The Astros Edge

August 4, 2017

Houston, Texas

BEN REITER, Correspondent:

It was the bottom of the fourth inning when Mike Bolsinger came to the mound for the badly trailing Toronto Blue Jays. He had one job to do.

Voice of

MIKE BOLSINGER

The Edge podcast, 2020

MIKE BOLSINGER:

Just get one out. I mean, in theory it should be easy.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

There’s another one deep to right. Bautista’s back. This one’s going to go. A three-run home run.

MIKE BOLSINGER:

They just kept getting hits.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Carlos Beltran jumps on the first pitch.

BEN REITER:

Bolsinger recounted the game on my podcast.

Voice of

MIKE BOLSINGER

The Edge podcast, 2020

MIKE BOLSINGER:

I’m trying to remember a time I was rocked more than that, and I just don’t remember a time. It truly was the most embarrassing moment in my career, 100%. I’ve never been more embarrassed of myself. Ever.

BEN REITER:

Bolsinger was precariously holding on to his place on the team. But he was far from the only pitcher the Houston Astros had beaten up in 2017.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Bases are loaded.

Voice of

MIKE BOLSINGER

The Edge podcast, 2020

MIKE BOLSINGER:

I remember in the interview after the game I told the reporter, I was like, “Man, it’s just like—it was like they knew what I was throwing. They were all over my stuff. There was nothing I could do.”

BEN REITER:

That night was Mike Bolsinger’s very last in the major leagues. The Blue Jays cut him after the game.

As for the team that ended his career? A few months later they would win the World Series and go on to become baseball’s most dominant club of this era.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

The Houston Astros! World champions!

BEN REITER:

But there was more to the Houston Astros’ success. Something that almost no one outside the team would know about until two years later. It sounded like this. Not the crack of the bat, but the banging sound right before it—a sound that let Astros batters know what pitches were coming, like many of the ones that night in August 2017 from Mike Bolsinger.

It would spark one of the most explosive scandals in baseball history.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The article in The Athletic that has everybody talking.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

A stunning charge about the Houston Astros World Series win two years ago.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Now in the story, Fiers accuses the Astros of illegally stealing signs.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Somebody in the dugout hits a garbage can once or twice.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

This ball is crushed to left field. Springer has just hit his 31st home run.

BEN REITER:

It’s a scandal still reverberating through Major League Baseball today.

Cheater, cheater, cheater

Voice of

MIKE BOLSINGER

The Edge podcast, 2020

MIKE BOLSINGER:

You put so much work into getting to this spot in your career and then you kind of find out, hey, this was taken away by people that cheated.

STADIUM ANNOUNCER:

—from the Houston Astros.

CROWD:

[Booing]

BEN REITER:

This is how Astros players were greeted at the 2023 All-Star Game, more than three years after the cheating scandal broke. Even though these guys hadn’t even been members of the team in 2017.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

José Altuve has probably heard the boos about as much as any player on this roster.

BEN REITER:

Players who were on that 2017 team have received similar welcomes from rival fans. Long before the Astros had become such lightning rods and synonymous with cheating, I had reported on the team for Sports Illustrated, writing about their influential and hypercompetitive approach to baseball, driven by data and drawn from Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

As the teams racked up four World Series appearances in six years, I’ve been trying to figure out what I and most everyone else had missed about Houston’s rise. How their ruthless drive for an edge led not only to such success, but also such scandal.

My search for answers led me far away from America’s pastime, to a soccer club in Spain, owned by an American businessman named Jeff Luhnow, the person credited—and blamed—for constructing the modern Astros.

JEFF LUHNOW, Astros General Manager, 2011-20:

I take my responsibility, but I—there are aspects of this that I haven’t explained until now, and I think it’s important. I have nothing to hide. I never have.

BEN REITER:

Luhnow used to be the general manager of the Astros and bore the brunt of the scandal. He denied knowing about the cheating, but he was fired and run out of the league.

We spoke for four hours—the most expansive interview he’s given on camera.

BEN REITER:

How could you not know that your team was cheating like this?

JEFF LUHNOW:

The umpire who was standing at home plate didn’t know. It’s not out of the realm of possibility. In fact, it’s more rational to think that I didn’t know than I did know, because I didn’t start it. I didn’t create it. I didn’t approve it. I didn’t budget for it. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t lift a finger to make this happen.

BEN REITER:

Major League Baseball, in its investigation of the scandal, didn’t find any evidence Luhnow knew about the banging scheme. But they said that as the GM, he should have known, and pointed to a “very problematic” win-at-all-costs culture he created.

How do you respond to the public perception of like a larger cultural problem within the Astros?

JEFF LUHNOW:

I think it’s wanting to create a narrative that is easy to explain. There was no toxic culture at the Astros. We had a very productive culture that led to a lot of success in the game of baseball. Six American League championships in a row, four World Series, two rings for winning the World Series. That’s a dynasty. I don’t think that’s going to be replicated anytime soon.

BEN REITER:

But their legacy’s more than that, because there’s other parts of the story.

JEFF LUHNOW:

There’s always other parts. You know, Tom Brady and the Deflategate, and there’s always—yeah, there’s always something, right? I’m not trying to minimize it. It’s there, and we all face the music, but the Astros are one of the best sports teams of the 21st century, period.

BEN REITER:

Luhnow was an unusual choice to lead the Astros from the start. Although he’d spent the previous eight years in the front office of the St. Louis Cardinals, he was a creature of corporate America, with a resume that included a stint at McKinsey, the powerful and controversial management consulting firm that advises governments and corporations how to run efficiently and profitably.

JEFF LUHNOW:

It was a big risk to hire somebody of my profile. I didn’t play the game professionally. I have an engineering degree. I have an MBA. That’s not the profile that people typically look for to run the sports side of a sports organization. I was hired to help innovate and to help push the boundaries and to help figure out what’s next, to look at the sort of long-term health of the organization.

BEN REITER:

He was hired in 2011 by the team’s new owner, a self-made shipping tycoon named Jim Crane.

MALE NEWSREADER:

And finally our crazy money story of the day comes from Houston. The Astros were sold to businessman Jim Crane for $680 million. Why is it crazy? Well the Houston Astros are in last place.

Voice of

JIM CRANE

Nov. 17, 2011, Houston Public Media

JIM CRANE:

We’ll sit down with all the executives, ask them what they think we’re doing right and ask them what we think we’re doing wrong, and we’ll make some very, very quick adjustments.

JESUS ORTIZ, Editor-in-Chief, Our Esquina:

He was buying a team that wasn’t going anywhere. He bought a bloated roster with old stars.

BEN REITER:

Jesus Ortiz was on the Astros beat for the Houston Chronicle at the time.

It wasn’t very popular either.

JESUS ORTIZ:

No, no, it was an unpopular team. It was a team that’s mediocre. It was a mediocre team with a very dissatisfied fan base.

BEN REITER:

Dissatisfied because despite a few periods of promise through the years, the Astros had never won a single championship. Even lifelong Astros fans like Tony Adams found it hard to root for the team by the time that Crane bought it.

TONY ADAMS, Astros fan:

I admire the fans that went to those games. I followed them. I watched some games, but I will admit that I didn’t follow them as closely as when they were winning.

BEN REITER:

I would end up talking to Adams a lot during my reporting.

TONY ADAMS:

Obviously as a fan, you’re probably more inclined to discount or not believe the rumors about your own team. There was so much hyperbole about the Astros, and it was just become such a viral thing. It was almost like the national pastime became hating the Astros. [Laughs]

BEN REITER:

When Jim Crane offered Jeff Luhnow the job in 2011, the Astros were not only the worst major league team, they were widely viewed as having one of the worst farm systems as well. Crane wanted Luhnow to turn that around, while operating with maximum financial efficiency, which meant an end to pouring money into a team that wasn’t ready to win anyway.

JEFF LUHNOW:

When you take a GM job, there’s certain sort of conditions usually. You have to keep the coach. These are the people you’re going to be working with, etc. So I asked him what are the constraints, what are the conditions of the job. And he had a notebook in front of him and I thought he was going to hand me a piece of paper with a bunch of notes on what the requirements of this job. It was a blank piece of paper, and he handed it to me across the table. So that was a message that, look, do it the way you think it needs to be done because we obviously need help.

BEN REITER:

So he’s like sliding a blank piece of paper across the desk to you.

JEFF LUHNOW:

Basically, yeah.

BEN REITER:

Blank slate.

JEFF LUHNOW:

Yeah. I believe within the first 12 to 24 months, he fired everybody from the business side. We ended up turning over probably about half of the baseball operations side, so a little less than he did over that same period of time.

BEN REITER:

Turning over—firing, right?

JEFF LUHNOW:

Yeah, I mean not renewing or bringing new people in, etc. When you’re taking an organization and completely changing the culture and changing the dynamic, that’s part of what has to happen.

JESUS ORTIZ:

I’d been at the Chronicle for 13 years and covered multiple general managers. But Jeff Luhnow was the first time I heard somebody describe a baseball player as an asset instead of a human. And it took me back, I’m like, “Wow.” But with Jeff Luhnow they were assets. Because a lot of very good, decent baseball people were let go by Jeff in a way that a lot of old Astros did not appreciate. People who devoted their lives to the Astros, Jeff Luhnow was quick to say, “See ya.”

Voice of

DAVE TREMBLEY

The Edge podcast, 2020

DAVE TREMBLEY:

Jeff was very upfront with saying it’s a new wave of baseball people, and he was out to change the way the game was played and change the way the game was run.

BEN REITER:

Dave Trembley was an Astros coach for two years before Luhnow fired him. Trembley told me that in nearly 30 years in professional baseball, he’d never encountered anyone like Luhnow.

DAVE TREMBLEY:

Looked like a Wall Street guy. [Laughs] He looked like a businessman. Dressed very nicely. He was very prim and proper, very guarded with what he said. He just gives you the impression that he wasn’t going to put his guard down, he wasn’t going to let anybody get too close to him. The culture was different. The culture was very distant. I equated it to almost like Secret Service or FBI.

BEN REITER:

Luhnow began staffing up his operation with people who, like him, didn’t have conventional baseball backgrounds. He brought in a crew of nontraditional employees. He established a “nerd cave” which was kind of a data center that was powering the decision making. And that was led by a guy named Sig Mejdal, who Luhnow brought with him from the Cardinals. In his past life, he had been a bio-mathematician for NASA. Luhnow called him “director of decision sciences.”

He brought in all sorts of other unusual people, too. A mechanical engineer. A computer programmer. A Wall Street valuations expert. These were people who hadn’t played the game. Luhnow didn’t have anything against traditional baseball people, as long as they shared a certain mindset.

DOUG WHITE, Astros Pitching Coordinator, Coach, 2013-18:

Jeff knew that if you were going to get something done, you had to hire people that were outside-the-box thinkers.

BEN REITER:

One of those outside-the-box thinkers was pitching coach Doug White, who was brought in to help reinvent the Astros farm system and eventually became their big league bullpen coach in 2018.

DOUG WHITE:

He just wanted people who were willing to educate themselves for the goal of reaching a championship

BEN REITER:

People like you.

DOUG WHITE:

Yeah, for sure.

BEN REITER:

So you feel like you’re kind of like inventing a new way of building teams and building players.

DOUG WHITE:

Absolutely. Every day was that. Every day. Because we had to literally create a system, a process of development, and we had to have the feedback for it. Because it’s like, Jeff’s the kind of guy, he doesn’t want you just doing something. You don’t just throw s— at a board, right? It’s like, I’m doing this for this reason. Is it working? Yes, no. If it works, keep it. If it doesn’t, drop it. Try something else.

BEN REITER:

Early results were not promising.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Pops it but it lands. They run into each other. And he is safe at first.

JEFF LUHNOW:

We’re picked to be last by every paper and magazine out there. So, you’ve got to be optimistic this time of year, and I think we’ve done some things to make the team better.

BEN REITER:

The Astros kept losing, completing a three-year run in which they lost more games than any team in half a century. Crane stuck to the strategy of not trying to throw money at the problem. Their payroll plummeted to the lowest in the majors.

MAURY BROWN, Forbes:

The first thing they do is basically cut salary to the bone.

BEN REITER:

Maury Brown writes about the business of baseball for Forbes.

MAURY BROWN:

They were going to do everything through smarts, through draft, scouting.

BEN REITER:

Brown and others in the industry saw something cynical in the strategy. Tanking the way the Astros did meant that they would earn higher draft picks.

MAURY BROWN:

They have three consecutive years where they lose over 100 games. That allowed them to procure all the draft picks that they had. I remember at the time, you would talk to people and they were furious about this idea. That you would purposely lose goes against everything that you’re supposed to do in sports.

BEN REITER:

In my conversations with Luhnow he pushed back on the idea that the Astros were intentionally losing.

JEFF LUHNOW:

We’re never going to not try and win every game, but we’re not going to go all in on 2012 to turn a hundred-loss team into a 90-loss team. That’s not a sound return on investment.

BEN REITER:

In the interim, you’re being made fun of on “Jeopardy.”

ALEX TREBEK:

The large valve used to control wellbore fluids on oil rigs is this “preventer”; the Astros could have used one.

CONTESTANT:

What’s a blowout preventer?

ALEX TREBEK:

You are right.

BEN REITER:

You know, no one’s watching the games on TV.

JEFF LUHNOW:

We had a zero rating one night, I think.

BEN REITER:

0.0 Nielsen rating, right?

JEFF LUHNOW:

Yes. [Laughs]

BEN REITER:

Embarrassing plays, right? Like the butt slide, you remember.

JEFF LUHNOW:

Yep. It looked like the Bad News Bears out there some nights.

BEN REITER:

They were still losing when I first went down to Houston for Sports Illustrated. The plan was to write about whether there was any hope at all for a team that had become the laughingstock of the sports world.

But what started as an inside-the-magazine feature turned into something very different. In June 2014, Sports Illustrated put my story on the cover with a bold prediction that the Astros would win the World Series exactly three years later.

JESUS ORTIZ:

When that story came out, I remember thinking, no way. I think they’re on the right track, but are they really going to win the World Series in 2017?

BEN REITER:

The story, and especially the cover, was widely questioned. But after I’d embedded with the Astros, Luhnow’s approach seemed to me to be the next evolution of a winning strategy that had begun to take hold a decade earlier. It was known as moneyball, after the title of a book by Michael Lewis, and later a movie, about how the Oakland A’s exploited data and analytics to get wins from overlooked and undervalued players.

“Moneyball” 2011

BRAD PITT (AS BILLY BEANE):

This is the new direction of the Oakland A’s. We are card counters at the blackjack table, and we’re going to turn the odds on the casino.

TOM VERDUCCI, Sports Illustrated:

Baseball had been more of an art than a science. And what moneyball did was it emphasized the science of the game, even the mathematics of the game. And it really changed the way, I think, teams were built.

BEN REITER:

I worked with Tom Verducci at Sports Illustrated for 15 years. He’s been covering baseball for more than four decades and has written a lot about the changes to the game.

TOM VERDUCCI:

It became much more scientific, where people really wanted to believe in the numbers. We can measure things now to say this guy’s going to be good. We know what kind of pitches can work based on how fast they’re spinning. All this math came into the game, and the owners were like, “Let’s get fully behind it.”

BEN REITER:

Still, there’s some impression around the league that the Astros were taking this to an extreme, right? There was a lot of pushback against what they were doing.

TOM VERDUCCI:

Listen, there was a lot of pushback because this threatened the long-standing system in baseball. I mean, people worried about their jobs because now they see, if you’re an old-time scout or you’ve been in baseball your whole life and your wisdom is being valued based on your experiences, now that’s being threatened by kids who are just out of Ivy League who have these algorithms that they’re running.

BEN REITER:

What Luhnow was doing was like moneyball on steroids. The Astros’ approach went far beyond statistics; they were systematically combining both human expertise and technology to find a winning edge.

A prime example was how they utilized something known as “the shift,” repositioning their fielders, often in extreme ways, based on data that showed where opposing batters were most likely to hit the ball.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

A lot of guys bunched over there in right field.

JESUS ORTIZ:

People did it, but the Astros were extreme in their use of numbers and their use of positioning.

BEN REITER:

Luhnow’s Astros were applying data to every single thing they did. It heavily informed how they maximized their draft money, like their surprise move drafting Carlos Correa number one and shaving millions off his signing bonus to also lure pitcher Lance McCullers.

MAURY BROWN:

If you look at how you scout a player, you can use the numbers to really ferret out a lot more than what subjectively I see with my eyes. And that idea that the numbers can be their—scouting still matters, but it was that idea that we could use numbers to really quantify more. That lowers your risk. There’s going to be some winners, there’s going to be some losers. And what you’re trying to do is minimize the number of losers that you have.

BEN REITER:

So it’s essentially a way of maximizing efficiency of your operation.

MAURY BROWN:

Yeah.

BEN REITER:

The Astros’ use of data also had the potential to help transform players, like drastically lowering a hitter’s strikeout rate, as it did with outfielder George Springer. And it could help change a solid player into a potential Hall of Famer.

When Jeff Luhnow came to Houston, one of the players he inherited was a slap-hitting middle infielder. The player had trouble getting signed at all out of Venezuela, in large part because he was 5 feet, 5 inches tall. Most scouts using their intuition wrote him off.

The guy’s name was José Altuve.

Despite his height, the Astros’ data analysts saw that he could get his bat on everything. Even pitches out of the strike zone. But they wondered, what if he didn’t try to do that? What if he became more selective, swinging only at pitches over the heart of the plate—pitches the data revealed he could not only just hit, but hit very, very hard?

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Fly ball, that’s smacked.

BEN REITER:

And it wasn’t too long before this 5-foot-5 slap hitter transformed himself into one of the best hitters in the game, and the face of the Astros.

TOM VERDUCCI:

There was a lot of time and effort devoted to hacking the percentages of the game from people who did not grow up within the ethos of baseball, but in the ethos of the business world.

BEN REITER:

Why do you think you upset the so-called traditionalists so much, starting around this time?

JEFF LUHNOW:

Change is by definition hard for people to accept because they get used to things a certain way. And especially when change is stimulated by an outsider who may not have the respect for the traditions and the history and all of the things that people who grew up and spent their entire lives in the game have.

BEN REITER:

One of those criticisms was that you and the Astros were turning players into numbers, into widgets. How do you take that criticism?

JEFF LUHNOW:

It didn’t bother me that much, to be honest with you. This idea that if you’re utilizing technology and analytics, by definition, you are a cold, unfeeling person or management, it’s not true.

BEN REITER:

I want to ask you to define something for me. It’s a term that I’ve heard you use in the past. You use the term “the edge,” right? But there’s a next level to that.

JEFF LUHNOW:

I’ve used it a lot in my career. It’s called “the bleeding edge.” What it means is you test the boundaries of what has been done. If you want to excel in the world of sports, you have to take risks and you have to be willing to get the cuts and bruises that come along with that.

ANTONIO PADILLA, Astros Mgr., Video and Advance Info., 2016-22:

I was like, wow, these guys are willing to do whatever it takes to find an advantage, and I knew the Astros were the team I want to work for.

BEN REITER:

Antonio Padilla became a manager in the Astros video room. This is the first time he’s spoken publicly about his experience with the Astros.

Even though you’d previously worked for three other teams, this was like a whole new world.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah, absolutely. They were like leaps and bounds over the other teams.

BEN REITER:

Padilla and his colleagues worked on innovative uses of data and video, during training and in real time during games. They leaned into radar systems, like TrackMan.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

We had live TrackMan data, where we’d be able to track pitches. So it’s like, “Hey, so-and-so’s slider’s not looking that well on TrackMan tonight. We need to tell one of the coaches.” So, we could call down and—

BEN REITER:

So it’s like using real-time data to make coaching decisions, make strategy decisions?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah. I mean, ultimately, it’s up to the coaches if they want to relay that information. We don’t want to tell this guy his slider’s not working tonight, because it could really get into their head.

BEN REITER:

This kind of technology was helping coaches and players reach new levels of performance.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

We had Edgertronic cameras. We were the first team to actually implement them into our video systems.

BEN REITER:

These are extremely high-frame rate cameras that can kind of break down what a player’s doing to a level that no one’s really seen before, right?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Exactly. Yeah, and they’re very expensive cameras. A lot of teams probably knew about it and didn’t want to invest in it, but the Astros just said, “Hey, this is a game changer, we’re going to put a lot of money behind this.” Being able to capture live footage for that is, I mean, so valuable.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

And Villar will come in to score as the Astros lead—

GAME ANNOUNCER:

—Astros were dwelling in the bottom of the cellar. Well, how things have changed in just one season.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

—against the first-place Astros. Still sounds funny to say, “first-place Astros.”

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Let the celebrations start! Astros in the postseason for the first time since 2005.

BEN REITER:

The Astros weren’t the laughingstock of the league anymore.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

And the Astros have advanced to the division series against Kansas City.

JEFF LUHNOW:

They battled through every element of it and made it to today, and I couldn’t be happier for them. But you know what? They’re not done.

BEN REITER:

Entering 2017, they were actually contenders.

TOM VERDUCCI:

They started believing that they were a team that could win the World Series and not just hoping they were that kind of team.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Back-to-back homers by Correa and Gattis.

BEN REITER:

But the team still had a few holes. Their extreme cost-cutting had rid them of most of their expensive veterans, and they had developed a new generation of up-and-coming stars. But that meant they were very young. Luhnow knew their roster needed an experienced leader to tie everything together.

They eventually landed on Carlos Beltran.

Voice of

CARLOS BELTRAN

2018

CARLOS BELTRAN:

They called me and they said, “Carlos, we want you. We need you in the ballclub.”

BEN REITER:

Beltran wouldn’t speak to me for this film. But I interviewed him in early 2018 as I was reporting my book, Astroball.

CARLOS BELTRAN:

I’ve been in the game for more than 15, 20 years, so you get to know when you see talent. You get to sense that. There’s a good group of guys, young group of guys, talented, in their peak.

BEN REITER:

Did they mention in your talks that they wanted your leadership, your chemistry?

CARLOS BELTRAN:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, A.J., he called me about—put next to me the guys you think I could help.

BEN REITER:

Beltran was 40 years old in 2017, nearing the end of what looked to be a Hall of Fame career. He had a good season the year before, but based on analytics alone it was hard to make a convincing case for signing the aging slugger. But Luhnow agreed to bet big on him—a $16 million contract—because of the potential effect he could have on the clubhouse.

JEFF LUHNOW:

We were missing that kind of person, that, “Oh, that’s how you do it if you want to be a Hall of Famer.” You have to come in early. You have to stay late. You have to watch video. You have to study the game. That’s how you do it. And Carlos did that during spring training. The video room was constantly full with young players trying to learn from him or watch their own video and all of that. So it was—it had the desired impact for sure.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Once we got Carlos Beltran, he was a big part of bringing the team to the next level. Everybody kind of felt like he was immediately one of the leaders of the team.

BEN REITER:

What kind of stuff would he do? What did he bring specifically?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

He was just like a walking encyclopedia. He’s been around so long and been a superstar for so long. And you could just tell immediately. He just has this aura about him that—especially with the Latin players, that was kind of like their Michael Jordan, a guy that they looked up to for a long time.

BEN REITER:

With Beltran and a few other key acquisitions, the 2017 Astros became one of the best teams in baseball—almost unrecognizable from the last-place team Jeff Luhnow had inherited.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Hurricane Harvey now a Category 4 storm.

MALE NEWSREADER:

We’re live here in Houston. Waters keep rising. The city is now facing an unprecedented flood event. Thousands of people are in need of rescue—

BEN REITER:

Not even the devastating Category 4 Hurricane Harvey could break their momentum. In fact, it gave them a rallying cry.

And throughout that fairy-tale season, no one seemed to notice the unusual banging sound that would sometimes happen at home games, right before the opposing pitcher threw the ball.

28 bangs

BEN REITER:

Some 28 times the night they beat Baltimore.

41 bangs

BEN REITER:

Forty-one times in a close win over the Yankees.

54 bangs

BEN REITER:

Fifty-four times that night Mike Bolsinger and the Blue Jays went down in the blowout that ended his career.

Then, in late September, the White Sox’s Danny Farquhar stepped up to the mound. It was 10 p.m. on a weeknight, and the stadium was pretty empty—and quiet.

Right away, he heard something.

Voice of

DANNY FARQUHAR

The Edge podcast, 2020

DANNY FARQUHAR:

Every time I would throw a change-up, the catcher would put down a four. I would come set and I would hear a bang.

And then, finally, on the third change-up that I threw him, in my head I said, “If I come set and I hear a bang, I’m calling the catcher out and we’re changing our signs.” Sure enough, I come set, I hear the bang. I remember being really upset, staring into their dugout. I was absolutely sure something was happening.

BEN REITER:

Farquhar didn’t publicly complain at the time, and the Astros actually lost that night. But it didn’t matter: They’d already made the playoffs and a month later would face the Dodgers in the World Series.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

It’s Game 1 of the 2017 World Series.

BEN REITER:

What was the feel heading into the 2017 World Series?

STEPHANIE APSTEIN, Sports Illustrated:

I think people thought this was going to be a pretty good series.

BEN REITER:

Stephanie Apstein was there with me, covering the Fall Classic for Sports Illustrated.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

It was the loudest ballpark I think I had ever been in.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Back at the wall, and it’s another home run. And the three-run lead is back.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

It wasn’t until Game 7 that it felt like one team got out ahead in a way that the other team couldn’t match.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Here’s a ground ball, right side, could do it. The Houston Astros are world champions for the first time in franchise history!

TONY ADAMS:

I jumped up and I cheered. And it was a relief. And after all the years, obviously, of being a fan to finally get there.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

The Sports Illustrated cover in 2014 and the article by Ben Reiter. They nailed it.

TONY ADAMS:

It didn’t quite seem real at that moment. And actually for several weeks after, it didn’t quite sink in. I would text my brother that they did win, right? I didn’t dream that. It’s like, “Oh, no, they won.”

JESUS ORTIZ:

It gave people a chance to celebrate at a time when there was little to celebrate in Houston. All these flooded people, they had something to rejoice for a little bit.

MARCO HERNANDEZ, Astros fan:

The city of Houston needed this after Hurricane Harvey.

CHAD CRAWFORD, Astros fan:

We’ll overcome any adversity, no matter what.

RYAN WONG, Astros fan:

But the Astros picked us up. They gave us some hope. They gave us something to cheer for. And now we’re champions of the world!

CARLOS BELTRAN:

It only took me 20 years to get to this position. But you know what, I’m happy. I’m blessed. And I want to give the glory and the honor to God for this moment.

JEFF LUHNOW:

As the architect, I got to tell you, there’s a lot of people doing the drawings behind me. This is Houston’s first championship in baseball, and I couldn’t be prouder to be a general manager of the team that delivers it to them.

BEN REITER:

That night on the field, Jim Crane told me even when the heat was on them, he’d always encouraged Luhnow to stick to their plan.

Our once-outlandish SI cover prediction had actually—unbelievably—come true.

DAN PATRICK:

Three years and four months ago the cover of Sports Illustrated was the Astros were going to win the World Series in 2017, and Ben joins us. Congrats on the prediction. How was your night, Ben?

BEN REITER:

It was short, Dan. I think I still smell like champagne and cigar smoke from the Astros clubhouse. But, you know, when we made that prediction 3 1/2 years ago we thought it had a chance, but to see it actually come through? Pretty amazing.

I was always mindful of the more ruthless aspects of what Luhnow was doing with the Astros, but it wasn’t until the next year when I was on my book tour that they did something that really made me question their tactics—and especially their ethics. It started with a mid-season trade.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

We have breaking news to bring you from the Rogers Center tonight. Closing pitcher Roberto Osuna has been traded to the Houston Astros. The 24-year-old is awaiting trial for domestic assault. He’s also serving a 75-game suspension in accordance with MLB policy.

BEN REITER:

The fact that Jeff Luhnow and Jim Crane—especially at the height of the #MeToo movement—would trade for an accused domestic abuser made me wonder if I’d missed something, if the Astros were willing to go to a darker place than I imagined in their pursuit of an edge.

BOB LEY, Outside the Lines:

The Osuna case, which casts this model front office and model organization in a different light. What do you make of that?

BEN REITER:

Well, pick your word, Bob. Problematic. Questionable. Morally troubling.

I found it indefensible at the time, and years later, I still have trouble fully understanding it.

Roberto Osuna is suspended for 75 games for domestic assault. Walk me through the decision to add him to the Astros roster.

JEFF LUHNOW:

Roberto Osuna’s a player that we had been watching for a long time, since he was originally signed. I knew the quality of him as a reliever, for sure. We didn’t have a closer. And we needed to address that.

We had asked for him the last year during the off-season and last year at the trade deadline, and the cost was way too high. Obviously, the cost had come down because he was suspended and they wanted to move him. So I talked to Jim about it, and we discussed it and made a decision to go ahead and execute the trade.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

They saw Osuna as a distressed asset. The Blue Jays were kind of looking to unload him, and they were willing to unload him for a lot less than it would have taken to get a closer of his caliber. And so where you might see another team say, “This doesn’t really feel worth it,” the Astros did the math and were like, “This is great. We get a closer for less than we would have gotten him. Done.”

BEN REITER:

I feel like the Astros at this point had been through so much bad PR and come out the other side as literal champions that I wonder if they’re like, “Well, we can take on more of this and we’ll be fine.” Memories are short, winning lasts forever.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

I think if you think you’re right, you’re willing to endure a lot to get there. And I think that sometimes that is very beneficial to your career, because it helps you ignore the haters, but sometimes the haters have a point and you miss it.

BEN REITER:

Osuna became a key part of the team’s success. His case never went to trial, and the PR debacle was largely forgotten.

But in 2019, as the team celebrated their second World Series appearance in three years, Luhnow’s top assistant, a former Wall Street valuation expert named Brandon Taubman, brought it all back.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah, that was definitely a night I won’t forget. I’m standing right next to him in the clubhouse celebrating, and there’s obviously champagne flowing.

BEN REITER:

Stephanie Apstein was there that night, too.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

I was in the clubhouse with two other female reporters, and there was an Astros executive, whose name I did not at the time know, who started yelling toward us that he was so f—ing glad they’d gotten Osuna,

ANTONIO PADILLA:

“I’m so f—ing glad that we got Osuna. I’m so f—ing glad we got Osuna.” And I remember just being so shocked by that.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

And eventually, I came to understand that it was Astros Assistant General Manager Brandon Taubman who was engaged in that outburst, in part because he’d been drinking, but in part because the team felt that they got too much grief from writers, specifically female writers, about having traded for a player who had been suspended for domestic violence. And so he was sort of making a point that, yet again, the Astros were right.

BEN REITER:

Taubman’s ire that night was specifically focused on one of the reporters standing with Apstein, who’d been particularly critical and persistent.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

I went to Astros PR to request an interview with Brandon Taubman. They said they were not going to make him available and they had no comment.

BEN REITER:

Two days later, Apstein published a story on SI.com about the incident. And the Astros PR office went on the attack.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

The Astros responded, calling her article “misleading and completely irresponsible.”

MALE NEWSREADER:

Big part of this seems to be that the Astros suggested this didn’t happen.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

—and said that it was a fabricated story.

BEN REITER:

I think the quote was like “fabricating a story where there was none.”

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

Where none exists.

BEN REITER:

“Where none exists.”

The Astros claimed that Taubman had just been trying to support Osuna after a bad outing on the mound that night.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

Fortunately for me, unfortunately for them, there was a room full of reporters. So pretty quickly other reporters corroborated what I had seen.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

NPR’s David Folkenflik reported details of the exchange.

DAVID FOLKENFLIK:

I want to be clear: It was intense. It was pointed. It was at this cluster of three women.

BEN REITER:

By the end of the week the incident was threatening to overshadow the World Series. Jim Crane issued a personal apology to Apstein. And Taubman was fired.

JEFF LUHNOW:

First of all, apologies to Stephanie and to the rest of the people that were involved in the incident. We have separated with Brandon Taubman; he’s no longer an employee of the Astros. His behavior was inappropriate and not representative of who the Astros are and our culture and what we stand for.

BEN REITER:

Taubman now works in commercial real estate. He wouldn’t go on camera or comment on anything other than to offer that he still “deeply regrets” his behavior and the pain it caused to many, including putting the Astros in a difficult position. He said over the past four years he’s tried to atone for his mistakes and has volunteered as a data scientist for a domestic violence organization.

Taubman had helped lead the charge on many of the Astros’ cutting-edge initiatives, like TrackMan and Edgertronic cameras. But he was also seen as overly assertive and confrontational.

JEFF LUHNOW:

Somebody made a mistake, and they have paid for that and we have paid for that, and obviously everybody, if we could do it all over again, I would have prevented that from happening, but I didn’t know it was happening.

BEN REITER:

Wait a second, we were talking about Taubman. He made a mistake, but it wasn’t just limited to that moment, right? This was like—the roots of this went back years and involved a lot of different aspects of the organization.

JEFF LUHNOW:

But Brandon didn’t talk a lot about Osuna. I was surprised that this even came up. And I will tell you that the Astros did not do things correctly in handling that situation and I think paid the price for it.

BEN REITER:

So you wouldn’t draw a connection between a certain aspect of the organization’s culture and that reaction either?

JEFF LUHNOW:

Well, that reaction was protecting the Astros, but it was a completely illogical, ridiculous reaction to have, and it was wrong, completely wrong. And it was above my pay grade. I had nothing to do with that decision, and I had to be the one to execute it, which made me look like the person that was somehow involved, even though I wasn’t.

BEN REITER:

But you were in the meetings, though, when some of these decisions were being made.

JEFF LUHNOW:

There was a series of emails going back and forth. I was getting ready for the World Series. I did not have an active role in those conversations at all.

BEN REITER:

A couple of weeks later, after a devastating Game 7 loss in the World Series, things went from bad to worse.

MALE NEWSREADER:

The article in The Athletic that has everybody talking quotes the former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers directly claiming that in 2017, the World Series run, the Astros used a camera system to steal signs and alert their hitters in real time as to what pitch was coming.

MALE SPORTS COMMENTATOR:

Excuse me, you know what that means? That means the manager was aware of it. That means the bench coach was probably aware of it. The players certainly were aware of it! They were in on it!

MALE NEWSREADER:

The very sad implication is that somehow the Astros 2017 World Series title is tainted—

FEMALE REPORTER:

Should the Astros be stripped of their title?

MALE INTERVIEWEE:

Yes, they should. The title is illegitimate.

BEN REITER:

In a stunning admission, former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers and three other members of the organization told reporters Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal about the sign-stealing scheme the team had been using two years earlier.

MALE REPORTER:

They used a camera in center field. They would then transfer the sign from the catcher. Then, using audible sound in the dugout—a trash can!—to alert the hitter. If there’s no bang, fastball. If there’s a bang, something soft is coming.

BEN REITER:

It was a revelation that shocked me, and it upended much of the mythology around the Astros—which I had helped create.

MALE SPORTS COMMENTATOR:

The Astros are now public enemy No. 1 in baseball. This is just far too calculated. Far too cunning. Far too deceitful. This is ridiculous, man.

BEN REITER:

The Astros had gone over the edge with one of baseball’s most storied traditions: decoding the signs opposing pitchers and catchers use to communicate.

TOM VERDUCCI:

Signs are super-important in baseball because the pitcher can throw a variety of different pitches, but the catcher needs to know what’s coming. Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to catch the ball, literally.

DOUG WHITE:

It’s basically a way for a catcher to relay to the pitcher a suggestion of what pitch to throw to this batter. Some of these sign systems I was like, “Wow, I have to be a mathematician to figure this out. How do you do this in the middle of a game with 50,000 fans and a dude on second base?”

Some teams and players are better at reading sequences and signals than others. And some teams make it a priority and some teams don’t. It’s like poker, right? So, can I get a tell off of you or not?

BEN REITER:

Teams are looking for all this stuff.

DOUG WHITE:

All that stuff, yeah. And that’s absolutely 1 million percent fair game.

BEN REITER:

What’s not fair game is using technology to help you figure out the opposing team’s signs in real time. In the years leading up to 2017, the league had begun allowing teams to use cameras and monitor live video feeds during games, but only for the purpose of analyzing players’ performance and helping decide whether to challenge umpires’ calls.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Expanded video replay is coming to Major League Baseball.

MALE NEWSREADER:

There will be 12 cameras at every stadium.

MALE NEWSREADER:

—to make most umpire calls subject to video review.

TOM VERDUCCI:

Having video monitors close to the dugout proximity was a recipe for disaster. I mean, it’s like if you have a child and he’s coming home from school and you tell him, “I’m going to leave the cookies out. You can have one cookie when you come home.” Come on. [Laughs] He’s going to have more than one.

BEN REITER:

The temptation was hard to resist. In 2017, MLB investigated both the Red Sox and Yankees over sign-stealing allegations.

MALE REPORTER:

Breaking right now, some bombshell accusations against the Red Sox. The team is accused tonight of cheating in the dugout.

ROB MANFRED, MLB Commissioner:

I take any issue that affects the play of the game on the field extremely seriously.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Red Sox video replay personnel reportedly sent pitch info—

MALE NEWSREADER:

They didn’t use this between every pitch of every game, it seems, but, rather, they waited for someone to be on second base. And they did that because it’s very easy when you’re on second to then relay the signal to the batter.

BEN REITER:

It would become known as the “base runner system.” And it would eventually come out that the Astros had a version of that, too. Antonio Padilla admits he and his fellow video room staffers helped run the system to great effect.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

So, you could call down and say, like, “Hey, the catchers are using outs plus one for their sign sequence, so relay that to the runner on second.” I think the codebreaking could definitely give an advantage. If you’re able to tell the runner on second what signs they’re potentially using, I think that could definitely help.

BEN REITER:

Inside the Astros clubhouse, Padilla says sign stealing became a huge focus.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

It got to the point where when we were playing certain teams that we thought were doing other things, that we would use multiple signs, even with no runners on.

BEN REITER:

It sounds like an extremely paranoid environment.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah, and that’s the perfect way to describe it. It was kind of like this paranoia where we just had to do everything to protect ourselves and try to gain an advantage to try to compete.

BEN REITER:

In September 2017, the commissioner of baseball, Rob Manfred, tried to contain the burgeoning sign-stealing problem without causing more of an issue. He imposed symbolic fines on the Red Sox and Yankees and privately warned club personnel not to talk about the topic to the media. He also sent a memo on illegal sign stealing to all 30 teams and put managers and GMs on notice they’d be held accountable in the future.

TOM VERDUCCI:

If you’re doing these kinds of things, you better stop now, because you’re going to be dealt with harshly. That should have set off alarms and sirens and whistles everywhere among all 30 teams. And it didn’t in Houston.

BEN REITER:

But after Commissioner Manfred sent out that memo, the Astros would not only continue to carry out a base runner scheme similar to what the Sox and Yankees had done, but also something far more insidious. Padilla told me it had begun earlier in the season with an unusual request from the Astros bench coach, Alex Cora.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

This was probably two months into the season. We’re well into our way and I get asked to put a TV monitor down below the dugouts. And at the time we didn’t have any TVs down there. So I thought when I was asked to put a monitor down there, I thought they just wanted to see when the inning was over or who was batting. So I was happy to oblige by that.

BEN REITER:

What was it actually used for?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

From my understanding, it was used for looking at the signs from the catcher and then relaying those signs to the batter at the plate.

BEN REITER:

And how were they doing it?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

They would look at the TV monitor and then be able to see the signs of the catcher and then have some type of audible sound or a bang on something to relay that to the hitter what type of pitch was coming.

I mean, instantly I knew it wasn’t right, but what was I going to do? I was the lowest guy on the totem pole there. You know, if the coaches knew and the other players knew, then—I’m just rolling with it.

BEN REITER:

Did you feel guilty as the season went on and this kept happening? Because I know you weren’t doing it night-to-night, but you facilitated it.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah. I mean, it was definitely something that’s kind of on your conscience, and then you’re thinking that OK, maybe this has a part of our success, so you start to feel more guilty about that. And then obviously it’s in the back of your mind over the years before it gets out to the public.

BEN REITER:

There was a big incentive for guys like Padilla to not rock the boat. It could jeopardize what’s known as their playoff share.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

One thing that people don’t understand or maybe don’t know about is the way that compensation for a lot of team employees works. They get paid by the team, but at the end of the year, teams that make the playoffs are allowed to vote on who gets a share of the gate money from the playoffs. And so, especially if you make the World Series, especially if you win the World Series, that’s a lot of money. And so, I think that a lot of team employees are aware that the team is their boss, but also the players are kind of their boss. And so I think that that leads to some difficult incentives.

BEN REITER:

So, 2017, the Astros win the World Series. Do they vote to give you a playoff share?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah, a full-time share. A full share.

BEN REITER:

And how much was that?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

$450,000, I think.

BEN REITER:

And you’re making $45,000 a year?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah, it was, like, 10 X my salary.

BEN REITER:

Wow.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah. I mean, I was able to pay off my student loans. Able to pay off my car. You know, it just alleviated a lot of things I had going on as far as finances.

BEN REITER:

It’s like winning the lottery.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Oh, exactly. It is. I mean, it’s a windfall.

BEN REITER:

With the playoff share system existing, did it feel like this was a big incentive to always keep the players happy and always stay in their good graces and anything they asked for, we’re going to give to you?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah, I wouldn’t say it’s a—I wouldn’t say that was the incentive, because that was—I guess that was part of the job. We were there for the players. We were there for the coaches as well.

BEN REITER:

If an influential player asks you to do something, you’re probably not going to say no, right?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever said no unless it was just something that couldn’t be done. But yeah, I always tried my best, I guess, to appease whatever they needed me to do.

BEN REITER:

Once the Astros banging scheme finally became public in November 2019, the league began investigating the team.

So did one extremely die-hard Astros fan, Tony Adams.

BEN REITER:

When you first read the reports and there was all this supporting video, did that start to change the way you had viewed that 2017 championship two years earlier?

TONY ADAMS:

I think at that point, no. I was still kind of waiting to get more information. Obviously you don’t want it to be true, so you were hoping that there was a chance that this just wasn’t accurate. But I went on to some other sites and found some information, and somebody had posted some video of some plays where they were banging on the trash can.

BEN REITER:

Adams realized that he might be able to figure out how widespread the banging was by watching—and listening closely to—old broadcasts of the games.

TONY ADAMS:

And that kind of became the puzzle that I wanted to try to solve.

BEN REITER:

What led you to make this decision, though?

TONY ADAMS:

The core of it is I wanted to know the truth. I really wanted to know what happened.

BEN REITER:

Adams would have to review more than 8,200 pitches the Astros had faced at home that season. So he developed an app.

TONY ADAMS:

Well, I’m a web developer, so I went with what I knew and basically developed a web application that would allow me to view the pitches, make a selection if there was a bang or not and jump to the next pitch.

So I was able to segment each pitch into an audio file, and the spectrogram shows the full spectrum of the frequency. So this allows you to see basically all the sounds. These lines here are actually announcers talking.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Beltran with just one of his 14 home runs hitting right-handed this year.

TONY ADAMS:

This line here is actually where the ball either hits the bat or hits the catcher’s mitt.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Upstairs. Two and one.

TONY ADAMS:

And you can see here in the lower frequency, a little spike here, a little blob here. That’s actually a bang.

BEN REITER:

These really jump out. Even I can see these, and I haven’t looked at 8,200 of these.

Adams ended up logging 1,143 bangs out of those 8,200 pitches across dozens of home games. He also pinpointed when the banging may have come to an end: that night when Danny Farquhar was on the mound.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Danny Farquhar on the season between Tampa.

TONY ADAMS:

This is the Farquhar game.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Gattis pinch-hitting for Brian McCann.

TONY ADAMS:

So it’s the bottom of the eighth. Gattis was up. And you can see here that there was a bang in this one. If you listen to it, it’s very obvious. The crowd wasn’t very loud that time. The announcers were not talking a lot during this game. Very clear.

BEN REITER:

Very loud.

TONY ADAMS:

Here we go with another change-up and there’s a double bang.

BEN REITER:

Man, that sounds like thunder or something, right?

TONY ADAMS:

Yeah, it’s very obvious. You can see that the crowd is pretty sparse, so there’s not a lot of crowd noise. At some point, Farquhar made a connection that whenever he was throwing a breaking ball, he was hearing this sound. He gets a signal, and if you look, you can see, “I think they have the signals.”

BEN REITER:

So you’re reading his lips. You can see he says, “I think they have.” This is the moment.

TONY ADAMS:

Right, right. And if you look at the game here, after this four-seamer, they called for a breaking ball and they got the bang, and that’s when he stepped off. And there was no more bangs for the rest of the game, even though there were plenty of pitches that were breaking balls and should have been.

BEN REITER:

Essentially, the second that Danny Farquhar heard this, it stopped.

TONY ADAMS:

It stopped.

BEN REITER:

At least this form of sign-stealing.

TONY ADAMS:

Correct. There were no more bangs during the regular season, and I wasn’t able to hear anything in the postseason either.

BEN REITER:

And we know that the moment that happened with Farquhar, the guys behind the dugout were taking the TV down, hiding everything. That was a moment of panic for the team.

TONY ADAMS:

They panic at that point.

BEN REITER:

After six weeks of research, Adams was on the brink of doing one of the hardest things he’d ever done: making all this damning evidence against his beloved Astros public.

TONY ADAMS:

It was a Wednesday, and I had the site ready. I had written the tweet. And then I paused for a second, because I knew if I hit send, that was it. It was out there.

I’ve never been part of something that went viral. That did. It took off pretty quickly.

Voice of

MIKE BOLSINGER

The Edge podcast, 2020

MIKE BOLSINGER:

One of my buddies actually texted me. He’s like, “Man, have you seen this?” I remember looking back on MLB.com, like, man, what was the last time I pitched against them? And I looked at it and I saw it was the highest one. And that’s when I finally was like, man, OK, this is for real. They really cheated on my game, against me.

It was a heck of an edge to take. When you know it’s coming, you’re taking everything away. Especially a guy that is not as elite as a lot of people.

How you think it’s OK would be probably the number one question that I’d ask. How can you not think this was wrong what you did?

BEN REITER:

In the end, Adams linked at least 19 Astros hitters to the scheme. A few, most notably José Altuve, showing little to no involvement, while most others were in deep.

But there would be very few formal consequences for them because of a fateful decision—unknown to the public at the time—by the commissioner at the outset of his investigation.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

He decided to grant them immunity to speak openly to him. In part, I think, to avoid a union grievance, in part because I think he felt that nobody would tell him the truth if they were worried about punishment, in part because he felt that it was going to be hard to determine who used the system for three games, versus 30, versus the whole season; that it was going to be hard to assign degrees of culpability. For all of those reasons, he decided to give them immunity.

BEN REITER:

Also probably in part because he didn’t want to damage his own product at a certain point.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

Sure. I mean, if you suspend the Astros, are they not supposed to field a team? Do they bring up all of their Triple A guys? That’s a big decision.

BEN REITER:

Commissioner Manfred wouldn’t talk to us about the decision or answer written questions. Nor would any of the 2017 Astros players we approached, or the players’ union. But when it came to light, some players from other teams were publicly critical of the immunity decision.

CODY BELLINGER, Los Angeles Dodgers:

I thought Manfred’s punishment was weak, giving them immunity.

MIKE TROUT, Los Angeles Angels:

To cheat like that and not get anything, it’s sad to see, for sure.

NICK MARKAKIS, Atlanta Braves:

They’re going to be able to go out there and compete with no ramifications at all, which is wrong, and I think the commissioner completely handled it the wrong way.

BEN REITER:

Manfred went on ESPN to defend the decision.

February 2020

ROB MANFRED:

You could have made the choice to go with the management people and sort of given them immunity and found out how the players were involved. Whatever dissatisfaction is out there with the grant of immunity to players, I think it would have been 10 times worse if you let the management people off and then tried to go after the players.

FAY VINCENT, MLB Commissioner, 1989-92:

I mean, I would have thrown some of the ringleaders out of baseball for a considerable period of time. When you cheat on the field, telling people when a fastball’s coming, you’re really playing with the heart of the game.

BEN REITER:

Former MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent told me that granting the players immunity sent the wrong message.

FAY VINCENT:

Baseball and Manfred decided it was better to have it be a minor event than a major event. In other words, to have it a major event, you were going to have to teach players that one of the problems of cheating is you can get caught. And if you get caught, it can cost you.

BEN REITER:

Let me ask you, it’s kind of like a devil’s advocate position that I’ve heard. People have cheated in baseball since just after the first sign was put down. What’s the difference? People have been doing it forever, and this is just the latest iteration of that.

FAY VINCENT:

The reason we have to have compliance with rules is that if you don’t have rules, you don’t have a system. The rules are what make a game a game. So the question is what would I have done as commissioner? I’d have thrown them all out. I would have said they’re out for the rest of their lives.

BEN REITER:

Rest of their lives?

FAY VINCENT:

Rest of their lives.

BEN REITER:

Lifetime ban?

FAY VINCENT:

Lifetime ban.

BEN REITER:

But when it came to accountability, Commissioner Manfred’s focus was where he said it would be after the Red Sox and Yankees cheating dust-ups back in 2017: on the manager and general manager.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

The one question they just kept hammering, they wanted to know if Jeff knew about it, and they wanted to know if any of it continued into 2018. And I told them from my knowledge, I don’t think Jeff knew.

BEN REITER:

Did it feel like they’re kind of zeroing in on Jeff Luhnow’s responsibility here?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah. It seemed like that from that testimony. That they really wanted to find out if he knew or not.

BEN REITER:

The league ended up interviewing 68 witnesses and reviewed tens of thousands of emails, texts, video clips and photos. When the commissioner’s investigation was finished, the only Astros sanctioned for the cheating were Jeff Luhnow and the manager A.J. Hinch. Both were suspended from baseball for a year.

JEFF LUHNOW:

The people that created it, that ran it, that executed it, essentially those people didn’t get punished. And I took the responsibility for the organization, as did A.J.

BEN REITER:

While the league’s investigators didn’t uncover evidence that Luhnow knew about the banging scheme, they did find evidence that he had, quote, “some knowledge of the team’s other illegal sign-stealing efforts”—a charge Luhnow continues to deny.

Manfred pointed out that Luhnow had never circulated his memo about electronic sign stealing back in 2017, and as GM it was his job to make sure the team was following the rules.

JEFF LUHNOW:

I was punished because I was the general manager overseeing baseball operations of a team that violated the rules. And I was punished for not forwarding a memo. I guess if I had pressed forward to the memo and forwarded it to A.J.—which, he already had the memo, so I didn’t feel there was a need to do that. And this memo was well known in the industry. It’s not like people lack the information. Every player, every person involved knew what was in the memo.

BEN REITER:

Since the scandal, I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to talk to A.J. Hinch, who’s now the manager of the Detroit Tigers. The league’s report noted that while he didn’t stop the cheating, he signaled his disapproval on at least two occasions by smashing the video monitor used to carry it out.

His only extensive interview about the scandal was on MLB Network with Tom Verducci.

February 2020

A.J. HINCH:

My mindset at that point was to demonstrate that I didn’t like it.

TOM VERDUCCI:

So what did you do?

A.J. HINCH:

I hit it. I mean, I just—a bat. I mean, I didn’t like it.

TOM VERDUCCI:

You took a bat to it.

A.J. HINCH:

Yeah, I didn’t like it. I should’ve done more.

ANTONIO PADILLA:

I remember one day I saw the monitor was broken. I think he felt like it was actually hurting the team at the time, and I think he just got frustrated with it and decided to try to end it there without telling anybody. Just kind of doing it on his own.

BEN REITER:

In your understanding, who was the driving force behind wanting to implement this system?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

Yeah, so it seemed like it was Carlos Beltran’s idea. Obviously he didn’t force everybody to do it, but it seemed like, from my perspective at the time, he was having one of his worst seasons, and he probably thought, “Hey, I’m here to help. I’m here to help this team win. I’m having a bad season. Let me try to drum up something to get this team going and get myself going as well.”

BEN REITER:

Did anyone try to push back against him?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

I’ve heard of some other players saying, “Hey, this isn’t right. We shouldn’t do this.” But honestly, it ultimately came down to the coaches. The coaches knew about it—the hitting coaches, our manager, obviously the bench coach as well. But if they didn’t shut it down then, I mean, players are just going to follow their leaders, in my opinion.

BEN REITER:

Was it almost like Beltran had more power than A.J. Hinch?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

That’s tough to answer. He definitely had a way of having the team go behind anything that he wanted to do. I think A.J. kind of bought into that as well.

BEN REITER:

Beltran was the only player mentioned by name in the commissioner’s report. He’s apologized, but also spread the blame to an organizational culture that didn’t exactly emphasize rule following.

YES Network

CARLOS BELTRAN:

I wish I would’ve asked more questions about what we were doing. I wish the organization would have said to us, “Hey, man, what you guys are doing, we need to stop this.” Nobody really said anything. We’re winning.

BEN REITER:

After the report came out, Beltran lost his new job as the skipper of the New York Mets before managing a single game for them. But now he’s back with the Mets, as a special assistant to their general manager.

The report also singled out bench coach Alex Cora, who was by then managing the Red Sox. Boston fired Cora. And though he was later cleared of wrongdoing in a sign-stealing investigation there, he was then suspended by the league for the Astros cheating. Cora apologized, and like Beltran he was rehired, and continues to lead the Red Sox today.

For Jeff Luhnow, the commissioner’s year-long suspension was only the beginning.

JEFF LUHNOW:

I was on a plane on the way to Cabo with my wife to celebrate her birthday and our anniversary. And I had asked Jim a few days before, I said, “Hey, should I cancel my trip? Because I know they’re getting ready to make a decision.” He’s like, “No no no, don’t worry about it. Go. Go on the trip. Enjoy yourself.”

I got a call from Jim as we were in baggage claim, and I took it. And he told me what his decision was as far as my employment goes, and—very short conversation.

BEN REITER:

How long was that phone call?

JEFF LUHNOW:

It was like 30 seconds, maybe.

JIM CRANE:

I’m going above and beyond MLB’s penalty. Today I have made the decision to dismiss A.J. Hinch and Jeff Luhnow. We need to move forward with a clean slate, and the Astros will become stronger—a stronger organization because of this today.

BEN REITER:

As for Jim Crane, Manfred went out of his way to make it clear in his report that he’d had nothing to do with the scandal, noting he’d instructed Luhnow to make sure his team abided by the rules.

My question is why would the commissioner go to such pains so prominently to clear the owner of the team of any responsibility for this scandal?

FAY VINCENT:

Because the commissioner works for the owner, and the most difficult thing in the world is to be working for people in a situation where you also have to discipline them. In baseball, the commissioner has the duty, the obligation, to police the very people he works for. That’s a relationship that is totally all by itself. That’s a conflict. That’s a challenge. That’s an impossibility.

BEN REITER:

As commissioner, Fay Vincent was famous for his clashes with owners and was ousted after just three years. He recalled something one of the owners once told him.

FAY VINCENT:

He said, “Your job is to make us money. We can run the baseball part. We understand baseball. We don’t need you. All we want you to do is think of ways to expand our revenue base and make money for us. And if you’re not making money for us, you’re getting in the way.”

BEN REITER:

The commissioner is there to serve the interests of the owners.

FAY VINCENT:

Hundred percent.

BEN REITER:

In the end, Commissioner Manfred took away four of the Astros’ draft picks and fined the team $5 million—the largest allowable by the league, but a drop in the bucket for Crane’s roughly $2 billion business.

Did the fallout from the sign-stealing scandal materially affect Jim Crane or the Astros?

MAURY BROWN:

In the long run, no. In the long run, it didn’t affect them at all. I mean, look, there’s this report. In the eyes of fans outside of Houston or fans of the Astros, they’re vilified. They’re going to get booed in perpetuity due to this thing. Was Jim Crane affected? No, of course not. I mean, all the successes that have come along with the world championships, all of the money that would come in due to attendance.

BEN REITER:

Earlier this year, Manfred actually made a surprising admission. He told a reporter he now regretted giving the players immunity—that it was, quote, “maybe not my best decision ever.”

A month later, the league’s owners voted to extend him as commissioner through 2029.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

The Astros win it. Welcome to first place, Houston Astros, for the first time in 2023.

GAME ANNOUNCER:

Astros get the win, moving them into a virtual tie with the Seattle Mariners, for first place in—

GAME ANNOUNCER:

—12-2 victory, and they have their biggest lead of the season now.

BEN REITER:

With the Astros battling for the 2023 playoffs and having won the World Series again last year, I returned to Houston to try to talk to Jim Crane and others in the organization about the legacy of the scandal and how they’d moved forward. No one inside the team would speak to me or answer written questions, other than to say that Crane doesn’t do interviews about things from the past and to point out the team was on pace to draw 3 million fans in 2023.

But for an issue that team and league have tried to put behind them, there’s lingering sense of injustice, on all sides.

ASTROS FAN 1:

I understand where they’re coming from. I’m not saying it’s right, but every team does it. We just happened to be the one to get caught.

ASTROS FAN 2:

I would just ignore them. They say whatever they want to say. It’s all talk.

ASTROS FAN 3:

I think they dispelled any thoughts that they were bad after that, right? They just won, so.

BEN REITER:

In ’22.

ASTROS FAN 3:

Well, they kept—They didn’t win the World Series every year, but they were dominant since then. They’ve been dominant since then, and then they won last year, so.

BEN REITER:

So the people who say that World Series ring is not legitimate, you’re not buying that.

ASTROS FAN 4:

That’s what they say.

BEN REITER:

Yeah, that’s what they say.

ASTROS FAN 4:

I mean, this last one is pretty legit. [Laughter]

BEN REITER:

Despite their success, the asterisk on the Astros continues to feed conspiracy theories about cheating beyond the banging, like the persistent accusation that José Altuve knew what pitches were coming the night he lifted the Astros to the 2019 World Series thanks to a buzzer hidden under his jersey.

MALE NEWSREADER:

But what about José Altuve? Don’t take off my shirt!

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

—buzzers taped to their bodies?

MALE NEWSREADER:

This electronic device business really takes it in a different direction.

FEMALE NEWSREADER:

At least one player had heard from multiple sources about a buzzer system.

MALE NEWSREADER:

—and when he’s asked about it—

JOSÉ ALTUVE:

[Laughs] I don’t know. I’m too shy. Last time I did that, I got in trouble with my wife. [Laughs]

MALE NEWSREADER:

In this case, there is a villain.

BEN REITER:

Was José Altuve wearing a buzzer?

ANTONIO PADILLA:

No. No, there’s absolutely zero truth to any of that. You just hate to see the media try to run some really good people into the ground with that. And even some other players around the league just buy into the conspiracy theory of that, and that just absolutely was never even discussed.

Obviously, the bad stuff is going to get more clicks and more headlines, but I think the good stuff needs to be talked about a lot more, just because they’re doing things that teams are still trying to catch up with today, that they were doing years ago.

BEN REITER:

When you look around baseball today, a few of the Astros from that 2017 team are still in Houston; more are playing for other teams. And many of the people who helped Luhnow reinvent the Astros—who helped him go after the bleeding edge—are now spread throughout the league.

JESUS ORTIZ:

You look at the Baltimore Orioles. You look at the Giants. Milwaukee, when they took Sterns. People started hiring folks away from the Astros, because everybody wanted to do what the Astros were doing.

The baseball world’s been against them from day one because these weren’t baseball guys. And now, in 2023, people realize the Astros are the standard for building winning baseball.

TOM VERDUCCI:

They were at the forefront of what is just standard procedure now in terms of what we know about leveraging technology in terms of evaluation, training. What really, I think, got the Astros in trouble is they didn’t know where to stop,

BEN REITER:

But who ultimately benefits from maximizing efficiency in a baseball context?

TOM VERDUCCI:

The benefit of it is not for the benefit of the fan. We didn’t wind up with a better game. We wound up with a more boring game. To me, we lost some of the reason why we’re fans, and that is the mystique and the chemistry and the magic and the things that don’t matter to a technocrat.

BEN REITER:

Baseball’s always been a business, but it became more a business like any other business in a certain way.

TOM VERDUCCI:

Yeah, I mean, listen, you don’t want to be naive and think baseball was always just a game. It always was business. But it became just a brutally efficient business. I don’t think it’s going to be one of the proud moments for baseball, what happened during that era, when technology outpaced baseball’s ability to deal with it.

BEN REITER:

Over the past several seasons, Major League Baseball has clamped down. They have strictly limited the availability of in-game video and hired an outside security firm to police the replay rooms. And this season, they put heavy restrictions on the the infamous shift.

The dark art of sign stealing was also dealt a blow with new technology called PitchCom that allows the pitcher and catcher to communicate via transmitters. Something that’s yet to be hacked—as far as we know.

What do you think is the lasting legacy of the Houston Astros of the past decade?

TOM VERDUCCI:

Well, it is a lasting legacy, first of all. It’s too big of a sin in baseball to be washed away, ever. And we’ll be talking about the Astros 50 years from now as a team that stole signs. And the second paragraph will be about how talented they were, and they won their first world championship. But I think in a broader sense, what they did was they defined, in its own way, a dirty era in baseball.

Madrid, Spain

BEN REITER:

In exile from baseball in Spain, Jeff Luhnow remains defiant.

JEFF LUHNOW:

Here in Spain, I’ve never even been asked a question about it. I’ve never even been asked a question about baseball. They don’t care.

[Speaking Spanish] This roster gives us a chance to compete with every team in the league.

BEN REITER:

The second division soccer team he purchased here with investors after being fired from the Astros is having a good season, and he’s not stopping there.

JEFF LUHNOW:

We’re buying and operating second, third and fourth division clubs in key strategic markets. My motto in the Astros was find and develop the best young talent in baseball and build a sustainable winner. We’re doing exactly the same strategy here in football that we did in baseball.

BEN REITER:

I still have questions about some of the results of that strategy, including the degree to which the Astros continued to steal signs in the 2017 playoffs. Between Tony Adams’s research, the league’s investigation and all the reporting, it’s just not clear.

Of course, it’s also unclear how many of their opponents were also cheating, and to what extent. But in a game of razor-thin differentials, we’ll never know if the cheating was what had given the Astros the ultimate edge.

DOUG WHITE:

The scandal is 5% of the story. Ninety-five percent of the story is, how did we create a system that has proven to be pretty dang good over a long period of time? And I don’t think that has anything to do with one cheating scandal.

When did the cheating help? And when did the cheating not help? And who wanted to get the cheating? And who didn’t want to get—I mean, you could go down a million different roads on that. And so that’s why I’m saying it’s not just, “We cheated, we won. Game over.” That’s not how this works.

BEN REITER:

To me, it’s almost like the biggest tragedy is that we don’t know.

DOUG WHITE:

And we never will.

STEPHANIE APSTEIN:

That’s the deal that they made. They get to have their title questioned forever. I think that is the outcome: that people are allowed to say whatever they want about you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s what the Greeks would call a tragedy, right? The thing that made you great is the thing that brought you down.

TONY ADAMS:

The players that decided to do this, they made that decision. That’s on them. It’s the fans’ team, and so I will always be an Astros fan. I think most Astros fans feel the same way.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Two hours ahead of Major League Baseball’s trade deadline, the Mets deal Justin Verlander back to Houston.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Framber Valdez, the first lefty in franchise history to throw a no-hitter.

MALE NEWSREADER:

This team is about October. This team is about another ring.

TONY ADAMS:

I feel great about the players that we have now, the team that we have now, the organization. But they will go away at some point, and the thing that remains are the fans. This is our team, and it’s H-Town versus everyone.

MALE NEWSREADER:

And when you talk about the Astros, remember: the championship pedigree, the addition of Verlander.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Here they are, a playoff team for the seventh consecutive year. The fourth-longest run in Major League Baseball history.

MALE NEWSREADER:

Sky’s the limit. It looks like the same old Astros again—here they come. Just took them a little longer to get there.

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