Sammy Sofa

Dude should have been fired after last season.

I think you're actually talking about the disease.

I mean, pro baseball is definitely the most conservative of the major sports...

I agree with the second sentence because the major players are better than Castellanos or Jason Castro but probably still not clicking on why they wouldn't max out the cap this year Is it because Ricketts is so squishy-looking he doesn't technically make any clicking sounds?

Literally nobody here is denying they cheated. The point that in a game rife with cheating at all times, especially this specific cheat, they just got busted on their particular method of cheating. It's faulty, IMO, to assume that their brand of stealing signal cheating was significantly more effective than other teams' brands of stealing signal cheating, and it's especially faulty to think this is some exceptional case, and that MLB will do much of anything about it. I disagree with this. Do teams try and pick up signs/pitch tipping, sure. But they’re doing it when a guy gets on 2B or in pre-game video hoping to find something or a guy on the bench in game. I don’t think many, if any, teams have a camera fixed on a catcher’s signs with a closed circuit TV in the dugout to relay the info to the hitter every game. That’s just brazen and on another level and is somewhat backed by the stories we hear about people and players being shocked at the lengths they Astros have gone to cheat. All teams attempt to steal signs/signals (mostly “the right way”), I doubt many teams actually accomplish this more than a few times over the course of a year. The Astros presumably had the ability to do it for every home game at a level nobody does it at. But that's the thing with baseball: cheating scandals always end up being exposed by the team and/or players out of SO DAMN MANY who were ultimately doing it best or the most. Like, it's NEVER an isolated trend or incident. I honestly look at players griping as being a tomayto/tomahto situation of some people looking it as guys genuinely outraged over the sanctity of their sport or whatever, and people like me who look at them as more being pissed that the Astros got away with doing an "accepted" form of cheating so well and to that scope. Like, "horsefeathers, my team(s) didn't try half as hard to give us the grey area (at best) advantage that pretty much all of us want and would accept at any time." I don't believe for a second that there's not another team out there who wouldn't do the same thing if they could, or have attempted it in the past along these lines or, hell, were doing it through last year and just weren't as good a team and didn't get caught. I genuinely feel like nobody in pro baseball can take some kind of high ground on this, and I think a lot of the fans doing the same are doing with some serious willful blinders on. I'd be stunned if it hits the levels of how the Cards were punished for their hacking escapades, much less exceeds it.

the videos above showed games in the regular season. it would be so categorically boneheaded to exploit such a clear advantage to that degree, it'd be unquestionably solved in short order i mean common sense would be just utilizing it in leverage situations...or who knows, maybe they were like the Price is Right Perfect Bid guy just doing it every pitch and 200 loud trash can bangs every home game went largely unnoticed to all and it actually had no tangible benefit anyway Literally nobody here is denying they cheated. The point that in a game rife with cheating at all times, especially this specific cheat, they just got busted on their particular method of cheating. It's faulty, IMO, to assume that their brand of stealing signal cheating was significantly more effective than other teams' brands of stealing signal cheating, and it's especially faulty to think this is some exceptional case, and that MLB will do much of anything about it. Seriously, what do you think should or is likely to happen?

why are you suggesting/assuming that they were doing this on every pitch @Minute Maid Park the entire season Astros team-wide postseason splits, 2017 home: 862 OPS away: 632 OPS Because people are very clearly arguing that this didn't only happen in the 2017 playoffs? *Just saw I was beaten to that point.

Pretty much. Like, I get a kick out of the "imagine if Bryant..." type of comments, as if the Cubs aren't also doing or have done this kind of horsefeathers (and aren't trying to figure out what the next hot cheat is) and he just can't hit those damn pitches. There's a huge amount of the schadenfreude out of this that feeds into people's need to think a team like that couldn't possibly be THAT good, and this is the iron clad vindication that proves they're not that good. Get outta here with that. If anything, it shows that cheating is one of the few things they're not good at. And man, that anyone thinks MLB is going to come down hard in any way...what planet are all of you living on?

Wait, am I denying somewhere that they did it? Why is this so difficult for you: I can't believe we're talking about a pro baseball scandal and people are legit crowing like it MUST only be this one team. And get outta here with this "whole league crap" out of a handful of salty players on Twitter.

horsefeathers, you beat me to it. For those that don't want to do the work: .278 .400 .523 .923 (16 HR) (345 PA) .315 .446 .663 1.109 (25 HR) (345 PA)

Right, but this kind of epitomizes why this won't really be a thing. Besides that it's something pretty much everyone is doing or trying to do in one way or another, and how the numbers don't really play out to this being this amazing advantage for the Astros, that so much of it will come down to things like "LOOK AT THIS REALLY GOOD HITTER CRUSH A TERRIBLE PITCH...also there's the bang" isn't going to give it a whole lot of traction. Like, it would be far more effective to show normally mediocre or lousy hitters having spikes and doing unusual amounts of damage, which we won't get a lot of because it's the Astros and they're mostly really good with or without the "cheating." I guess it would be a Bonds-type of situation in terms of trying to find a line where they went from "just" a great team to freakishly great. Plus MLB has no real motivation to do much of anything about it, and the other teams don't have any real motivation, or a leg to stand on, to make it a big deal. ..are you trying to reenact the Chapelle Show jury selection sketch here oh yeah this guy hits 40 HR now I mean, sure, congratulations on totally showing me that the Astros aren't literally 100% stacked to a man. I take it all back.

BY GAWD, HOW COULD HE HAVE POSSIBLY CRUSHED THAT MEATIEST OF MEATBALLS OTHERWISE. Still was an 0-2 pitch and a breaking ball that he could’ve been extra geared up for if it was a meatball. Also adds to the proof of “trash can drum beat noise=breaking ball/off speed.” Right, but this kind of epitomizes why this won't really be a thing. Besides that it's something pretty much everyone is doing or trying to do in one way or another, and how the numbers don't really play out to this being this amazing advantage for the Astros, that so much of it will come down to things like "LOOK AT THIS REALLY GOOD HITTER CRUSH A TERRIBLE PITCH...also there's the bang" isn't going to give it a whole lot of traction. Like, it would be far more effective to show normally mediocre or lousy hitters having spikes and doing unusual amounts of damage, which we won't get a lot of because it's the Astros and they're mostly really good with or without the "cheating." I guess it would be a Bonds-type of situation in terms of trying to find a line where they went from "just" a great team to freakishly great. Plus MLB has no real motivation to do much of anything about it, and the other teams don't have any real motivation, or a leg to stand on, to make it a big deal.

BY GAWD, HOW COULD HE HAVE POSSIBLY CRUSHED THAT MEATIEST OF MEATBALLS OTHERWISE.

if you had time to sit and prepare for the pitch, sure, but the video seemed to show the batter getting the info just before the pitcher goes into windup. There's not a whole lotta time to adjust to a pitch at the point, and thats where it can be detrimental to the batter rather then helpful. The only caveat is if the batter is sitting change up the ENTIRE AB and is told when one is coming, THEN he has a huge advantage. Wait, what? That's not how batting works. You don't sit there and prepare for a specific pitch for a few minutes. Knowing before release that a changeup is coming would be a huge advantage. It both allows you to sit fastball if you don't hear banging, then expect off speed once you hear it. You don't need 5 minutes to think it over. Based on my very scientific analysis of how much I suck at The Show even when I guess the pitch, HARD DISAGREE.

Cool. I think the declaration of him not being a 1st rounder is the hottest take I've had in a few years lol. Lol. I think he'll be great, but injuries happen, too. We'll see. "Guys, I totally realistically think that the only way Trubisky isn't a horsefeathering franchise QB is if he gets hurt."

if you had time to sit and prepare for the pitch, sure, but the video seemed to show the batter getting the info just before the pitcher goes into windup. There's not a whole lotta time to adjust to a pitch at the point, and thats where it can be detrimental to the batter rather then helpful. The only caveat is if the batter is sitting change up the ENTIRE AB and is told when one is coming, THEN he has a huge advantage. The only reason why I disagree is that if it didn't work very well or didn't help much at all, they wouldn't have kept doing it. How can you say this with a straight face about anything in baseball just solely based on the fact that Albert Almora exists.

Look at Derwood majestically destroying sulley and David and raw.

Has...has secretly been Pace the entire time?

It's the asymmetry that matters to me, I don't particularly care that they're trying to get signs. Steal all the signs you want, but if you're using your home park to do it in a way your opponent physically can't, that crosses the line for me. Yup. Big-time. Anybody passing this off as just good old-fashioned cheating has it way wrong. This is a different territory all together. It's the optics more than anything else; it's not realistically THAT much of an advantage, if at all, most of the time. It's more along the lines, IMO, of corking the bat, where the perceived/actual benefits are far more dwarfed by he risk/work involved.

No setting up a system with cameras in your home park so you can instantly relay signs to a hitter is capital C cheating. I'm not even sure there's a huge benefit(lots of hitters have said they don't even want that information), but when you're systematically getting it in a way that isn't possible for the opponent to do so because it's your home park, it's cheating. Nah. It's dumb for catchers and pitchers to still communicate that way 20 [expletive] years deep into the 21st Century. At worst it's motivation for the game to update something that should have been updated god knows how many years ago. It's such a ridiculous blind spot it basically deserves to be exploited (and visiting teams can exploit pretty damn easily, too). Hit like to subscribe and get my follow up theory: A [expletive] pitch clock would pretty much fix all of this.

NEVER SIDE WITH MANAGEMENT, SULLEY. I especially like the logic trap of the last one. "Well, the shitty GM who should be fired says the shitty QB who shouldn't have been drafted reminds him of one of the best QBs of all time! BOOM, GOTCHA."

Let's face it: it's mostly "cheating" as opposed to actual cheating, since the not really-rules are hinged on old-timey nonsense that treats cameras like sorcery that will steal someone's soul.

Boy, I sure hope the Cubs don't hire any of those dirty cheaters who are really good at cheating. No sir!

That was about Descalso. Like, why would I have been saying Schwarber is old?

Still a terrifyingly small sample size, but BR has him going HAM pretty much all of the last month: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=happia01&year=2019&t=b Or is that mostly masking that he sucked and that last week dragged up the previous 3-ish?