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2020 astros offseason

elfenix

By elfenix
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Eastwood
Eastwood

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 t

Asithappens
Asithappens

It's not the end, I agree. The Astros are still sacks of giant shit, though.  Shame on them.

Asithappens
Asithappens

Very sad to see that the Astros are basically dipshit cheaters from the top down. Hey, at least the Black Sox are happy that someone else is wearing their crown of infamy.    

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David Dennison

David Dennison 18922

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3 minutes ago, Chuckie Finster said:

Can anyone explain why the buzzer thing took off? The claim came from an account that has been revealed to be bogus. I understand that the Astros have lost the benefit of the doubt, but why has this gained mainstream traction?

It's sinking in around the twitterverse that no players will be punished, that no wins will be vacated, and that the Astros are still the 2017 world champions.

 

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9498

Posted
Posted
It's sinking in around the twitterverse that no players will be punished, that no wins will be vacated, and that the Astros are still the 2017 world champions.
 

Yep

Re-adding the link I posted above
(post #1861)

This article is 2 months old
This isn’t new news...

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/astros-sign-stealing-scandal-mlb-execs-reportedly-think-buzzing-bandages-may-have-been-used-to-relay-pitches/

We’re going to get away with a whole lot more than we probably should. But shows you how widespread this sort of stuff must be or MLB would have hammered us even harder for continuing this through oct 2019.

Instead, MLB gets their pound of flesh from the Astros (who very well may have been the worst offenders) and let’s the aftershocks pick off a few others (cora, Beltran).
The message is heard loud and clear along the way about future repercussions if someone decides to try something again ...and MLB gets to close the book on any other sins in the past and restart clean in 2020 with everyone’s full and undivided attention.
Now they just need to step up monitoring to get through the next two seasons (even though you’d have to be a complete idiot to try to steal signs now... but most baseball players aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed)
until the CBA expires when you can work on formalizing more teeth for player punishment.
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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

Posted
Posted (edited)
2 hours ago, Fondren & Main said:

I really don’t get the outrage over this.  All the best teams cheat.  I sure wish we’d cheat at fucking football.  May win something of significance more than once every 30 fucking years!

There's a reason that fans are bitching, but there isn't a peep out of actual players on any of the supposedly injured teams. 

And again, Patriots got caught deflating footballs midgame in the AFC championship game. That was a bigger deal than this. It may very well be the greatest example of  "caught red handed" of all time.  Who has the super bowl trophy for that year?  Does anyone even really give a shit about deflategate anymore?  They beat the shit out of the Colts anyway.  They would have won by 14 if Brady had to throw a basketball. And eventually, people will also start looking at the Astros playoff box scores, and realize the Astros just won too. And they'll also realize that the box scores don't show any evidence of sign stealing. Maybe Oakland or Seattle have a complaint. But the Yanks and Dodgers just got beat. 

The thing is also though. You can cheat for a slight edge but you still have to be good. Texans aren't that. Imagine deflategate except the Patriots had the Texans defense. 

Edited by FondrenRoad
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cabowabo

cabowabo 4487

Posted
Posted (edited)
5 hours ago, FondrenRoad said:

There's a reason that fans are bitching, but there isn't a peep out of actual players on any of the supposedly injured teams. 

And again, Patriots got caught deflating footballs midgame in the AFC championship game. That was a bigger deal than this. It may very well be the greatest example of  "caught red handed" of all time.  Who has the super bowl trophy for that year?  Does anyone even really give a shit about deflategate anymore?  They beat the shit out of the Colts anyway.  They would have won by 14 if Brady had to throw a basketball. And eventually, people will also start looking at the Astros playoff box scores, and realize the Astros just won too. And they'll also realize that the box scores don't show any evidence of sign stealing. Maybe Oakland or Seattle have a complaint. But the Yanks and Dodgers just got beat. 

The thing is also though. You can cheat for a slight edge but you still have to be good. Texans aren't that. Imagine deflategate except the Patriots had the Texans defense. 

Good grief. Letting a little air out of a football and a hitter knowing what pitch is coming is not comparable at all. Think back to the 2017 WS and some of the huge hits the Astros had in that series. It was so close that one of those hits could have easily changed and probably did change the outcome of that Series. If an Astros hitter was tipped off in any AB where there was a big hit, then this championship is fraudulent. I remember the heartbreak in 1980 and I cried like a bitch in 1986. This abortion is much worse. Crane has done as good a job as possible in this deal. I love the way he fired AJ Hinch and Luhnow instead of “parting ways” with those fucksticks. Hopefully he’ll remove those fraudulent World Series banners at some point. 

Edited by cabowabo
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Lat22

Lat22 4015

Posted
Posted
8 hours ago, Chuckie Finster said:

Can anyone explain why the buzzer thing took off? The claim came from an account that has been revealed to be bogus. I understand that the Astros have lost the benefit of the doubt, but why has this gained mainstream traction?

Because we’re cheaters. Proven cheaters. That’s why this shit is a bigger deal than a lot of you seem to think. Why wouldn’t our guys wear buzzers if such a thing were available to them? 

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Fondren & Main

Fondren & Main 6725

Posted
Posted
5 hours ago, FondrenRoad said:

There's a reason that fans are bitching, but there isn't a peep out of actual players on any of the supposedly injured teams. 

And again, Patriots got caught deflating footballs midgame in the AFC championship game. That was a bigger deal than this. It may very well be the greatest example of  "caught red handed" of all time.  Who has the super bowl trophy for that year?  Does anyone even really give a shit about deflategate anymore?  They beat the shit out of the Colts anyway.  They would have won by 14 if Brady had to throw a basketball. And eventually, people will also start looking at the Astros playoff box scores, and realize the Astros just won too. And they'll also realize that the box scores don't show any evidence of sign stealing. Maybe Oakland or Seattle have a complaint. But the Yanks and Dodgers just got beat. 

The thing is also though. You can cheat for a slight edge but you still have to be good. Texans aren't that. Imagine deflategate except the Patriots had the Texans defense. 

I was talking about longhorn football but your point stands.  

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Scraps

Scraps 13562

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Posted

It took off cause there are a bunch of fools on twitter.

That "niece" account posts about it and yankee blowhards latch on to it and think it is the gospel......

But then that same account said Yankees have camera and something about Gleyber and Yankees blowhards then say "oh this is a burner account don't believe everything it says!"

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Js1

Js1 85409

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Posted
36 minutes ago, Scraps said:

It took off cause there are a bunch of fools on twitter.

That "niece" account posts about it and yankee blowhards latch on to it and think it is the gospel......

But then that same account said Yankees have camera and something about Gleyber and Yankees blowhards then say "oh this is a burner account don't believe everything it says!"

emoji849.pngemoji849.pngemoji849.png

The niece account is Bauer until I’m proven otherwise. Fucking bitch 

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The Dog

The Dog 44062

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Not 100%. But, it doesn’t change the fact that Altuve is a cheater. 

Actually he may be the only Astro who DIDN’T participate in the scheme. A fan on the astros subreddit reviewed a lot of game video and said he’s the only one where there was no trash can banging.
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justinjc7

justinjc7 153

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Posted
1 hour ago, cabowabo said:

Don’t rip my jersey off because my wife will get mad. Really?

Sure, I get that sounds crazy in a vacuum.  But there was another game earlier in the season (against Mike Fiers and the A's of all teams) where Altuve's jersey actually was ripped open (and there were no buzzers by the way) and he said the same thing about his wife.  But apparently a little basic fact checking is too hard for these supposed "journalists".

And if the Astros did use buzzers, why is that any worse than banging on a trash can?  Under that scenario, the Astros would be using the same general methods to steal signs and transmit them to the batter, they're just using a different avenue with which to do so, it's insane to me that anyone thinks the buzz from a buzzer is any more cheating than the bang from a trash can. 

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David Dennison

David Dennison 18922

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2 minutes ago, justinjc7 said:

Sure, I get that sounds crazy in a vacuum.  But there was another game earlier in the season (against Mike Fiers and the A's of all teams) where Altuve's jersey actually was ripped open (and there were no buzzers by the way) and he said the same thing about his wife.  But apparently a little basic fact checking is too hard for these supposed "journalists".

And if the Astros did use buzzers, why is that any worse than banging on a trash can?  Under that scenario, the Astros would be using the same general methods to steal signs and transmit them to the batter, they're just using a different avenue with which to do so, it's insane to me that anyone thinks the buzz from a buzzer is any more cheating than the bang from a trash can. 

This has nothing to do with buzzers or trash cans.

It has everything to do with the perception that MLB wasn't harsh enough in its punishment.

No players were punished, no wins were vacated, the Astros are still the 2017 world champions. That is not sitting well with baseball twitter.

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cabowabo

cabowabo 4487

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7 minutes ago, Fozzz said:

It should be fun for those idiots watching the Astros be the first team in MLB history to win 100 games in four consecutive seasons.  

Let's hope so. And nobody who is being critical here is saying they were/aren't a good team.  That's what makes it so frustrating.  They didn't need to cheat.  But the Championship is forever tarnished in my mind, so much so that I choose not to even recognize it now. 

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Fozzz

Fozzz 152

Posted
Posted (edited)
5 minutes ago, cabowabo said:

Let's hope so. And nobody who is being critical here is saying they were/aren't a good team.  That's what makes it so frustrating.  They didn't need to cheat.  But the Championship is forever tarnished in my mind, so much so that I choose not to even recognize it now. 

That's fine.  They were cheating and irrespective of who else was doing it it was wrong and they deserved to be punished (I don't know if I agree with Crane's decision to fire Luhnow though).  However, the cheating may have given them a couple of extra wins over a 162 game season, and almost certainly did extremely little to help them win in the 2017 postseason - so little as to be practically undetectable. 

I really don't understand why they kept doing it after Manfred's warning that season given the severity of punishment for cheating was going to be significantly higher after that point.  It makes me think that maybe Luhnow really didn't know about it because the risk for continuing to cheat was objectively not worth the reward for doing so and while Luhnow is a snake he surely would have seen that.

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David Dennison

David Dennison 18922

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Posted
5 minutes ago, cabowabo said:

Let's hope so. And nobody who is being critical here is saying they were/aren't a good team.  That's what makes it so frustrating.  They didn't need to cheat.  But the Championship is forever tarnished in my mind, so much so that I choose not to even recognize it now. 

Do you recognize the Yankees championships of the 90s?

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David Dennison

David Dennison 18922

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4 hours ago, cabowabo said:

Good grief. Letting a little air out of a football and a hitter knowing what pitch is coming is not comparable at all. Think back to the 2017 WS and some of the huge hits the Astros had in that series. It was so close that one of those hits could have easily changed and probably did change the outcome of that Series. If an Astros hitter was tipped off in any AB where there was a big hit, then this championship is fraudulent. I remember the heartbreak in 1980 and I cried like a bitch in 1986. This abortion is much worse. Crane has done as good a job as possible in this deal. I love the way he fired AJ Hinch and Luhnow instead of “parting ways” with those fucksticks. Hopefully he’ll remove those fraudulent World Series banners at some point. 

That banner is never coming down.

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clapclapclap

clapclapclap 9000

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3 hours ago, The Dog said:


Actually he may be the only Astro who DIDN’T participate in the scheme. A fan on the astros subreddit reviewed a lot of game video and said he’s the only one where there was no trash can banging.

Counterpoint:  Every time Altuve stepped up to the plate the home crowd was abuzz.

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Chuckie Finster

Chuckie Finster 22700

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Let's hope so. And nobody who is being critical here is saying they were/aren't a good team.  That's what makes it so frustrating.  They didn't need to cheat.  But the Championship is forever tarnished in my mind, so much so that I choose not to even recognize it now. 

Oh no, what are we going to do without cabowabo’s recognition?!
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pepper brooks

pepper brooks 580

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think of it this way.  If I said after the 2016 season you can go to 2 World Series, 1 ALCS, and win 1 out of the 2 WS over the next 3 seasons, but the cost is your manager and Gm get fired, you make that deal 100 times out of 100, right?  Yes.  You do.  Banner is still there just like those of USC circa 2003-2004.  

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Hank Chinaski

Hank Chinaski 6315

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Fangraphs on the potential GM/front office direction:

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/whats-next-for-the-astros/

Spoiler

Plenty has been written in the last few days about Major League Baseball’s findings during its investigation into the Astros and the pending inquiry into the Red Sox, the penalties that were received or will be, and what these punishments say about baseball. The various (and sometimes divergent) constituencies commissioner Rob Manfred had to satisfy made doing so basically impossible; I’ve made it clear how I feel about the punishments. The Astros dismissed Jeff Luhnow and AJ Hinch following their suspension by MLB. The Red Sox mutually parted ways with Alex Cora on Tuesday; Carlos Beltrán and the Mets followed suit Thursday afternoon. It is and will continue to be a dark time for the league.

But even as the ramifications of the scandal continue to make themselves felt, we can look ahead to how we think the Astros baseball operations group might operate going forward. Houston’s baseball ops groups was already on the small side before Luhnow was fired, both by design and as a result of recent departures. In the last year or so, the club has lost Mike Elias, Sig Mejdal, and Eve Rosenbaum to the Orioles, Mike Fast and Ronit Shah to the Braves, and Oz Ocampo to the Pirates. Colin Wyers departed the organization, but hasn’t yet landed with another team. Brandon Taubman was fired before being placed on baseball’s ineligible list; he can apply for reinstatement after this season. And all of that has come against the backdrop of another scouting purge, and a couple of lower-level departures. So what comes next in Houston?

How The Astros Have Done Things

The Astros pioneered an organizational structure of having one assistant GM who’s in charge of everything other than the big league team. That role was first occupied by Elias, then by Taubman. Now Pete Putila is the lone assistant GM, though it appears his role is more limited than his predecessors’ as his experience is limited to player development. I’m told that Bill Firkus (Senior Director, Baseball Strategy) has been assisting with other high-level, day-to-day decisions. Putila interviewed for the Pirates and Giants GM openings and is seen as a strong GM candidate, though likely years from now, when he has more experience in other departments.

This small, inner circle structure also resulted in another signature trait of the Luhnow-led Astros: a lack of traditional scouting directors. If the evaluation process for the most progressive team in the sport includes more video analysis and statistical modeling, the value of a traditional scouting leader is diminished. The processes by which you scout an 18-year-old in the GCL or in high school or as an international free agent then become much more similar, allowing office roles to bounce between traditional department lines more than they do with other clubs. This means the Astros don’t have a domestic scouting director, as that decision-making has shifted a bit north on the org chart to assistant GMs and heads of research & development (read: the analytics department).

This serves to further a goal of today’s more paranoid, progressive clubs: confine valuable, proprietary knowledge to as few people as possible, and silo smaller snippets of information within each department to minimize losses. Having just a handful of decision-makers with a larger layer of rank-and-file below them means less turnover at the top (since there are fewer people at that level, and they are afforded the salary and autonomy that inspires them to stick around) and more turnover at lower levels, which are staffed with less experienced employees with less access to internal information. Replacing a veteran scout who travels frequently with an entry-level video scout based in the office (all while doubling the responsibilities for another existing scout) saves money while allowing the club to publicly (and technically, correctly) claim “scouting headcount” is unchanged.

As you might guess, the morale of the handful of traditional scouts is, I’m told, generally not high. Meanwhile, the unifying characteristic amongst the rank-and-file analysts and scouts is that they, on an individual basis and as a department, are cheaper. To my knowledge, all of the front office losses mentioned above have been replaced with less experienced, often cheaper personnel, if they were replaced at all. And not having a traditional director of these departments means the people at that level are paid less than their counterparts at other clubs. That’s why Eric and I refer to these sorts of practices as the corporatization of baseball in our forthcoming book Future Value, as Luhnow’s background working for management consulting giant McKinsey (and their long-time consulting deal with the Astros) is very apparent in the ruthless, efficiency-for-efficiency’s-sake approach that can be seen throughout the organization.

This, combined with an inability to put out an even passable press release after the organization’s various recent scandals, and these scandals themselves, makes it pretty clear that institutional control and self-awareness in the organization is pretty low. More than a few of the recent front office departures were people who left the team with no other job in hand, or for a lateral position.

How Will Houston Proceed?

It seems likely the Astros will hold steady with the current group of Putila, Firkus, and Co. to assess what they have in that group and what they need in terms of additional high-level ops staffers, then add to and re-title their personnel when those answers emerge.

Given the Commissioner’s comments about the team’s poor culture, and the Astros top execs’ relative lack of experience, an outside hire seems likely, and the sooner the better. Hiring someone with experience working for MLB’s Labor Relations Department seems like a strong possibility. The LRD is a small group within the league office that uses economic studies and its arbitration expertise to advise clubs in contract negotiations. Alums typically have a strong understanding of transaction rules, which translates well to eventually joining a club as a director of baseball operations or assistant GM. There are a number of LRD alumnae in senior positions on the club side, and such a hire by Houston could serve as an olive branch to MLB, which would no doubt like to have one of their own inside the new-look Astros.

And regardless of the penalties the league recently imposed, Houston’s GM job is enticing relative to other recent GM vacancies because there’s a very strong big league roster, a high payroll ceiling, strong infrastructure, and a seeming desire from ownership to right the most recent wrongs, or at least move on from them. The attractiveness of this GM opening is similar to the Braves’ vacancy post-scandal, but the Astros are a win-now contender while the Braves boasted a strong system in the upper minors, with a contending roster clearly on the horizon. An experienced, steady hand would seem to be most important for this role, and time is of the essence. Crane can’t afford to let 2020 be a time for tinkering. A high-profile front office addition before the end of the upcoming season would make a lot of sense. Someone like current Brewers GM David Stearns seems like a perfect fit, having previously worked under Luhnow as the Astros AGM, and in LRD. Stearns is free of any discipline or residue of scandal, and the Houston job offers some things Milwaukee’s can’t. But Stearns pulled out of the running for the Giants club president role and now has that title with the Brewers, making his availability difficult to project.

In terms of the actual day-to-day decision-making, I wouldn’t expect much to change. Crane appears to be comfortable with the organization’s general approach; despite firing Luhnow and Hinch, he disputed the Commissioner’s assessment of Houston’s culture in his press conference on Monday. The Astros could try to lessen the roughly $30 million’s worth of lost draft pick asset value by signing free agents to delay those picks into the future, but testing the limits of Manfred’s ire is juice that’s not worth the squeeze at this point. There’s value in cooperating with MLB, as John Coppolella learned the hard way. The team also doesn’t have a ton of holes or the money left to address it, so treading water with a slightly updated version of what has worked in recent years seems likely.

 

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Player

Player 4575

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, cabowabo said:

Let's hope so. And nobody who is being critical here is saying they were/aren't a good team.  That's what makes it so frustrating.  They didn't need to cheat.  But the Championship is forever tarnished in my mind, so much so that I choose not to even recognize it now. 

Jesus you're a fucking beating during the regular season, but now you're just being an insufferable cunt with all of this self-righteous feigned indignation. Get the fuck on outta here then. Plenty of room on the Harlingen Helobiouses bandwagon for bitchasses like you. 

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cabowabo

cabowabo 4487

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18 minutes ago, Player said:

Jesus you're a fucking beating during the regular season, but now you're just being an insufferable cunt with all of this self-righteous feigned indignation. Get the fuck on outta here then. Plenty of room on the Harlingen Helobiouses bandwagon for bitchasses like you. 

I'm sorry.  Please forgive me.  Bitch.

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