Hating the Astros, Take Two
Let me try this one more time...
In an Undrafted first, I’m going to try to redo an argument. You see, last month, before the ALCS, I tried to unpack why baseball fans can’t forgive the Astros for the 2017 cheating scandal, but I don’t think my argument ever quite came together. So now, nearly a week after they won their second World Series – and first since the cheating scandal was uncovered – I want to try one more time.
In January 2020, when Rob Manfred’s report on the Astros’ cheating scandal came out, and punishment was handed out, most people seemed to think it wasn’t enough. Other players, like Mike Trout and Aaron Judge, said the punishments should be harsher, and many fans seemed to echo that line of thinking. Which was a little odd, because the actual punishments were pretty severe: The team was fined $5 million – the maximum allowable amount; they had to forfeit four highly coveted draft picks; and their manager, AJ Hinch, and General Manager, Juff Luhnow, were each suspended for a full year – longer than almost any suspensions in the history of the game – and each was ultimately fired. Two other managers – Carlos Beltrán and Alex Cora – lost their jobs for their connection to the scandal. Beltrán and Luhnow have still not been hired back, and it’s unclear if either will ever work for a team again.
But still, that was not enough.
Two things really left people mad. First, that the team got to keep its World Series title. And second, that none of the players were punished for their participation in the scheme. These two failures are why people can’t really get past their anger at the Astros, even years later.
There is something so American about the unsatisfying nature of Houston’s punishment. Because like so many attempts at justice in this country, it is both too much and too little – simultaneously too punitive and too lenient. It is heavy on blame and condemnation, with no real attempt at atonement or solutions.
By now, everyone knows about America’s mass incarceration problem.* This country puts people behind bars at a higher rate than any other country in the world, and our incarceration rates are on par with some of the most oppressive regimes in world history, like South Africa under apartheid or Russia in the gulag era.
*Well, I guess not everyone agrees it’s a “problem.”
But mass incarceration does not affect all people equally. Put another way, people get away with all kinds of shit in this country. No bankers went to prison for stealing people’s money during the financial crisis. No intelligence officials went to prison for breaking the laws against torture or spying. Nobody went to prison for using phony intelligence to justify an illegal invasion of Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
It’s one thing to set up a system that punishes people harshly for minor offenses, to say, “Look, we’re going to be serious about crime here. If you screw up, right to jail for you.” I wouldn’t support such a regime, but I get how it’s intuitively appealing. People who do bad things SHOULD face consequences. But this is not the system we have: We have a draconian criminal justice system for some, that grants elites an incredible degree of impunity.
And this is not just true of our criminal justice system – it is true throughout capitalism. The IRS is more likely to audit you if you make $20,000 and claim a deduction you are not technically entitled to than if you are a millionaire who aggressively exploits loopholes for years. You are more likely to have your debts forgiven if you owe millions to the government than if you owe a few thousand dollars to a hospital. Over and over it’s the same: Harsh penalties for one class of people, and infinite clemency for another.
The effect of all this is a persistent cynicism and, conversely, a real lust for vengeance when the opportunity strikes. And the Astros cheating scandal struck people as a missed opportunity because it didn’t accord with our normal pattern of punishment.
Indeed, think about the way the different classes were punished in the cheating scandal. First, there’s the ownership class, as represented by the team itself. They got the only kind of punishment that capitalists ever get: A punishment that looks “harsh” when presented as raw numbers, but which doesn’t fall on any individual and does little to actually deter bad behavior.
A $5 million fine seems like a lot to normal people, but it’s not like Astros owner Jim Crane had to dip into his personal savings to pay it. It was levied on a business that is worth over $680 million, and likely generates ~$100 million in operating income per year.* Wasn’t the World Series they won worth at least $5 million? And while the draft picks forfeited were valuable, the championship team the Astros hoped to build with draft picks was already assembled. Taking away draft picks in 2020 and 2021 was too little too late.
*Crane paid $680 million for the team in 2011. And while baseball teams do not open their books, we can make some inferences about team profitability based on the Atlanta Braves, who are owned by a publicly traded corporation.
Indeed, the Astros’ punishment was reminiscent of the kinds of fines that financial institutions and other massive corporations pay for wrongdoing. Every so often you’ll see headlines about Wells Fargo or JPMorgan or GlaxoSmithKline paying some ungodly sum in fines for breaking the law. But when you look closer you usually see that a) the “fine” is usually just the cost of complying with a law they were supposed to be following already; b) the fine is actually a small fraction of the profits generated by the company; or c) both. Nobody ever actually goes to prison for this behavior – often the CEOs get huge bonuses after the fine. If you can generate large profits with illegal activity, and then pay the fines out of those profits, then it’s just the cost of doing business, which is how the Astros’ fine looks to any jaded observer.
Next there was the professional managerial class, as represented by AJ Hinch/Alex Cora/Jeff Luhnow. All three were suspended for a season (although that “season” ended up being the 60-game COVID year) and Hinch and Luhnow were both fired. But Cora got his job back immediately after the suspension, and Hinch was hired by another team the next year. Only Luhnow hasn’t come back, which might have more to do with him being a total jerk that nobody likes than anything else.
But this is the role of the managerial class – to protect the interests of ownership by taking the fall for them when things go bad. When a CEO resigns in disgrace, or when an executive gets hauled in front of Congress to get humiliated on TV for a few days, it is the same phenomena: the professional managerial class accepting a slap on the wrist for the misdeeds of capitalists. They are typically well-compensated for this role, and while the punishments are often embarrassing, they are never severe. After all, while Manfred punished Hinch and Luhnow, his report was careful to absolve them of most responsibility for the actual crimes – the report repeatedly emphasized that it was the players who set up the sign-stealing system.
Which brings us to the last class: the workers, who in this case are the players themselves. This is where the Astros’ scandal diverges from the normal pattern, which is why it left so many so angry. Normally, workers are left to suffer the harshest punishments at the most capricious whims of those in power. But in this case they weren’t punished at all. Not a single player was fined or suspended. Jose Altuve didn’t have to give back his MVP trophy. The team got to keep their World Series rings. The banner still gets to hang in their stadium. How could this happen? Why were they allowed to defy the normal pattern of punishment?
The answer, to put it simply, is that the players have a good union. The MLB Players Association would only allow their players to cooperate with the investigation on the condition of immunity, and so the league couldn’t punish them individually, and decided it was “difficult and impractical” to assign blame to specific players.* For some, this makes the union a bad guy, since they prevented justice from being done.
*The one exception was Carlos Beltrán, who the report singled out as spearheading the idea (which his former teammate, Carlos Correa, called “total bullshit” for what it’s worth). Tellingly, Beltrán had retired by the time the report came out, and was already making his way into the managerial ranks – but the New York Mets, who had hired him just a few weeks before Manfred’s report came out, fired him once it was released. Unlike Hinch and Cora, Beltrán has not been hired by a team since. It’s very telling that the closest thing to fall guy this scandal has is someone who was a player at the time of the scandal, but could no longer be protected by the union once the punishment was handed down.
But I will suggest that this is a very empty form of justice. We have simply come to accept that harsh, vindictive punishments levied on workers are the only kind of retribution we can ever expect. And when we don’t get it, that turns into long-lasting anger, like the kind still directed at the Houston Astros.
If this sounds like a defense of Jose Altuve and Co., I don’t mean it to be. It is perfectly normal to want to see the 2017 Astros face some kind of justice. People who do bad things should face consequences. But a capitalist kind of justice is no justice at all…