After the penalties against the Astros were announced for their sign-stealing scandal, there was a very brief time period where the club looked set to ride out the suspension of general manager Jeff Luhnow for a season before he regained control of the club, and the atmosphere that came along with it, that he helped create. Hours later, Astros owner Jim Crane fired both Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch. For the manager role, Crane hired something of a stopgap in the form of 70-year-old Dusty Baker, a veteran option with years of experience and a sterling reputation in the clubhouse. It was a hire designed to help the club move forward with as little friction and ties to the past as possible. It was also a hire made without a general manager, the person typically responsible for such decisions. Baker received just a one-year deal, likely in part due to this uncertainty. The Astros and Crane appear to be less interested in making a similar decision at general manager, opting for 42-year-old James Click from the Rays organization over a more-experienced option like Bobby Evans, formerly of the Giants.

If the Astros had wanted some consistency and someone within the organization to step up for a short time, the list of candidates wasn’t long. The last three assistant general managers for Astros are in charge of the Brewers (David Stearns), the Orioles (Mike Elias), and ineligible to be involved with major league baseball (Brandon Taubman). Several key front office members left with Elias when he moved to Baltimore as well. Internally, Pete Putila graduated from college in 2010, has been with the Astros since 2011, and rose to his current position of assistant general manager, but when Crane fired Luhnow, the Astros owner assumed responsibility for baseball operations. In Click, the club is going with a more experienced version of Putila. Read the rest of this entry »

When commissioner Rob Manfred issued his report regarding the Astros’ illegal sign-stealing efforts and handed down one-year bans to both manager A.J. Hinch and president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow, he also took aim at the culture within the Astros’ analytically-inclined organization, calling it “insular” and “problematic.” In desperate need of rebranding as they move forward, the Astros have taken the first step towards that end by hiring Dusty Baker to succeed Hinch — who, along with Luhnow, was fired by owner Jim Crane almost immediately after the report was released — as manager.

The choice of Baker certainly offers a contrast to the recent past, given the 70-year-old skipper’s old-school reputation, but that’s not to say it’s a bad one. At the helm of a team that will face constant scrutiny and considerable hostility, Baker’s strengths — many of which fall outside the realm of the quantifiable — include the respect he commands in the clubhouse and when dealing with the media, particularly amid controversy, all of which should serve him well. That said, he’s been positioned as an easy fall guy if things don’t go well. After all, the Astros came within one win of a championship last year, and they still have a strong roster despite the departure of free agent Gerrit Cole, so any outcome short of a trip to the World Series will represent a step backwards. The fact that he’s been hired before the team has replaced Luhnow sets up a potential clash down the road, in that the incoming general manager or president of baseball operations might prefer to hire their own manager. The length of Baker’s contract — one year plus a club option — spells that out explicitly.

Baker, who turns 71 on June 15, hasn’t managed since the end of the 2017 season, when he parted ways with the Nationals, who opted not to renew his contract. His departure from Washington was sudden and rather stunning, as he’d led the team to back-to-back NL East titles and seasons of 95 and 97 wins, but each time the Nationals lost five-game Division Series to lower-seeded teams. Baker’s teams went 0-5 in one-run games across those two postseasons, including both Game 5s, during which they surrendered early leads — all of which put his in-game decisions squarely in the crosshairs, fairly or unfairly. In his final game at the helm, for example, he took the fall in part because Max Scherzer — who was about to win his third Cy Young award — allowed four runs in a messy inning of emergency relief. Read the rest of this entry »

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? Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Beltrán won’t set foot in a Citi Field dugout anytime soon. In my conclusion to Thursday’s article on Beltrán’s place in the Astros’ 2017-18 sign-stealing mess — he was the only position player mentioned in commissioner Rob Manfred’s report, which positioned him as central to the improvements that resulted in “the banging scheme” — I noted that his status as Mets manager wasn’t “likely to remain in limbo much longer; he could be out of a job by sundown.” While admittedly not a stretch, that prognostication turned out to be correct.

As with the Red Sox and Alex Cora, Beltrán and the Mets “agreed to mutually part ways” on Thursday. With that, all three sitting managers implicated by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich in their November 13 report (a day after they broke the initial story) — three who previously were well-respected throughout the industry and understood to represent part of a shifting paradigm with regards to the input of front offices and an emphasis on the interpersonal aspects of managing a club rather than the X’s and O’s of tactics — are out of work, that within roughly 72 hours of the release of Manfred’s report.

The Mets named Beltrán as their manager on November 1, 12 days before The Athletic implicated him. At the time, Beltrán denied any wrongdoing via text messages to The Athletic and the New York Post (and perhaps others). Manfred’s report showed that he had lied to them, and not with the kind of little white lies and half-truths — on topics such as player availability — that managers routinely get away with. Read the rest of this entry »

This article was published before the Mets and Beltrán “agreed to mutually part ways” on Thursday. Jay’s follow-up is available here.

This has not been a good week for Carlos Beltrán. Though he evaded punishment from Major League Baseball for his involvement in the Astros’ 2017 electronic sign stealing scheme, as did every other player, Beltrán was the only one singled out by name in commissioner Rob Manfred’s report. What’s more, he’s now the only one of the three managers who were caught up in the scandal — or at least its initial wave — who still has a job, though he’s already on the hot seat before managing a single game. Suddenly, what appeared to be a very promising second act to his career is in jeopardy, as is the possibility that Beltrán will be elected to the Hall of Fame once he becomes eligible in 2023.

Per Manfred’s report, which I dissected on Tuesday, the Astros’ efforts to steal signs using electronic equipment — a practice broadly prohibited by MLB rules but not strictly enforced at the time — began early in 2017 and grew more elaborate as the season went on. “Approximately two months into the 2017 season, a group of players, including Carlos Beltrán, discussed that the team could improve on decoding opposing teams’ signs and communicating the signs to the batter,” wrote Manfred. The intent was to upgrade a system that had been rather simple to that point, with employees in the team’s video replay room viewing live footage from the center field camera, and relaying the decoded sign sequence to the dugout, where it was signaled to a runner on second base; the runner would then transmit the signs to the batter.

In the wake of Beltrán’s intervention, bench coach Alex Cora arranged for a monitor showing the center field feed to be placed in the tunnel near the dugout. After decoding the sign from that monitor, “a player would bang a nearby trash can with a bat to communicate the upcoming pitch type to the batter,” according to the report. The practice continued through the end of the regular season and the postseason, and into 2018, even after Manfred issued a stern warning to all 30 teams on September 15, 2017, in the wake of separate allegations regarding the Red Sox engaging in their own abuse of the system. At that point, Manfred said that he would hold general managers and managers accountable for their teams’ efforts to subvert his prohibition on using electronic means to steal signs. Read the rest of this entry »

Consider the book thrown at the Astros. On Monday, commissioner Rob Manfred announced the results of MLB’s investigation into allegations pertaining to the Astros’ electronic sign-stealing efforts in 2017, the year they won the World Series, and handed down a set of sanctions that together form the most severe punishment administered to a single team since Judge Landis banned eight White Sox players for life in 1921. In this instance, no players were banned or even suspended; instead, Manfred took aim at the Astros’ braintrust, suspending both president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch for the 2020 season but deferring punishment for bench coach Alex Cora, the most directly involved non-player, pending the results of a similar investigation into the 2018 Red Sox’s actions. Additionally, the team was stripped of four high draft picks and fined $5 million, the maximum amount allowed under MLB’s constitution. Finally, former Astros assistant general manager Brandon Taubman was placed on baseball’s ineligible list.

In announcing his decision via a 10-page report (PDF here), Manfred confirmed and elaborated upon a November report by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich that the Astros systematically used their video replay system in an attempt to decode opposing teams’ signs and relay them to the team’s hitters via a trash can-based system of signals. The report was based on interviews with 68 individuals as part of this investigation plus an additional nine interviews related to Taubman’s inappropriate conduct towards female reporters during the team’s ALCS victory celebration.

As I wrote last week, MLB’s failure to anticipate the consequences introduced by the creation of video replay rooms in connection with the adoption of the instant replay review system in 2014 has echoes of the league falling behind in addressing the influx of performance-enhancing drugs in the 1990s. Both issues centered around highly competitive players crossing into gray areas while looking for that extra edge, but because of the key differences in the two issues — mainly the protection of the players’ union and the need for a collectively bargained system of testing and suspensions when it came to PED usage — commissioner Bud Selig never had the chance to bring the hammer down on PED users with the force that Manfred applied here. This is a hefty and impactful set of punishments that asserts the commissioner’s authority and is designed to deter other teams from similar behavior, but it won’t be the last set of them given the investigation into the Red Sox and the possibility of further inquiries. Various decisions within Manfred’s purview on this won’t please everyone, but since when has any commissioner managed to do so?

In the report, Manfred laid out a timeline for the Astros’ gradually more elaborate efforts to steal signs using electronic equipment, a practice broadly prohibited by MLB rules but not strictly enforced at the time, and one that arose with the introduction of reviewable replays. The Astros’ efforts “with the exception of Cora [were] player-driven and player-executed,” and began early in the 2017 season, with a simple system where employees in the team’s video replay room viewed live footage from the center field camera, then decoded and relayed the sign sequence to the dugout. From there it was signaled to a runner on second base, who would transmit the signal to the batter. Soon Cora began calling the replay review room to obtain the signals, and on some occasions the information was delivered via text messages on smart watches or cell phones. Read the rest of this entry »

Seattle Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto said the following when I spoke to him in November:

“The best we can do is lay out a game plan, a quality game plan, and then track our success. In this game, everything can be tracked.”

That includes trades, and it’s no secret that Dipoto has made a lot of them since he was hired to replace Jack Zduriencik following the 2015 season. The exact number — this based on a perusal of transaction logs — is a whopping 106, which works out to more than two dozen annually. The subject broached, Dipoto acknowledged that “it’s a long spreadsheet.”

What does the spreadsheet show in terms of wins and losses? The plethora of deals precludes a detailed response to such a question, but the 51-year-old executive did provide an overview when asked. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

When I sketched out a plan to tackle the 14 one-and-done candidates on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, I found unifying themes to group them together even as the profiles themselves expanded: oft-injured infielders, sluggers who finished their careers concurrently with the White Sox, Dominican-born players who took unorthodox routes to the majors, starting pitchers for the 2003 champion Marlins, late-blooming relievers. When I reached the final pair, reliever José Valverde and slugger Raúl Ibañez, I was ready to concede that they were simply leftovers — but I had momentarily forgotten that during the 2012 ALCS, I had witnessed a moment firsthand that permanently tied them together:

In addition to that moment from the 2012 ALCS, both of these players seemed to have nine lives as they kept their grips on baseball — or vice versa, to invoke Jim Bouton’s famous line — for a long, long time. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Houston Astros.

Batters

Let’s get the garbage receptacle in the room out of the way: there are no adjustments for sign-stealing related shenanigans baked into ZiPS. The simple truth is that the data to do so doesn’t really exist, and any adjustments made for an unknown effect on unknown players for an unknown amount of time would lack any precision. It’s one of those unknowables floating around in the aether that makes up part of the error bars.

Houston’s front-end offensive talent remains an absolute battering ram. The great players are, well, great, and there are few holes in the lineup, though there will be less offense behind the plate in 2020, and Gurriel’s age means he’s always a cliff-diving risk in any given season. Read the rest of this entry »

A new avenue to pursue a competitive advantage, a gray area as to whether it’s considered cheating, a paper ban that goes unenforced, bad behavior spreading around the league through player movement, executives shocked — shocked! — that such behavior is happening on their teams, a commissioner sounding out of touch as he publicly downplays the severity of the problem, once-celebrated achievements now tainted… if the outlines of baseball’s current sign-stealing scandal sound familiar, it’s because they’ve followed a pattern similar to that of the performance-enhancing drug problem that enveloped the game in the 1990s and early 2000s. Of course, there are key differences between the two, but both found Major League Baseball well behind the curve and struggling both to catch up and regain credibility on the issue.

That thought came to mind on Tuesday, as the sign-stealing saga took a new turn when The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich reported that in 2018, the Red Sox used their video replay room in an attempt to decipher opponents’ sign sequences, a practice that proliferated after instant replay reviews were introduced in 2014, one that was broadly prohibited but generally unenforced until 2018. Three members of the 2018 Red Sox told The Athletic that multiple teammates used the team’s video room, which was just a few steps from the home dugout, to break down opponents’ signs. Unlike the bang-on-a-trash-can system Rosenthal and Drellich reported the Astros having used in 2017, the Red Sox did not directly communicate to batters what pitch was coming, instead relaying that information through the dugout to the baserunner and then to the hitter.

While the efficacy of either system is still murky, both the Astros and Red Sox flouted the rules, and both went on to win the World Series in the year they did so, coincidentally beating the Dodgers. While rumors have circulated regarding other teams’ usage of replay rooms and other means to steal signs electronically, thus far the substantiated allegations have been limited to those two clubs, who share a common denominator: Alex Cora, who as bench coach of the Astros in 2017 is said to have played a key role in their sign-stealing system, and who left following that season to manage the Red Sox, a job he still holds. Read the rest of this entry »