Why We Hate the Astros

A 2022 ALCS Preview

Baseball Week continues! Monday we had a Lefty Specialists episode on the history of the Dodgers in Brooklyn. Tuesday we previewed the NLCS by focusing on Bryce Harper and Manny Machado. Today we focus on the ALCS, the Astros, and why we hate them…

If you ask the average baseball fan why people hate the Astros, you’ll likely hear, “Because they cheated.” And that’s definitely true. But as with so many people who condemn cheaters, these accusations come with a hint of shame and guilt. After all, the 2017 Astros were not the first team to steal signs, and it’s generally understood that they weren’t the first or only team to use technology to assist them in their sign-stealing. Both the Yankees and Red Sox were fined that same year for doing something similar. 

But the guilt only clings to Houston. Partly it’s because they won the World Series that season, and partly because, in so doing, they came to represent something ugly about the way baseball teams are run. 

If you remember, when Rob Manfred’s report on the sign-stealing operation came out, what angered a lot of people was that, even though the report found a lot of wrongdoing, it didn’t point to anyone as being responsible for that wrongdoing. According to the report, the plan was hatched and implemented mainly by the players, but the report didn’t name any specific players who did it (besides Carlos Beltrán, who had retired by the time the findings were released).

The Astros GM, Jeff Luhnow, their manager, AJ Hinch, and their former bench coach, Alex Cora, all got fired for their roles, but the report made clear that none of them spearheaded the cheating scheme. In fact, Hinch claimed to disapprove of the scheme, and Luhnow insisted he never even knew about it. They were punished merely for their failure to stop it. 

How was it possible that a complicated cheating scheme had been developed and put into place for weeks, and yet nobody in charge had been able to stop it? The Astros were supposed to be a well-run team! For years, Luhnow/Hinch/Cora had all been fêted for their strategic acumen and their leadership. They had, after all, turned the whole franchise around. Either they were lying, or we had to reassess what it meant to be a well-run organization.

It was probably a little bit of both…

As I wrote last year, I think it’s actually plausible that Luhnow didn’t know about the cheating and that Hinch disapproved. It’s entirely possible for management to create a culture where cheating is encouraged, but where nobody in high positions actually knows about it, and those who do know feel like they can’t stop it. In fact, I think the ability to do that is a big part of being able to succeed in modern capitalist enterprises. The fact that Luhnow could send the message “Win at all costs, wink wink” without explicitly telling anyone to cheat is what made him such a good executive. It was a feature, not a bug.

This is what people found so off-putting about the revelations about the Astros. They realized a team they thought they had been celebrating for savvy player development was really just breaking the rules. And rather than being part of some master plan, it was all just whispers and skullduggery and silly banging on trash cans until someone got caught, in which case they found someone like Hinch to throw under the bus. An operation that seemed professional turned out to be slapdash and amoral.

You could say the same thing about the Astros’ tanking strategy, which sometimes seems to be at the heart of their now six straight American League Championship Series appearances. The conventional wisdom – echoed at times by me in this very newsletter – is that this mini-dynasty was built by tanking earlier in the decade: From 2011-2014, they lost 416 games, and used the high draft picks to select future stars like Carlos Correa, Alex Bregman, and Kyle Tucker, who have powered their resurgence since 2015.

But the truth is that the value of high draft picks in turning the team around is often overstated. With the exception of those three names I mentioned, and possibly Lance McCullers, none of the key contributors to the recent Astros’ success were selected in drafts during that period. Jose Altuve was signed as an international free agent back in 2007, when McLane still owned the team. Justin Verlander was acquired by trade, and none of the prospects sent to Detroit were drafted during the tanking period. Dallas Kuechel and George Springer were drafted in 2009 and 2011, before the tanking began in earnest. Yordan Alvarez was acquired as a prospect from the Dodgers by trade in 2016. Michael Brantley, Charlie Morton, and Josh Reddick were all signed as free agents. Etc.

The dirty little secret is that owners don’t tank to improve their team – they do it to save money. Jeff Luhnow and Astros owner Jim Crane were not savvy baseball men building a dynasty through a shrewd new, modern Moneyball. They were just doing what so many new ownership groups do: tearing a team down to the studs to cut costs. The Ricketts family did this when they bought the Cubs in 2009; Bruce Sherman did it when he bought the Marlins in 2018. The high draft picks are a bonus, and if you can leverage that talent for a few years of sustained success all the better, but that’s not why they do it. They’re just trying to pinch pennies.

The Astros, then, seem to represent so many ugly things about what modern “success” entails. The tanking showed success was defined not by what the benefit of the fans or the players or the game… but what helps the pocketbooks of the owners. The cheating seemed to expose their professional operation as little more than an organized crime ring, which is how so many successful organizations appear when you look closely. And when the shit hit the fan, only the ownership class can emerged unscathed. What is to like about a team like that?

Anyway… Yankees in seven.