MLB Off-Topic

[Master Live 013]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Damn.

10char.

[slickdtc]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

It doesn’t change anything but at least it’s respectable to take responsibility. I’m glad someone took the first step. Wonder if anymore will, especially any current Astros. They got spared.

[Jeffx]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

It's pretty much been covered. But, Manfred is the worst thing that's happened to baseball since the "94 strike". I thought Selig was the worst commissioner.... Hold my beer, Here comes Manfred. A man that seems dead set on destroying baseball and it's tradition.

He wants to make sweeping changes to an already great game, He made the weakest decision he could have ever made on the Astros scandal. He doesn't give a damn about baseball. It's just a paycheck for him.

I hear all this nonsense from MLB about steroids and how it ruined the integrity of the game and then this moron comes in and now the baseballs are juiced and then he completely denied it. Even though everything and anyone credible can easily confirm that the baseballs are most certainly juiced. But that's ok apparently [emoji849]

But honestly, it doesn't surprise me anymore. Every major sport that I love right now has a dip**** commissioner, including the NCAA, that continues to ruin these sports. excluding the NBA.

But Manfred might just be the very worst, and I do not like what the future holds at all with him in that seat.

Edit: I'm starting to really like Bauer.

Trevor Bauer (@BauerOutage) Tweeted:
No idea who made this new playoff format proposal, but Rob is responsible for releasing it, so I’ll direct this to you, Rob Manfred. Your proposal is absurd for too many reasons to type on twitter and proves you have absolutely no clue about baseball. You’re a joke. https://twitter.com/BauerOutage/stat...741682176?s=20

Great post man....you said it all.


Did you guys catch Paul Lo Duca on WFAN's Moose & Maggie? He tore the Wilpons, Manfred & MLB a new one.

https://wfan.radio.com/articles/paul-lo-duca-on-wfan-jeff-wilpon-statement-is-ludicrous

[TripleCrown9]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Astros owner Jim Crane is holding a meeting with the entire roster tomorrow to discuss the team's strategy for publicly addressing the scandal.

[Master Live 013]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

It is going to be beautiful.

[jeebs9]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Astros owner Jim Crane is holding a meeting with the entire roster tomorrow to discuss the team's strategy for publicly addressing the scandal.

It's probably going to be shut up. Marshawn Lynch every question. And give vague answers like our former manager did.

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[Blzer]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Astros owner Jim Crane is holding a meeting with the entire roster tomorrow to discuss the team's strategy for publicly addressing the scandal.

"Quit gulping up a lump in your throat during interviews, Alex!"








Now, if I was a publicist and one of the players sought my advice during this time, I would say:

Spoiler

[slickdtc]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Astros owner Jim Crane is holding a meeting with the entire roster tomorrow to discuss the team's strategy for publicly addressing the scandal.

Oh so we’re going to get a unified company line instead of a genuine response. Forget it then.

Spoiler

IMG_5630.JPG

[WaitTilNextYear]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Loving this low key Maddon-Epstein beef that's just now emerging.

"It was plenty," Maddon said. "Philosophically, Theo needed to do what he needed to do separately. At some point, I began to interfere with his train of thought a little bit. And it's not that I'm hardheaded. I'm inclusive. But when I started there -- '15, '16, '17 -- it was pretty much my methods. And then all of a sudden, after '18 going into '19, they wanted to change everything."

"Joe and I aren't exactly the same," Epstein said. "His approach was more 'Things will work themselves out. These are great players. Let them play. This will work out.' From my perspective, there was a little bit more cause for concern."

[BatsareBugs]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

"The commissioner made his report, the Astros made their decision" is going to be their new motto.

[DamnYanks2]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

Great post man....you said it all.


Did you guys catch Paul Lo Duca on WFAN's Moose & Maggie? He tore the Wilpons, Manfred & MLB a new one.


https://wfan.radio.com/articles/paul...t-is-ludicrous

Not a Met fan. But I became a fan of Lo Duca. I agreed with everything he said. Really good listen.

Some quotes that really stuck out to me.

"Bud was shaking Roger Maris's families hand while he knew these guys were on rocket fuel."

"At least Bud stuck his face in front of the camera. But he was the used car salesman." But Rob doesn't even try.

Talking about the sweeping changes in MLB-

So everything's changed for them, but wheres the change for the umpires that stink?

Dead on...[emoji122]



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[DieHardYankee26]

MLB Off-Topic

Seeing Bud Selig all of the time was an absolute negative so Manfred is probably smart not to follow there, even though Manfred has done interviews in the past.
The fix for the umpires is an automated strike zone which tons of fans are adamantly against, a lot of them don’t think anything needs fixing. There is no universal agreement among baseball fans, but there probably is among the 30 owners, who Manfred works for. It’s Goodell all over again, he is not the problem, just the face of it.

[ProfessaPackMan]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

I see Baseball is trying to make sure I give up watching Sports completely by 2030. With this mess they’re trying to do, the NFL’s yearly nonsense and the NBA’s garbage proposals as well, I’ll have a lot of free time by then.

[Master Live 013]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

More on the Astros cheating scandal from the Washington Post:

Into this arena stepped the Nationals, appearing in the World Series for the first time in October. They entered the series as underdogs to 107-win Houston. But they came armed with two advantages: time to prepare, by virtue of their sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship Series; and an entire sport that had a vested interest in having anyone but the Astros win the championship.

As one member of the Nationals put it, “It was amazing, once [it was assured] we were playing the Astros, how many people were coming out of the woodwork to let us know what they were doing.”

...................................

“It was all brought up” in the advance reports the scout handed over to his superiors, one AL scout said. “It was as much a part of the report as anything else, because we had to be prepared to counter it, if that were possible. [Use] a bunch of sign systems . . . just any way possible to try to combat an advantage we all knew they had but couldn’t do anything about. It felt helpless. You felt silly almost, sitting there knowing [they were doing something] but having to just put it in a report as if it was a normal thing to contend with. It sucked.”

...................................

Many in baseball are asking why it took a whistleblower — Fiers, the former Astros pitcher — to spark MLB to action when so many people had suspected the Astros of wrongdoing for years, with some taking the extra step of reporting those suspicions to MLB.

“We investigate any allegation that’s brought to this office,” an MLB spokesman said Monday, declining to say how many of those allegations it received.

...................................

And there was lots of chatter. The Los Angeles Dodgers, who lost the 2017 World Series to Houston, were particularly forthcoming. Several Dodgers reached out to Washington second baseman Brian Dozier, who had been with Los Angeles the previous year, to say Houston was stealing signs, according to one person with knowledge of the talks.

Martinez spoke with Alex Cora, the former Houston bench coach, who was by that point managing the Red Sox, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations. Cora, named in the MLB report as a primary instigator of the Astros’ scheme, was subsequently fired by the Red Sox, with whom he won the World Series title in 2018 but failed to make the playoffs in 2019.

Martinez, according to one person, also reached out to Tony Sipp, a reliever for Houston from 2014 to 2018 who spent the first part of 2019 with Washington. Martinez and Sipp didn’t connect, but Nationals pitcher Max Scherzer took his own steps to track down Sipp. It is standard for pitchers and catchers to switch to a more complex set of signs with runners on second — to prevent the runner from stealing the sign and signaling it to the batter, a practice that for years has been considered acceptable — but Scherzer asked Sipp whether the Nationals needed to be concerned about the Astros even with no runners on base. Sipp said yes, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

So the Nationals’ plan took shape. The pitchers first met on the Friday before the World Series started. They assigned each pitcher five sets of signs, all of which could be affixed to the inside of their caps. They outfitted catchers Yan Gomes and Kurt Suzuki with wristbands with all those signs, much like a quarterback who wears plays on his forearm. Although traditional sign-stealing requires a runner on second base who can see the catcher put down his fingers, the Nationals instructed their catchers to put down multiple signs even when there was only a runner on first or there was no one on base.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/mlb/astros-cheating-open-secret/2020/02/11/1830154c-4c41-11ea-9b5c-eac5b16dafaa_story.html

With each additional story that I read the more that I become convinced that the Astros punishment wasn't severe enough (I'm not talking about stripping the Title).

[Master Live 013]

Re: MLB Off-Topic

From the Wall Street Journal:

“Beltrán, who is the godfather of the whole program, ironically just swings at everything after taking a strike and probably does the worst with the info,” Koch-Weser wrote.


The message clarifies a critical point about the cheating operation that has transformed into one of the biggest scandals in American sports history. Neither the players alone, nor the front office, are to blame. The Astros’ rule-breaking permeated the organization, involving executives, coaches and players.

...................................

The interplay between players and executives was inherent to the sign-stealing program from the start. In 2016, Houston third baseman Alex Bregman, then a rookie, mentioned to video room staffers at one point that other teams were better at stealing signs when runners were on second base than the Astros, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Three people familiar with the matter said that Bregman wasn’t telling the Astros to cheat, but rather suggesting that they could find a way to decode signs legally. The Astros didn’t provide comment on behalf of their employees. The MLB Players Association declined to comment.

The conversation eventually led to Derek Vigoa, then an intern and now the Astros’ director of team operations, delivering a PowerPoint presentation to Luhnow in September 2016 that featured a slide devoted to Codebreaker. (Luhnow was suspended for the entire 2020 season last month and then fired by the Astros.)

One of the people familiar with the matter said that once Codebreaker went into action, the people most interested in sign-stealing were Beltrán and bench coach Alex Cora.

...................................

On May 24, 2017, Koch-Weser, who is still employed by the Astros, sent an email to Luhnow and others that highlights Cora and Beltrán’s roles.

“I don’t want to electronically correspond too much about ‘the system’ but Cora/Cintron/Beltran have been driving a culture initiated by Bregman/Vigoa last year and I think it’s working,” Koch-Weser wrote. “I have no proof that it has worked, but we get real good dope on pitchers tipping and being lazy. That information, if it’s not already, will eventually yield major results in our favor once players get used to the implementation.” (Alex Cintrón was an Astros assistant coach in 2017 and is now their hitting coach. He was believed to be involved in transmitting information from the video room to the dugout, a person familiar said.)

...................................

The banging scheme started around June 2017, with Cora and Beltrán among the most responsible for its implementation, according to a person familiar with the matter. It was Cora who had a tech worker install the monitor that the Astros’ players watched before banging on the trash can, this person said.

But while it started with Cora and Beltrán, it quickly spread. Manfred’s Jan. 2 letter to Luhnow said that, “Most or all Astros players were active participants in the Banging Scheme by the conclusion of the 2017 World Series,” which ended with Houston winning in seven games over the Los Angeles Dodgers. “The Banging Scheme was so prevalent,” Manfred wrote, “that witnesses regularly describe that everyone in and around the Astros dugout was presumptively aware of it.”

Koch-Weser’s August email that called Beltrán the “godfather” was referring to the video room sign-stealing operation. It singled out González as particularly benefiting from it. “Marwin I’d say does the best job with getting this info,” Koch-Weser wrote.

González, who signed a two-year, $21 million contract with the Minnesota Twins last February, declined a request for comment from The Wall Street Journal. He spoke with reporters at the team’s spring training camp in Fort Myers, Fla., on Tuesday and apologized generally for the Astros’ cheating.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-astros-front-office-created-codebreaker-the-players-took-it-from-there-11581508800?mod=hp_lead_pos12

So Marwin Gonzalez gained a 21M contract under false pretenses? If you wanted chaos, Twins would try to void that contract, MLBPA would go nuclear.