Note: it is accepted wisdom that there is nothing more powerful in all of baseball than a team meeting.)

Most recent stories want us to focus on the question of whether the Astros’ 2017 World Series title is tainted.  Of course it is.  It’s not invalidated, but short of mass amnesia there’s no way for people not to think that the Astros won, or may have won, because they cheated.  But that’s not the most important question, not to me.  I need to hear Hinch’s explanation for why he tolerated too much, why he didn’t put a stop to behavior of which, we are told, he highly disapproved.

Verducci didn’t press him to answer, at least not in the portion of the interview that was published.

When the question is why didn’t you stop it, the answer is not “I wish I had stopped it,” the answer is to explain to me why you did not, and so far I haven’t seen Hinch’s answer to that question.  I get that it’s not the old days when players didn’t have any power and managers ruled with an iron fist, and that today maybe some managers don’t really have control over their players.  In this case, though, the players reportedly told the investigators that if Hinch had just told them to stop it, they would have stopped; sounds like a group that respects the manager and wants to please.  So why didn’t Hinch take advantage of that dynamic and direct his players to stop this thing that he claims he opposed?  We don’t know.

Hinch has always been comfortable in front of the camera, and he did a good job in this interview of accepting responsibility for his inaction that hurt his team.  Fired Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow seems to have fallen into a deep deep hole somewhere with absolutely nothing to say, beyond a statement last month denying he knew anything at all about this as it was happening.  Hmm.

Keep that in mind when you read the Wall Street Journal story that the “Houston Astros’ front office laid the groundwork for the team’s electronic sign-stealing ploys via a program dubbed ‘Codebreaker’ that was introduced by an intern in the organization in September 2016.”  (If you can’t access the full WSJ story, here’ a link to an ESPN version.)  An intern who worked for Jeff Luhnow says he assumed Luhnow knew the program was being used during regular league games.  Luhnow reportedly told MLB investigators he remembered “the intern’s PowerPoint slide about ‘Codebreaker,’ but said he thought it would be used to legally decipher signs from previous games.”

The team’s director of advance information, Tom Koch-Weser, also alleges Luhnow knew about the system. According to the WSJ, Koch-Weser told MLB that the former GM would occasionally go to the Astros’ video room during road games and make comments like, “You guys Codebreaking?”

Luhnow declined the WSJ’s request for comment but, according to the paper’s reporting, denied Koch-Weser’s accounts to MLB, and investigators could find no definitive proof that Luhnow knew how “Codebreaker” was being used.

Meanwhile, the Astros players are still in hiding, and this is a great example of how a lot of journalism today fails when it comes to covering professional sports, and how the players and other employees of the major league teams aren’t held accountable for their actions in the way that other people who find themselves unfortunately in the news are.  The businessman accused of cheating or of allowing cheating to occur gets grilled.  To use a Houston example, think Enron: Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow were hounded to respond to the charges, and no reporter was satisfied to just let it go if one of them “had not been made available” for an interview.  But that’s what we get from reporters covering the Houston Astros and the findings from Major League Baseball that the team cheated.  Not one current player has had his feet held to the fire to talk about their roles, or the team’s behavior.

I get it that the players don’t want to talk publicly; they do not want to have to admit that they broke the rules.  Of course they don’t; who would?  But it’s the job of reporters to hold the powerful accountable for their actions.  Yet in all the stories about this in the past four weeks since the commissioner’s report was released, I haven’t seen a single reference like “George Springer could not be reached for comment” or “Messages left asking Carlos Correa to discuss the report have not been returned.”  Am I supposed to believe that no one in all of journalism has Yuli Gurriel’s cell phone number?  The Wall Street Journal was able to contact Luhnow for its story, but not one reporter who covers the team has been able to get a player to make a not-for-attribution statement, to give us some insight to what they did and how they feel about it now?

To this point we’ve had to make do with comments from former Astros players, obtained at team-organized off-season events for their new fans.  Two weeks ago it was Dallas Keuchel who apologized without getting into details of which players did what, and yesterday former Astros pitcher Charlie Morton did the same.

…when Morton learned of the scheme his Houston teammates were using to steal signs and tip off their hitters to what pitch was coming, when he heard the actual banging on a trash can to relay the info, he didn’t say or do anything.

And that, he said Saturday in addressing the cheating scandal for the first time, is his primary remorse.

“’I was aware of the banging. … Being in the dugout you could hear it. I don’t know when it dawned on me, but you knew it was going on,” Morton said. “Personally, I regret not doing more to stop it. I don’t know what that would have entailed. I think the actions would have been somewhat extreme to stop it. That’s a hypothetical.”

Extreme because it was widespread, some of his Houston players and coaches actively participating, others complicit by allowing it to continue, all the way to a World Series championship. Extreme because it felt like more than one man could do anything about.

“I certainly have thought about it a lot because it negatively impacted the game, and people’s perception of the game, the fans, opposing players. And that doesn’t sit well with me,” Morton, 36, said during the Rays Fan Fest at Tropicana Field. “Where I was at the time, I don’t know where I was.

“Because what’s wrong is wrong. And I’ll never be absolved of that.”

A couple of weeks ago Astros owner Jim Crane had this to say about the fact that his players had yet to speak on the subject of having cheated, and of being caught at it, and of costing their manager his job:

“A couple of guys that have been interviewed, they’ve been holding back a little bit,” Crane said. “We need to get them a little more time to get together in spring training. Everybody’s split up (geographically).”

(Note: there appears to be no technology available that would let all the Astros players in their various locations have a real-time conversation; that might be worth investigating.)

“It’s a team. We’re going to sit in a room and talk about it and then we’re going to come out and address the press — all of them will address the press — either as a group or individually. Quite frankly, we’ll apologize for what happened, ask forgiveness and move forward.”

OK…Astros pitchers and catchers report on Tuesday, the rest of the players are due one week from today.  We’ll see.

Finally, there was one

Two weeks.  It’s been almost two weeks now since Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred issued his report finding my Houston Astros guilty of cheating in 2017 and 2018 for using technology to steal signs from their opponents, and only now has the first of the 2017 Astros manned up to make a substantive comment.  It’s a now-former Astros player, and a pitcher at that, so it’s a guy who conceivably wouldn’t have been involved in stealing signs and sending signals to the batters but he might have been, and he reportedly did not elaborate on what his own role in the operation was (or was not).  But still, good on you, Dallas Keuchel.

Keuchel signed with the Atlanta Braves as aKeuchel free agent in 2019 and just last month signed with the Chicago White Sox for this year, which is why he was at “Sox Fest” in Chicago on Friday and was asked about the cheating scandal.  Unlike all of his former teammates, including Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman who refused to admit or deny involvement or express any remorse when questioned during an Astros fan event one week ago, Keuchel responded.

“First and foremost I think apologies should be in order for, if not everybody on the team,” then himself, Keuchel told reporters during a scheduled media session. “It was never intended to be what it is made to be right now. I think when stuff comes out about things that happen over the course of a major-league ball season, it’s always blown up to the point of ‘Oh, my gosh, this has never happened before.’ ”

(snip)

Keuchel wouldn’t go into detail, but he implied other teams had similar schemes during the 2017 playoffs, saying, “Everybody’s using multiple signs. … It’s just what the state of baseball was at that point in time. Was it against the rules? Yes it was. I personally am sorry for what’s come about the whole situation. It is what it is and we’ve got to move past that. I never thought anything would’ve come like it did. I, myself, am sorry, but we’ve just got to move on.”

It’s not sackcloth and ashes, but it’s a start.  Major League Baseball investigated and concluded the Astros cheated; so far not a single person associated with the team has said that the commissioner’s office is wrong, that the Astros are not guilty of the charge.  Not the manager or the general manager, who were both fired for not stopping the cheating; not any of the players who are accused of having been behind the scheme.  No one.  The owner said that once the players get to spring training next month and all have a chance to discuss how to handle this, they will apologize.  Yeah, that sounds like it’ll be pretty sincere.

My bet is the players are going to be plenty sincere when they agree with one more thing Keuchel told the Sox fans Friday: that what is really unfortunate is that former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers violated the sanctity of the clubhouse when he went on the record about the Astros cheating and sparked the MLB investigation.

“That’s a tough subject because it’s such a tight-knit community in the clubhouse,” Keuchel said of Fiers. “In baseball especially, you’re playing 162 games in the regular season, plus spring training and the maybe in the playoffs if you’re lucky, so you’re pushing 185 (to) 200 games. It sucks to the extent of the clubhouse rule was broken. That’s where I’ll go with that, I don’t have much else to say about it.”

But then later, he added, “A lot of guys are not happy with the fact that Mike (Fiers) came out and said something. But at the same time, there is some sorrow in guys’ voices — I have talked to guys before. This will be going on for a long time. I’m sure in the back of guys’ minds this will stick forever.”

Not just in the players’ minds, you know: people are not going to just forget that these Houston Astros cheated the year they won the World Series, no more than they’ve forgotten the way the Chicago Black Sox colluded with gamblers to fix the outcome of the 1919 World Series.  And no, I don’t think that comparison is over the top.

Keuchel’s feeling that “It is what it is and we’ve got to move past that” is understandable, and true to an extent.  It’s hard to admit you did wrong, and it’s natural to hope we can all give a tacit nod without the guys who broke the rules having to say so in so many words.  They want to move forward, and so do the rest of us.  But we can’t move forward and start rebuilding trust if “we” don’t acknowledge the bad thing that has happened, and in this case by “we” I mean “you.”  I need you to say to all the rest of us that you acknowledge you intentionally broke the rules, and that you’re sorry for doing so if you really are, and that you’ll try to do better.  Then, we take the first steps of moving on.

Just don’t expect a lot of sympathy for having been “victimized” by a guy who broke a clubhouse rule to come clean about the team cheating.

Don’t let the facts get in the way of (your) truth

A old friend of mine—a friend from way way back, I mean; I’m actually older—recently published a nice piece in which he argues for all of us to expand the sources of news and information we regularly sample and to rediscover the ability and the inclination to think critically.  You can read it here, and when you get past the cows and the sharks (you’ll see) he makes a good point about how in today’s world our experience and exposure tend to drive most people into a set of beliefs that become impermeable to facts and reason.  Unfortunately.

Today I was looking through articles I’d saved to write about some day, and found one that relates to Joe’s post: from almost three years ago, Rex Huppke’s Chicago Tribune obituary for Facts.

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives are communists.

(snip)

“It’s very depressing,” said Mary Poovey, a professor of English at New York University and author of “A History of the Modern Fact.” “I think the thing Americans ought to miss most about facts is the lack of agreement that there are facts. This means we will never reach consensus about anything. Tax policies, presidential candidates. We’ll never agree on anything.”

(snip)

Through the 19th and 20th centuries, Facts reached adulthood as the world underwent a shift toward proving things true through the principles of physics and mathematical modeling. There was respect for scientists as arbiters of the truth, and Facts itself reached the peak of its power.

But those halcyon days would not last.

People unable to understand how science works began to question Facts. And at the same time there was a rise in political partisanship and a growth in the number of media outlets that would disseminate information, rarely relying on feedback from Facts.

(snip)

Though weakened, Facts managed to persevere through the last two decades, despite historic setbacks that included President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the justification for President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and the debate over President Barack Obama’s American citizenship.

(snip)

“American society has lost confidence that there’s a single alternative,” [Poovey] said. “Anybody can express an opinion on a blog or any other outlet and there’s no system of verification or double-checking, you just say whatever you want to and it gets magnified. It’s just kind of a bizarre world in which one person’s opinion counts as much as anybody else’s.”

Facts is survived by two brothers, Rumor and Innuendo, and a sister, Emphatic Assertion…

…and a not-so-distant cousin, Bald-Faced Lie, all of whom now appear regularly in the political “reality show” that passes for journalism on the 24-hour news networks.

(Relive the debut of “truthiness” right here.)

This is harder on me than it is on you, even though you really wouldn’t think that’d be the case

If you’re employed somewhere you’ve probably seen the memo: the stilted and awkward announcement that one of your co-workers is about to become one of your former co-workers, thanks to the right-sizing of the organization.  It’s almost as if bosses get special training in how to transmogrify what should be a simple and direct conveyance of a bit of office news into a hideous and/or hilarious trip to Freaktown.

A couple of years ago Chicago newsman Steve Daley, who died on Sunday at 62, authored the essential takeoff of the genre.  Read the whole thing at the Columbia Journalism Review.

John came to us (four years ago; in 1981; last month) from (the Bugle; the London School of Economics; a think tank in Phoenix). He arrived here with a reputation as (a sociopath; a member of the team of twenty-seven reporters that won a 1991 Polk award for the Bugle series on alternate street parking; a friend of the former executive editor).

John’s contributions to this paper have not gone without notice. He’s a (deft writer; diligent copy editor; pain in the neck), a man who is passionate about (the First Amendment; gerunds; the Bass Ale at Costello’s Taproom) and a newsroom leader who has (become obsessed with Google maps; not generated a single sexual harassment complaint; inspired legions of young reporters to consider teaching American Studies out at the junior college).

(snip)

So it is with (mixed emotions; ill-disguised glee; a disturbing sense that I have now written about seventy-five of these tortured memos) that we bid farewell to our colleague. Moving forward, it is possible the number of voluntary buyout applications may be limited by (pure malice; Sarbanes-Oxley; the guy in the Crocs on 7). Only then will we know if the Involuntary Severance Program (“Opportunity 2009”) will be extended.

This is our time

To call for sacrifice, the president will have to be willing to make a sacrifice himself.  Obama can offer his own political career. He can put his reelection on the line. He can make the 2012 election a national referendum on doing the right thing.

Evan Thomas, Newsweek, Nov. 13, 2010

George Bernard Shaw suggested that “If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.”  I prefer the rephrasing (source forgotten) that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they’d still point in every direction.  Like me, trying to figure out what to make of the budget compromise in Washington, D.C.

President Obama and the Senate Republican leadership agreed on a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts, including those for the highest-earning Americans, in exchange for a 13-month extension of unemployment benefits and a temporary reduction in payroll taxes.  Is that good or bad?  Sounds like it’s good for the highest-earning Americans and the people who’ve used up their state unemployment benefits, at least.

Do you go with the argument that Obama is too reasonable for his own good, and that although he gave in on something he wanted in order to get something else he thought was more important right now, he’ll eventually have to say no to his political opponents or he’ll never get what he needs to deliver on his promises?

How about the argument that Obama’s emulating President Clinton by siding with “the people” rather than with one party or against the other, hoping that in two years the people will hate both parties enough to vote for him?

There’s no guarantee Congress will sign off on the deal: do you wonder about the fact that the GOP leadership doesn’t have all its ducks in a row to support this compromise, precisely because it will increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars, especially one leading quacker who supported Tea Party favorites over establishment Republicans in the last election and might have some sway over new members?  Is it at all concerning to you that the White House finds it necessary to “warn” Democrats that not supporting the compromise could revive the recession?

Are you persuaded by the argument that this compromise, in which neither side made a truly painful political concession, means that no one in Washington is really serious about doing anything about the deficit right now?

I’m persuaded by Clarence Page’s conclusion that both sides are putting off the bloody fight until spring, when they’ll have to make a decision on raising the national debt ceiling—nothing focuses the attention quite like impending doom.

Whether the big fight happens then, or sooner or maybe later, I think I’d like to see what Evan Thomas suggested: that Obama take a stand—and yes, stake his presidency—on a call for Americans to make the necessary sacrifices to save ourselves from catastrophe.

…being honest about the real choices is the only way Obama can break through the noise and chatter. It is also absolutely necessary to save the country from very hard times ahead, or at the very least a steadily declining standard of living. Obama needs to start by explaining the mess we’re in.

Presidents have an ability to go to the people and ask us for what we wouldn’t choose to give.  And Americans stand up for their country, and for each other, in the face of a common enemy, whether we voted for the guy in the White House or not.  This could be our time to find out who the real patriots are, if only our leaders are strong enough to ask us to stand up.