World Series Grillz

Note: This post has been lightly edited since its original publication in November 2022.

1. I thought I understood pain; I started watching playoff baseball. I was at a BW3 alone, stepping out of my job early to catch the end of Astros-Royals Game 4. With a four-run lead in the eighth, the Houston Astros were a few errant Will Harris pitches away from punching their first-ever ticket to the American League Championship Series. Harris blew a 6-2 lead and what felt like 60 seconds later the game was over. 9-6 Kansas City. There was a Game 5 at the K in two days but I knew we weren’t winning that one. It wasn’t misplaced pessimism—I know what backbreaking loss looks like.

2. The most lasting memory I had of the Astros before 2013 was when everyone thought it was hilarious we had a guy nicknamed The Big Unit on the team when I was in elementary and I didn’t understand why that was funny. I was familiar with names like Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Lance Berkman, Jose Lima, and Ken Caminiti, but to me they were synonymous with noble failure. Baseball more than any other sport was one you were either born into or not, and, unlike my brothers, I didn’t play little league. The 2005 World Series run was but a blip on my radar in a year that saw Houston in a near-miss with a Category Five and my high school obsession with Feels. I believed baseball was doomed to extinction and the years of futility by fumbling former owner Drayton McLane killed any potential interest I could have in the sport. Chronic red flag collector Jim Crane bought the team in 2011 and under former commissioner Bud Selig’s thumb moved the Astros from the National League to the American League and committed to tanking under General Manager Jeff Luhnow. I picked up on this idea—losing so much you accumulate the highest draft picks and stack them to success—and was sold. The Process 76ers were but a glimmer in Houston Rockets assistant GM Sam Hinkie’s eye. Let’s lose 100+ games a year.

3. I gravitated to watching bad Astros teams as a lark. I didn’t talk about it. This was the height of post-graduation funemployment. After Catfish I would abscond to my bedroom and watch the last hour of an Astros pummeling at the hand of some anonymous Twins team. Don’t worry about who’s on the field, they’re keeping the seats warm for guys named George Springer and Jon Singleton and #1 overall pick Carlos Correa and another #1 overall pick and the pride of Houston, future ace Mark Appel. During the 2014 season that featured the long-awaited call-ups of Springer and Singleton, the Astros over-performed. A 5’6” second baseman named Jose Altuve was the AL batting champ. I watched the last game that season, a home loss against the Cleveland professional baseball team, to see him clinch the title, sweating every at-bat. I had spent the summer watching Springer hit dingers and a bearded stoic named Dallas Keuchel deal every few games. Hope sprung eternal.

4. I moved out of my house in 2017 and rented my first apartment. I was sick of driving 30+ minutes home from work, stopping to say hi to my parents, and missing the first pitch of every game. I was also about to turn 2[x]. The commute was killer for many reasons but when I visited apartments that spring the only thing I daydreamed about was how fast can I get home from work and can I have the TV on by 7:07 pm. My first apartment was four minutes away from my job and the number of games I missed during the 2017 season I could probably count on one hand. I watched the Seattle game when we were 5-5 and Julia Morales ate a cricket live on air. The Astros won that game and went on a winning streak. People talk about the rally cricket to this day. This was the season the Astros won their first World Series.

5. I spent 2019 convinced we were on a collision course with not just the World Series, but sweeping whoever we’d face in the four-game dalliance. Gerrit Cole was the best pitcher on the planet and 70-year-old ace-whisperer and Zen master Brent Strom made it happen. He turned the Astros pitching staff into a machine and the homegrown lineup of proven champions Springer, Altuve, Correa, Alex Bregman, and Yulieski Gurriel, alongside rookie-of-the-year slugger Yordan Alvarez and Kyle “his nickname is literally Ted Williams” Tucker was an unstoppable force. The Washington Nationals ditched their manager Dusty Baker a few seasons before to continued postseason success and superstar Bryce Harper decamped to the Phillies that offseason. They started the season 19-31. They beat the Astros in seven games, in the only best-of-seven series across the four major North American sports in which the home team never won a game. I thought I understood pain.

6a. I don’t think any of us have fully processed all that 2020 brought. MLB thought a 60-game season made sense. During the winter of 2019/2020, fresh off the most heinous sports loss I’ve endured (the 2018 Western Conference Finals is my Joker origin story but the 2019 World Series is when I tapdance down the stairs), the news formally broke of the Astros sign-stealing scheme.

6b. The plan was brought to the title-winning 2017 Astros by former-Yankee Carlos Beltran, who came to the team that year as a mentor figure and stabilizing force when the plucky 2015 Astros gave way to a broken 2016 team prominently featuring a washed Carlos Gomez complaining about his role on the team despite hitting .210 and making game-losing errors nightly. Beltran said the Astros were “behind the times” with the lack of an organizational cheating apparatus. Along with bench coach Alex Cora they made quick work of implementing the live-video-feed-to-trashcan system. Marwin Gonzalez in a career year was the #1 beneficiary of the system. Manager A.J. Hinch was tipped off about it and broke a monitor in anger, then later said he regretted not doing more. Altuve refused the system and logged the fewest uses of it by a mile but became the face of the scandal-ridden team because a NYC-based conspiracy theorist insisted he wore a wire during his pennant-clinching homerun off Aroldis Chapman in 2019. Altuve, a man who has never had the luxury of the profile of a major leaguer, demonstrated powerful leadership: He stood on a dais in February 2020 and apologized for the wrongs his teammates and former teammates committed. He would later end the 2021 White Sox season in front of a Chicago crowd that cheered when a misplaced pitch hit him early in the game by knocking a three-run jack at the top of the ninth that slammed the door shut on a mass of people that was but one of many screaming “Fuck Altuve” that year. Couldn’t have happened to nicer people.

6c. Relaying signs to hitters in real time via trashcan bangs is objectively funny. It has also been proven negligibly advantageous for a team that had a better record away than home, hit better on the road, and whose most productive players were good without it and have spent five years proving so (even if/perhaps especially if they are no longer with the team). Lance McCullers threw 24 straight curveballs to clinch the AL pennant in a win-or-go-home outing. Everyone watching knew what pitch was coming except for the “savages in the box” Yankees apparently. (You still have to hit them.) They also won two games in Los Angeles in the World Series, including Game 7 when Dodgers starter Yu Darvish allegedly tipped his pitches on the way to a 5-1 loss.

6d. Alex Cora implemented the same system when he was promoted to manager in 2018 for a Boston Red Sox team that featured every position player hitting out of his mind (including a career year in nearly every offensive stat for second baseman and current Dodger Mookie Betts), and ran away with the World Series in five games versus L.A. They blamed one equipment guy and Cora returned to steer the team to the ALCS in 2021 after serving a one-year suspension. He is beloved by fans and the city and met with indifference by MLB at large.

6e. The most successful teams of the pre-2019 era all had a system in place—your Dodgers, Yankees, Cubs, Brewers, Red Sox, Braves, Mets, Royals, etc. This does not prove you have to cheat to win, or that it’s fine if everyone does it. It proves the opposite—these are talented teams who looked for competitive edges, and correlated to their success during the previous decade was another thing they did. Good for them. In 2018 Sports Illustrated reported:

…If you walked into [Dodger Stadium’s video 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 … These cameras are not used for training purposes. They are used expressly for stealing signs and deciphering “tells” from pitchers.

Within the first ten minutes of Ken Burns’ definitive nine-part documentary about baseball he states it’s the one sport “that tolerates cheating.” Relaying signs via trashcans is amusing, but it’s the same competitive edge as players and coaches in the dugout whistling after receiving signs in real-time on an Apple Watch.

6f. The most nefarious aspect of the Astros cheating scandal was the exposure of a toxic front-office culture that had been McKinsey-pilled to an embarrassing degree. Rebuild captain and former GM Jeff Luhnow brought an HGH-induced version of Billy Beane/Theo Epstein analytics to a perennial St. Louis Cardinals contender before coming to Houston. (His cutthroat methods were so successful a former Cards employee is serving federal time for hacking access to them.) He wanted to gut the minor leagues by instituting simulations of the game like it was The Show, which would nuke the heart of the sport as a lifeline to professional ball in many small towns. He inquired about disgraced Oregon State pitcher/pedophile Luke Heimlich who was radioactive even in the all-too-forgiving professional sports world. He brought aboard historic reliever and proven abuser Roberto Osuna to a 2018 Astros team that was coasting on good vibes from the year before who would become a karmic debt that would prove costly. In the 2019 ALCS, after blowing a save to the Yankees (before the Astros won the pennant on a miracle homer by literal angel Altuve), team exec Brandon Taubman taunted female journalists by screaming “I’m so fucking glad we traded for Osuna” even though his man just blew the game. All of this needed to be flushed away for the Astros to be good again and I’m glad Luhnow, Osuna, and especially Taubman’s consulting firm BlackRock-aspiring minions are gone.

6g. The second most nefarious aspect of the scandal has nothing to do with the team but a media apparatus so steeped in the coasts it doesn’t know what to do with itself. Every sport has its golden franchises but no sport is as indebted to its marquee teams as baseball. If the Astros had beat the Tigers, Rays, and Pirates on their way to a World Series win in 2017, the blow-up over the scandal would have lasted a week. Check the goofy tenor of pre-2019 stories about sign-stealing versus the limp, paternalistic mealy-mouthing that happens today.

6h. If you’re an NBA guy, you can create an entire persona based on being like, the #1 Orlando Magic fan. Not only will people care about what you have to say about the Magic, they will take what you say about the sport as important. This doesn’t exist in baseball. The Athletic does not field a dedicated reporter for the most successful team in baseball over the past six seasons. [2024 update: The Athletic hired Chandler Rome to cover the team at the start of the 2024 season lolmygod.] There are no Houston homers in the national media across all sports with the exception of Robert Flores who toils away at the MLB Network. There is no Marlins superfan who breaks the game down in an entertaining way on YouTube. There is not an Astros fan at the cool, calm, collected Baseball Knowers’ table on the internet. (Whitney Pastorek might have been the closest we got.) This allows for endless amplification of condescending, scolding coverage of the Astros, which characterizes fans as unsophisticated bumpkins. Let it have been a coastal or Chicago/Philly team with the same exact system as the Astros, and we would not hear the end of it from smugly unrepentant media cheerleaders. Can you imagine how (more) obnoxious Yankees fans would be if everyone thought their team was full of unapologetic cheaters. There would be stories about how the rest of the country is wrong and cheating in baseball is fine actually and the trashcan system didn’t result in winning games wouldn’t you know it. If Correa played on the coasts his “know the facts or shut the fuck up” soundbite would open a city-specific podcast hosted by a Raytheon-backed media vertical that would be praised for its witty, playful, diehard-fan candor. This is a hill I will die on.

6i. This is what MLB commissioner Rob Manfred wanted. The sign-stealing scandal swallowed the league’s foremost blue-chip teams, so the Astros became a scapegoat. It was a power play: the players weren’t suspended because they were used as pawns to clean up the game at large, and if the franchises in New York, Boston, and Los Angeles went un-tainted by scandal the league would be in a better place. Why do you think the title wasn’t stripped: it would have put a magnifying glass on the competitive balance of MLB, a league constantly in a staring contest with itself. Manfred issued a one-year suspension of Luhnow and Hinch but Crane shortsightedly chose to fire them. Manfred, in his cynical handling of the game, wanted to save face and distract fans from an expanded playoff field, universal designated hitters, more inter-league play, banning the shift, pitch clocks, starting extra innings with guys on base, the looming lockout, etc. The way to ram these big changes to the game through and not be inconvenienced by a black mark like a league-wide cheating scandal would be to scapegoat a team, offer the players immunity, and let the fans pick up the slack. This is the shock doctrine. You could shit on the Astros if it meant the rest of MLB could appear clean. Meanwhile the biggest reform since the Second Vatican Council was coming. This is an accepted fact by many major-leaguers, including rivals, former teammates, and Guys Who Just Knew How the League Worked. If the rest of the league could go un-punished and the sport could escape its biggest scandal since steroids no one would care about the backwater franchise in Houston.

6j. Accept the Hinch and Luhnow suspension; dock draft picks; hear the boos from fans of other teams; the Astros broke the rules and were punished. But the story has always been overblown—it was easier to throw dirt on the tanking team that ruffled feathers for doing what every NBA team does and stormed the league’s upper echelon in a few years than tackle existential questions about sign-stealing. Because none of it matters—more teams should cheat. Baseball is such an easy game they introduce it to toddlers and invent new ways to cheat all the time: Pine tar. Grease. Sticky stuff. Corked bats. Metal bats. Heavier baseballs, lighter ones (the capricious nature of which is wholly endorsed by MLB itself, which in 2021 took over production of balls from Rawlings to change outcomes of games). Forthcoming robot umpires. Bigger bases. It’s a 200+-year-old game. 2019 NL MVP Cody Bellinger hits like an AAA player since the league cracked down on sign-stealing and no one bats on eye. MLB banned sticky stuff and Gerrit Cole has looked mortal for the past 1.5 seasons and no one cares. A.J. Hinch was offered a job immediately by Detroit after serving his suspension. The Astros were never a hit to the integrity of the game; at the risk of whataboutism the integrity of the game is challenged when an Angels employee provides fentanyl to Tyler Skaggs that directly leads to his death, or the Dodgers keep a flow-chart of how egregious their human trafficking criminal offenses are in foreign countries, which is tied to the illegal maneuvering for prospects that got former Braves GM John Coppolella banned for life. These scandals speak to a level of corruption inside the game that both MLB and the government thought warranted a deeper look. No one cared about the Astros until child predator Mike Fiers danced on their 2019 grave.

7. There were a few moments during the winter of 2020 when I had my doubts about the Astros. One of my favorite team bloggers James Yasko quit his daily game logs and link-roundups out of some mixture of disgust and exhaustion. Yet any time I processed new information I failed to see an ethical or moral problem with rooting for the ‘Stros. If there was proof the trashcan scheme resulted in thrown games or outcomes different from what could have been expected, I would reconsider. It never came.

8. With the meteoric impact of the scandal still sizzling, the team signed lovable skipper Dusty Baker and snatched Tampa Bay Rays GM James Click to reset. Click was the architect of all the no-name Tampa teams that finished ahead of the Yankees and Red Sox in their division every year and while I thought both were calculated moves (cast a lovable manager to a proven workhorse to stay the course), they also signaled something else: they were not giving up. Crane pushed his chips in.

9. At the end of a forgettable 2020 season where they went 29-31, lost the division to the A’s, and whose most memorable moment occurred when Ramon Laureano tried to fight the entire team, Oakland was the first victim of “we want Houston.” The Astros then opened their fourth consecutive ALCS appearance against the Rays and went 0-3. After the year from hell, I thought I would tune into baseball for the first time since 2019 and “enjoy” the sweep. They took Tampa Bay to seven, including an exhilarating walk-off in Game 5 by Correa and his Jordan-aping swagger. This changed everything.

10. They continued to build off their improbable 2020 postseason run. After my favorite player, George Springer, departed to Toronto, I was all-in for 2021. I wanted to see one more year of Correa. They needed a redemption tour in front of fans. They won 95 games and took the Braves to six in the World Series.

11. When Atlanta finished them in 2021 I felt a pang of, “it’s not over.” I had already made the choice I wouldn’t watch most of the upcoming season if they let Correa walk, but when it was 7-0 Braves to close it out I knew I would put my faith in the Astros again when they would be back in the World Series, at home, 2022. Hope sprung eternal.

12. I’ve never needed a championship to justify my love of a team or a player. I can (and have) spend 5,000 words explaining why James Harden in his prime was second only to peak LeBron James in increasing your win probability in any given NBA game. This isn’t my own story, so I don’t talk about it when I talk about the 2017 Astros. But do you know how many people pulled for the team when their homes were in shambles. When they had lost everything. When Justin Verlander rode through the trade deadline on a horse. When they were invited to play at the Trop for a few games by first-class organization Tampa Bay after noted dumpster franchise Texas Rangers refused to let the Astros switch a home-and-home series. I would walk through my deserted neighborhood post-Harvey to snag clean copies of World Series newspapers and see piles of carpet and flooring and furniture outside every house. It ran too deep. It wasn’t something you just walk away from as a fan, not after everything that led to “ground ball, right side, could do it.”

13. Through 2017 I felt like I needed a return on investment. Then there was the chase of “one more.” After 2019 it became about needing good faith rewarded and time redeemed. You can’t back out on something like the home team racking up pennants with the whole city behind them as a united front. No more moral victories. As this year’s World Series progressed, I kept thinking about the changes to the game to come, and if this spell in which I became a fastidious admirer of America’s pastime was coming to an end. I couldn’t imagine the drama of Chas McCormick’s catch in Game 5 with the novelty of a pitch clock to hasten Ryan Pressly’s pace. I had to imagine a loss to a sixth-seeded Phillies team that wouldn’t have made the playoffs years prior before putting that to bed. There was a sense this could be it. There’s always a sense of unpredictable endings just around the corner. I know what backbreaking loss looks like—I know it often comes unannounced, unanticipated, at the peak of your powers. The 2022 Astros annihilated the league with workmanlike focus. A slow start had people wondering if the Mariners or Angels would get it together this year. By July the division wasn’t in question. We had seen this movie before, but clocking 106 wins, winning 100+ games in four seasons out of five, compared to where we were a decade ago—symmetry is a mother. Losing again would be out of the question, because then this mirage of winning would be just that—unreal.

14. When Yordan Alvarez lifted a 2-1 Jose Alvarado pitch 450 feet over the batter’s-eye-box dead center at Minute Maid Park it was all over but the shouting. I knew the 2021 Astros would be back and I knew the 2022 Astros would “finish the job.” And when Nick Castellanos flew out to end Game 6, and Kyle Tucker trucked to catch the foul ball, Dusty Baker scored the play on his game card. A lifetime in baseball as player and manager prepared him for that moment—the moment of perfection, the moment all preparation leads you toward, the moment of commencement—and my experience as a fan left me in suspended animation. I wasn’t going to celebrate until I saw the ball in Tucker’s glove. This is the great unifying force of the game. After all that, there wasn’t a lot to say, or ruminate on. The experience was pure, and final.

15. Baker said after the game: “It’s not relief. It’s just sheer joy and thankfulness.”