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Gourmand

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Posts posted by Gourmand

  1. Here's the thing that makes me absolutely livid about this... Cheating happens all the time in baseball. At all levels. All levels. The MLB itself cheats the game by juicing the ball. Players juiced to the absolute gills. Pitchers have been putting every substance known to man on the ball for an edge. Scuffing the ball. Pine tar. Snot. Whatever for an extra inch of movement. Corking bats and getting caught red handed. But almighty baseball and their decrepit, old as fuck, unwritten rules loving core fan base picks and chooses what is "real" cheating and what isn't.
    Teams knew what the Astros were doing DURING THE SEASON, as evidenced by mound visits and changing of strategy during the game, and don't say jack shit. People are willing to suspend belief and pretend like the players weren't talking about this behind closed doors while it was happening and sat on it because they were all doing some form of this one way or another. People want to pretend like the MLB home office didn't already hear about this while it was happening and sat on it the way MLB sits on everything. Red Sox did it with Apple watches but nobody cares because they didn't win anything using it. But Mike grows a conscious all of a sudden, goes to the press, and now because the media got its teeth into it and now the MLB is all fire and brimstone and shocked, absolutely shocked that cheating is going on in America's past time of only the holiest of holy integrity and sacred worship of all that is unwritten tradition.
    So now all of these players who have shared locker rooms with guys who cheat and said absolutely dick about it and continue to look the other way are getting their soundbites in, getting in their shots so as to appear to be above the cheating fray, but we all know how this is going to end. It's going to come out after all the damage is done to Houston that 16 other teams did this, too, and some of the guys dropping hot sound bites will be popped for some other form of unsanctioned cheating, but people aren't going to give near as much of a fuck as they did when Houston did it. Because that's how sports roll. The only thing people care about is how much blood you can put in the water to feed the frenzy. And if you're an East Coast media darling team that gets ESPN paid like the proven, multi-time champions of cheating NE Patriots, or the "no price is to high, no crime is too big" SEC, then who cares, still a dynasty, bruh. If the Yankees won a World Series and it came out this was happening, it would be "sign stealing has always been a part of the game. It's just more sophisticated now." Fuck, man, when Barry Bonds' head and hands grew 5 sizes in one summer from replacing his entire blood supply with the stem cells of 1,000 baby fetus, you still had people in the media saying "it doesn't put the bat on the ball for him! He still has to hit it!"
    And I'll say this: Mike Fiers isn't some hero in the front office behind closed doors. He went outside the family on this one. MLB will crush anyone who says that publicly and will continue to laud him as a catalyst towards "bringing integrity back to the game," but lets be real here. This is the same league that punted for as long as possible on juiced players because the home runs brought more eyeballs. It wasn't until the media started pushing the issue did the righteous indignation popped up. Mike Fiers brewed up a shit storm and nobody in the MLB front office is happy about this. Oakland isn't happy about this. That locker room just lost a little extra "sanctity" over this. A's players will be looking over their shoulder a little more with a guy known to spill the locker room secrets around them. Fiers is in his contract year this year. He had a fantastic first year. If he has anything less than a stellar year, the A's aren't re-signing him. MLB is quietly hoping that Fiers does everyone a favor and fades into the background.
    There. That's it. This is everything that I've been quietly ranting to myself about in traffic for the past two months. Now some 65 year old baseball purist can chime in and tell me how I don't know dick about the "real history" of the game and why what the Astros did was somehow different than the thousands of instances of systemic, continuous, and premeditated cheating that happens every season. It's either cheating or it's not. Either it's all punished or none of it is punished. Unwritten rules, my ass.
    Excellent post.

    The sanctimonious groupthink makes me ragey.

    Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

    • Like 2
  2. So, what's the over/under on bench clearing incidents involving the Astros this year?
    I'm skeptical about this line of thinking and won't be surprised if there's little response on the field of play. Many hitters on opposing teams were doing shady shit as well. They won't want to keep this alive into the regular season by brawling about shit from 2017.

    Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk



  3. When you say it like that, it seems like it should be really easy for a fan of a team that cheated their way to a championship to just admit it, take your medicine, and not make a bunch of bullshit excuses.

    Yet here we are.
    What excuses?

    Scoreboard motherfucker. The only taint here is the whiff your bitchass team gets of ours while we kick all kinds of ass again.

    Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

    • Like 1

  4. Fuck off and return to your circle jerk where the only people buying your load of shit is fellow Astro fans going full aggy.
    Fuck you. This is an Astros fan thread, gtfo here and go do something productive like cleaning your cum sock.

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    • Like 1
  5. Stfu Pokes and go fucking read the early reporting before you try to tell us what we already all know. 

    This is a media narrative driven by anti-Astros reporters with an axe to grind. While there's definitely truth to their reporting, the scope of this electronic surveillance is not limited to one clubhouse but the narrative of "cheating" is very much limited to the Astros. MLB is complicit in this and Rob Manfred is going to regret his handling of this. I can't wait for the whole thing to get blown open PED style. 

     

    • Like 1
  6. Great post because you interpret it to back up your lame ass excuses.  I interpret that as teams watching video of games not in progress trying to pick up tendencies and tells from pitchers and catchers to use in a future game.   That seems perfectly within the rules and a long way from what the Astros were doing.  
    Your head is in the sand if you really believe that. Carlos Beltran knew it was going on elsewhere NYY cough cough and brought it with him. You're delusional if you think teams weren't finding ways to use that information in real time. The only difference between the Astros and them is Mike Fiers. I guarantee that if this doesn't go away, more teams will be implicated as more guys break the code of silence.

    Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

  7. If this is such a big fucking deal, why didn't it cause the same level of outrage when Verducci wrote the following in Nov 2 2018 SI?

    Quote

    Forget free agency, Bryce Harper and Manny Machado. The most important person this baseball offseason is commissioner Rob Manfred. He punted on the chance last offseason to exercise his power to implement pace of action procedures (i.e., a pitch clock) out of deference to a players association that was chapped about a slow-developing free agent market.

    Among the developments that are slowing baseball games to a crawl: the proliferation of electronic surveillance. Many clubs now have as many as six high magnification cameras installed in their home ballpark specifically designed to steal signs from opponents.

    Here’s how quickly things have changed, according to a Dodgers source. Three years ago, if you walked into the Dodgers’ video room behind their Dodger Stadium dugout you would likely have found Zack Greinke pouring over video of opposing hitters, looking for any edge he could find to match up his stuff against their weakness. This year, if you walked into the same room you would have found a small army of 20-something analysts in polo shirts and slacks pouring over video from the in-house cameras, like the security room at a Vegas casino. Most teams train their cameras on the catcher, the pitcher (from several angles), the third base coach and the dugout.

    These cameras are not used for training purposes. They are used expressly for stealing signs and deciphering “tells” from pitchers.

    “We’ve reached a point,” said one club executive, “where the attractiveness of the sport as an entertainment option has been lost in the quest to find every incremental edge. And video has changed things rapidly. I’m increasingly thinking something has to be done.”

     

    The entire takeaway from that piece has nothing to do with "cheating" but with the problem of the pace of play. So what changed between then and now?

    • Like 4
  8. 18 minutes ago, Go Pokes said:

    Um, maybe because it's the most impactful sports cheating scandal in 100 years?   

    Oh please, not even close. This electronic surveillance "scandal" was employed by numerous teams across MLB, as previously reported by Verducci in 2018. This wasn't new, it was an open secret with a code of silence by every player in MLB. THEY ALL KNEW. So here's an idea for the opposition....CHANGE YOUR SIGNS!!!


    Cheating is endemic in baseball and it's not the Big Deal this narrative has evolved into. This is a bunch of stupid fuckin pearl clutching by the media and butthurt fans of other teams who hate us because they ain't us. This gives them a participation ribbon and a dream of the World Series that they didn't win. 

    This is only a big scandal because MLB allowed these circumstances with the implementation of instant replay and looked the other way when the Dodgers, Red Sox, and Yankees were doing it. Now the Astros are the convenient fall guy because 1) they had guys in the front office who played the smartest guys in the room role to the media instead of playing the likable insider role and 2) they kept beating the marquee franchises on the field and at their own game and 3) Mike Fiers didn't like being left off the playoff roster and not invited back and 4) Evan Drellich wanted revenge for the front office bullying him back in 2015 or so. 

    I'm ready to start this season and cheer as the Astros take on the world.

     

     

     

    • Like 9
  9. The baseball media is fully engulfed in Astros Derangement Syndrome. It feels like just yesterday when this organization was getting pummeled by the Fangraphs and Keith Law for being dumb dinosaurs. Now we learn they had an elaborate analysis of catcher's signals called Codebreaker and these same writers are clutching their pearls about those cheating Astros.

    I can't wait to fuck this season in its ass.

    Sent from my Pixel 2 using Tapatalk

    • Like 1
  10. If you are usually around wifi then you can look at Google Fi.    It's $20 a month plus $10 per gig of data.    They use TMO and Sprint towers.    If you are using data while not on wifi its going to get expensive.   And you will have to have a certain phone but there are probably 10-15 now.    Internationally its amazing.  Works in almost every country with a few exceptions. 
    We have Fi in our household and bought two Pixel 3as recently and have no complaints yet. Pretty affordable if you use your phone most often in wifi connected areas. I also appreciate the data diet it encourages us to follow when opening the app and seeing how little/much our current usage is in dollars.

    Sent from my Pixel 3a using Tapatalk

    • Like 1
  11. The only reason this stupid ass player scheme got busted was because of three fucking cocksuckers: Evan Drellich, Brandon Taubman, and Mike Fiers.

    Drellich is a crybaby bitchass Masshole mfer who has never liked the Astros organization because of his personal beef with them going back to his brief stint in Htown at the Chronicle when the Astros kicked him out of the clubhouse and tried to strong arm him with his  bosses or something. Mike Fiers was butthurt because the Astros left him off the postseason roster and then declined to bring him back. Brandon Taubman was just an arrogant pissant who had too much to drink in celebrating the ALCS win and went full on douche bro against Alyson Footer in the presence of people like Drellich. So game 7 happens to go against the Astros and guys like Fiers and Drellich were ready to pounce in the wake of the Taubman story about the Astros culture.

    • Like 3
  12. The report itself cast doubt on anyone trying to determining causality between the sign stealing scheme and the results on the field. The Astros weren't found by this investigation to be cheating in 2018 or 2019 yet they were still pretty fucking good both years. Not to mention the road/home splits etc or the testimony from various players who thought it was more distracting than beneficial. 

    Fuck this asterisk bullshit.

     

    • Like 4
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