Your Cheatin' Heart

The baseball scandal that won't stop dominating our division and the impossible pretzel that an analytical drive for dominance twists us into as fans and people

Note: if this is your first time reading The Enni Way, start here to understand my summer of going (strategically) insane about baseball.

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May 23 - Mariners @ Astros (W, 5-3)

From the soggy south side of Chicago, I followed the Ms down south to sweltering Houston, Texas. This city is a big, sprawling mess of contradictions. I landed at an airport named for former President George W. Bush, and drove past an outlet of the Meow Wolf experiential art exhibit on the way to my rental. The apartment was full of marble and stainless steel fixtures… but didn’t have hand soap or a second roll of toilet paper. 

In Houston, two things are often true at once. It’s the home of Beyonce… and Enron. It’s packed with conservative-minded oil tycoons, and it elected the first openly-gay mayor of any major American city. This is a town that’s enormously proud of its major league baseball team… and it knows full well that they won their first-ever World Series in 2017 by cheating.

If you follow baseball closely, you know every bob and weave of this scandal. Read and be enraged anew! For everyone else, here’s what you need to know:

The Houston Astros franchise has existed since 1962, when they were added to the National League as an expansion team along with the Mets. They went to the World Series in 2005 but slid into irrelevance from there. They posted losing records in four of the five seasons leading up to 2012 when their owner washed his hands of the entire thing and sold the team. As part of the sale, Major League Baseball shifted the Astros from the National League to the American League, evening out those two leagues at 15 teams each. With Houston in the American League West, each division would now have five teams who would play one another 18 times per season.

That’s how the Astros came to be the Mariners’ division rivals. At first it seemed like a dream—adding a cupcake to the schedule. To get a sense of how abysmal the Astros were, here’s a bit of the Los Angeles Times’s coverage of the sale:

The move would seem to benefit the Angels and other AL West teams to play 18 games a year against the Astros. Houston had a record of 56-106 last season, traded its best player, outfielder Hunter Pence, to Philadelphia and appears several years away from playoff contention.

And this was the picture that Deadspin included in their write-up of the transaction:

But the new owner was not interested in sitting around and padding other teams’ stats. Jim Crane is a competitive man with a ruthless streak. He’s a former college pitcher and billionaire who ran a logistics firm fined for war profiteering, price-fixing, and discriminating against Black, Hispanic, and female employees. (He also reportedly threatened to sue his ex-wife when she informed him that their son no longer wanted to play on the little league team he was coaching. The kid was forced to play.¹) When he hired former McKinsey consultant,² Jeff Luhnow, as general manager, he handed him a piece of blank paper. The directive was clear: Luhnow had carte blanche to do whatever it took to win. 

Luhnow went all-in on analytics and a “disrupt” mentality—he wanted to move fast and break things. He fired veterans in the clubhouse and the front office, replacing them with younger, cheaper workers who would adopt his analytics-first approach. “The Astros were corporate America’s modern-day takeover of America’s pastime, and they moved at breakneck speed,” Evan Drellich, who covered the team for the Houston Chronicle from late 2013 to 2016, later wrote for The Athletic. They kept salaries low, sold ostentatiously large ads in the outfield, and tanked the 2013 and 2014 seasons to accumulate draft picks. Two things were true: the Houston Astros were playing terrible baseball, and the franchise had gotten back in the black. 

But the emphasis on young talent started paying off sooner than expected. By the 2015 season, the team got back to a winning record and earned their way to the postseason, losing in the Divisional Series. Two years later, in 2017, Houston won the division and went all the way to the World Series. The franchise won its first-ever championship, beating the Los Angeles Dodgers. The next year, they went to the AL Championship Series and lost to the Boston Red Sox. And in 2019 they were in the World Series again, facing off against the Washington Nationals. The series went to a seventh do-or-die game, but ultimately Houston fell to the upstart Nats.  

Then, less than two weeks later, The Athletic published a bombshell story that threw Houston’s rise to dominance into a far darker light. Drellich and Ken Rosenthal reported that, in the 2017 World Championship-winning season, Houston engaged in an elaborate scheme of electronic sign stealing. (The art of sign stealing from second base with your own human eyes is not against MLB rules, but using electronics to see, track, interpret, and act on signs in real time is explicitly forbidden.) At their home park, The Athletic reported, the Astros had set up a camera in the outfield capable of zooming in on the signs opposing team catchers were giving to their pitchers, indicating which pitch to throw. That camera feed was hooked up to a television monitor placed in a tunnel just off their home dugout. Team employees and players would watch the screen during the game and try to decode signs. When they thought they’d cracked the code, they’d alert the Astros hitter to which pitch to expect by banging on a trash can. A bang meant the hitter could expect a breaking ball or offspeed pitch. No bang meant fastball. They did this all throughout the 2017 regular season, and into the postseason.

Astros bench coach Alex Cora and veteran center fielder and slugger Carlos Beltrán masterminded the scheme. Drellich reported in his book about the scandal, Winning Fixes Everything, that Cora, when he went on to manage the Red Sox in 2018, would brag about the cheating scheme. He was known to say, especially late at night, especially when drinking: “We stole that fucking World Series.”³

It was a die-hard Astros fan who stuck the dagger into the growing scandal. Tony Evans had lived in Houston and cheered for the team his whole life; confronted with the horrifying possibility that their first-ever championship was tainted, he had to see for himself. So Tony made a database isolating the video and audio of every single pitch from the 2017 season. His weeks of hard work laid bare exactly what the Astros had done. And he told Sports Illustrated’s Ben Reiter that it was important to him that an Astros fan be the one to do it. Even years later, Tony was brought to tears when recalling the moment he hit send on the tweet opening his database to the world.⁴

MLB investigated, and handed down a year-long suspension to both Luhnow and Astros manager AJ Hinch. Then the Astros fired them both. Cora, who had gone from Astros bench coach to Red Sox manager and cheated to win his second consecutive World Series, was fired, too. And player/cheating ringleader Carlos Beltrán resigned as Mets manager before he ever oversaw a single practice. To many, the consequences were too little, for too few. Commissioner Rob Manfred offered players immunity for speaking to the league investigators, and he refused to vacate the Astros championship title, calling the trophy “a piece of metal.”

That all happened in the early months of 2020. The COVID-shortened baseball season didn’t begin until late July, and the stands were half-full at most. What would have been an 80-game national tour of shame, with fans at every non-Houston ballpark booing the Astros players non-stop, was neutered. The Dodgers—among the teams with the most obvious existential axe to grind with the Cheating ‘Stros—won it all that year. But winning a shortened season was an asterisk unto itself: at a neutral site, in front of minimal fans, and no parade. (That’s what made their 2024 championship so sweet for LA.)

And then, guess what? The year-long suspension was over and, hours after it passed, Alex Cora was back in his exact same role as manager of the Red Sox. AJ Hinch is currently managing the red-hot Detroit Tigers; Carlos Beltrán eventually did end up working for the Mets, in the front office. MLB punished some people involved in the cheating scandal and a whole bunch of active participants got a pass. And now, years later, all of baseball is sprinting to adopt Houston’s McKinsey-approved, big-business, “players as assets” strategy to maximize profit and maybe even win a championship along the way. None moreso than the Mariners, whose own stupid-ass GM admitted that they were aiming for winning about 54 percent of games, for statistical reasons. (Don’t worry, we’ll get way more into that in a future newsletter.) 

All of this was swirling in my mind as I walked to Diaken Park. I’ve had nothing but vibrant, molten hate in my heart for the Houston Stealin’ Astros since the moment they dared enter our division and start winning. In the 12 full seasons since they came into the AL West, they’ve won it seven times. As of this writing, they’re seven games ahead of the Mariners and on track to win it again. And then the cheating on top? Get bent. But as I blended into the mill of blue-and-orange outside the stadium, watching the families and the friends in the warm south Texas night, I reminded myself: fans didn’t choose who owned the team, or who managed it. Fans didn’t cheat. Some, like Tony, appeared genuinely torn apart by the whole wretched scandal. But he’s still rooting for his team; being an Astros fan now requires tolerating a lot of cognitive dissonance. 

Daikin Park has a non-retractable roof, and is air conditioned. But the air inside was heavy. I got seats along the third base side, close enough to wave to Randy Arozarena in left field. There were empty seats all over that section, so I decided to bounce around a bit. But the next seat I chose happened to be in front of a man who had a loud voice and a bad attitude. He was either drunk, a bully, or both. From the moment I sat down and started scribbling on my scorecard, he hyperfixated on my presence. “Mariners suck!” he yelled intermittently and, in case I wasn’t aware, clarified: “That’s for you!” 

It’s baffling to be heckled by someone who either doesn’t know shit about baseball or doesn’t care. He yelled “easy out” when Leody Taveras—who had already homered, putting Seattle up 1-0—came to the plate. He screamed that Emerson Hancock couldn’t throw a ball as he pitched for contact and ended the inning with a double play to hold us steady, behind 3-2. When Julio hit an RBI double and Cal immediately followed up with a two-run homer to put us in the lead, 5-3, I turned around and cheered in his face in a way that I hoped would say scoreboard without having to say scoreboard. It didn’t stop him. Since Jim Crane took over the team, they’ve punctuated every seventh inning stretch with “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” As the crowd sang along, he added “Not Seattle!” after every line. And when I took a swig from my water bottle he whispered to his friend that I was probably drinking piss. I moved seats.

We won, and I was so glad. 

The walk home was oddly surreal. I felt that strange pulsing adrenaline drain that lingers after a confrontation. The street outside was packed with vendors selling LED light-up balloons; a partially-closed roadway buzzed with neon-lit scooters and pedicabs. Just a block away from the stadium, in front of a conference center, the wide streets were empty. A park’s expanse of lawn was saturated to an alien hue by green-tinted streetlamps. The lawn crested with a big hill, and three young people huddled together at the top. One stood and waved to no one in particular, then started to dance. The post-game fireworks were only visible reflected, funhouse-style, in the conference center’s towering windows. A truck and low-rider looped around downtown playing psychedelic EDM on incredible sound systems. 

I felt transported to the place where I experience the most cognitive dissonance: Burning Man. The annual week-long camping trip/music festival/art exhibit is held in late summer on a salt flat three hours east of Reno. Tens of thousands of like-minded folk flood to a newly-built city where time is largely meaningless, money has no role, cell phone service is dotty at best. It’s a place for drugs and dancing and a very welcoming view of polyeverything; it’s also about ambitious art, serendipitous encounters, full and uninhibited expression. It’s where I go to embody a different world, where the boot of capitalism lifts ever so slightly and I can feel a little bit like a human whose only pressing need is to exist.

And yet. In the lead-up to Burning Man, I spend more money and order more Amazon packages than I do the entire rest of the year. I burn fuel getting to the desert, and buy individually-packed band-aids, hydration packs, ramen dinners. Single-use zip ties are the true currency of the realm. The festival is also an annual tradition for the head-spinningly-wealthy Silicon Valley wanna-garchs whom I loathe. In fact, their money subsidizes the festival for many of us, as we’ve learned this year while Burning Man Org battles a $20 million budget shortfall. And in seeking to claw back some of its wealthy patrons, BOrg is skipping out on making some fairly basic statements in support of its LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and generally non-fascist attendees. I’m skipping it this year. There are so many reasons—financial, vibes, logistics. But the cognitive dissonance being cranked to 11 is a huge part of it. This year feels like BOrg is wearing a scarlet asterisk. 

The truth is, I was worried when I went to see the Houston Astros in their home stadium. I had no idea what to expect from a group of tens of thousands of people who had made the mental calculus necessary to continue supporting that team. And I just happened to sit in front of the worst representative of the team’s fanbase. But I want to avoid making obvious, lazy generalizations in this newsletter. So I can’t paint the entire fanbase with that brush, as tempting as it is. I met plenty of warm, welcoming fans in Houston.

At the same time, I’m not absolving the Astros or anyone involved in banging trash cans. In fact I hate them more than ever, and the absolutely unexplainable heater they’ve been on this season has me wondering if they’re dipping a toe into Patrick Mahomes Witchcraft territory. But I can’t hate the fans the same way. The truth is, living in America as a thoughtful, aware citizen is to endure a nonstop barrage of demoralizing, dehumanizing institutional uppercuts. We’re all complicit because we literally can’t escape it. What is there to do but beg for decency—and boo?

                                   ⚾ 🔱

🗣️ The first episode of But How’s the Sex is out, a superfun new podcast from Elissa Sussman, author of Totally and Completely Fine, out now!

🗣️ I was also really impressed by The Edge, the Frontline podcast with Sports Illustrated’s Ben Reiter exploring the Astros cheating scandal. It was a fantastic documentary series that brought in the voices of not only the people directly impacted by Houston’s cheating, but features the first in-depth interview with Jeff Luhnow, post-scandal. I learned a lot and it led with emotion.

📚 I hope it’s very clear that I devoured and loved Evan Drellich’s Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess! Everything Evan learned from his time at the Houston Chronicle through to breaking the story with The Athletic; I’m obsessed with all the stray details beat reporters accumulate over time but don’t have space to report. This book is packed full of gems.

1. “Using court records, the Houston Press in 2000 reported that Crane’s ex-wife, Theresa, informed him that their son Jared “no longer wants to play on the little league team coached by him,” when Crane believed otherwise. “In a 1992 note under the letterhead carrying all the full weight and authority of the then Eagle USA corporate emblem, Jim lets Theresa know he’s pissed, mightily,” the Press story went. “If the boy doesn’t stay on the team, ‘I will be left with no other alternative than to pursue this issue legally.’ “Apparently, the threat of kids’ league litigation keeps the boy playing.”

Drellich, Evan. Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess (pp. 44-45). HarperCollins.

2. In his book about the cheating scandal, Evan Drellich writes that Luhnow was actually known to send employees copies of Who Moved My Cheese? Which, if you listen to the If Books Could Kill episode about that book, you know is a crime deserving of The Hague

3. Drellich, Evan. Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess (p. 250). HarperCollins.

4. Fun fact: The scandal also helped launch Jomboy; one could argue that the cheating scandal is the Rubicon that forced Rob Manfred to modernize the game. Baseball insider Jeff Passan wrote of the day the scandal broke the internet: “For one day, baseball felt like a real modern sport, full of verve, and not one stuck in the morass of its past.”