The Astros have done it again in !
NARRATOR: As they clinch
their th playoff berth in a row...
The kings of the American
League West remain the
Houston Astros!
NARRATOR: Correspondent
Ben Reiter examines the meteoric
rise of the Houston Astros.
We use the term the edge, right?
But there's a next level to that...
It's called the bleeding edge.
If you want to excel in the world of sports, you have
to take risks.
NARRATOR: Exclusive inside accounts...
These guys are willing to do whatever it takes...
NARRATOR: The historic cheating scandal...
The Astros used a camera system to steal signs...
The players certainly were aware of it!
They were in on it!
The scandal is five percent of the story.
NARRATOR: And the lasting impact on the game.
It became a brutally efficient business.
And the Astros did better than anybody else.
That's the deal that they made they get to have their
title questioned forever.
NARRATOR: Now on FRONTLINE
I'd have thrown them all out.
Lifetime ban?
Lifetime ban.
NARRATOR: "The Astros Edge."
[crowd cheers, whistles]
BEN REITER: It was the bottom of the fourth inning
when Mike Bolsinger came to the mound
for the badly trailing Toronto Blue Jays.
He had one job to do.
Just get one out; I mean, in theory it should be easy.
There's another one deep to right.
Bautista's back, this one's gonna go...
[loud bang]
A three-run homerun.
They just kept getting hits.
Carlos Beltran jumps on the first pitch.
REITER: Bolsinger recounted the game on my podcast.
I'm trying to remember a time I was rocked more than that,
and I just don't remember a time.
It truly was the most embarrassing moment
in my career, percent.
I've never been more embarrassed of myself, ever.
REITER: Bolsinger was precariously holding on
to his place on the team.
But he was far from the only pitcher
the Houston Astros had beaten up in .
Bases are loaded.
[bat cracks, crowd roars]
I remember in the interview
after the game, I told the reporter, I was like, man,
it's just like, it was like they knew what I was throwing,
like they were all over my stuff.
There was nothing I could do.
REITER: That night was Mike Bolsinger's very last
in the Major Leagues.
The Blue Jays cut him after the game.
As for the team that ended his career?
A few months later, they would win the World Series
and go on to become baseball's most dominant club of this era.
The Houston Astros! World champions!
REITER: But there was more to the Houston Astros' success.
Something that almost no one outside the team
would know about until two years later.
It sounded like this:
[two low-pitched thumps in distance]
[bat cracks]
Not the crack of the bat,
but the banging sound right before it.
[two low-pitched thumps]
A sound that let Astros batters know what pitches were coming,
like many of the ones that night in August
from Mike Bolsinger.
It would spark one of the most expl*sive scandals
in baseball history.
The article in "The Athletic" that has everybody talking...
A stunning charge about
the Houston Astros' World Series win two years ago...
Accuses the Astros of illegally stealing signs...
Somebody in the dugout hits a garbage can once or twice...
[low-pitched thump, bat cracks]
This ball is crushed to left field.
Springer has just hit his st home run.
REITER: It's a scandal still reverberating
through Major League Baseball today.
[chanting]: Cheater, cheater!
You put so much work into
getting to this spot in your career,
and then you kind of find out,
hey, this was taken away by people that cheated.
[bat crack echoes]
♪
From the Houston Astros.
[crowd booing]
REITER: This is how Astros players were greeted
at the All-Star Game,
more than three years after the cheating scandal broke.
Even though these guys hadn't even been members of the team
in .
[crowd booing]
Jose Altuve has probably heard the boos
about as much as any player on this roster.
REITER: Players who were on that team
have received similar welcomes from rival fans.
Long before the Astros had become such lightning rods,
synonymous with cheating...
...I had reported on the team
for "Sports Illustrated."
[fans whooping]
Writing about their influential
and hyper-competitive approach to baseball:
driven by data, and drawn from Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
As the teams racked up
four World Series appearances ln six years--
I've been trying to figure out
what I and most everyone else had missed
about the Astro's rise.
How their ruthless drive for an edge
led not only to such success, but also such scandal.
♪
My search for answers led me far away from America's pastime.
To a soccer club in Spain,
owned by an American businessman named Jeff Luhnow,
the person credited-- and blamed--
for constructing the modern Astros.
I take my responsibility.
But I, I... there are aspects of this
that I haven't explained until now.
And I think it's important.
I have nothing to hide. I never have.
REITER: Luhnow used to be
the general manager of the Astros,
and bore the brunt of the scandal.
Though he denied knowing about the cheating,
he was fired and run out of the league.
We spoke for four hours,
the most expansive interview he's given on camera.
How could you not know
that your team was cheating like this?
The umpire who was standing at home plate didn't know.
Like, it's not out of the realm of possibility.
In fact, it's more rational to think
that I didn't know than I did know.
Because I didn't start it, I didn't create it,
I didn't approve it, I didn't budget for it,
I didn't, I didn't do anything.
I didn't lift a finger to make this happen.
REITER: Major League Baseball,
in its investigation of the scandal,
didn't find any evidence Luhnow knew about the banging scheme.
But they said that as the GM, he should have known.
And pointed to a "very problematic"
win-at-all-costs culture he created.
How do you respond to the public perception of, like,
a larger cultural problem within the Astros?
I think it's wanting to create a narrative
that is easy to explain.
There was no toxic culture at the Astros.
We had a very productive culture
that led to a lot of success in the game of baseball.
Six American League championships in a row,
four World Series,
two rings for winning the World Series.
That's a dynasty.
I don't think that's gonna be replicated anytime soon.
REITER: But their legacy's more than that,
because there's other parts of the story.
There's always other parts, you know?
Tom Brady and the Deflategate, and there's always, yeah,
there's always something, right?
I'm not trying to minimize it.
It's there and we all face the music,
but the Astros are one of the best sports teams
of the st century, period.
♪
REITER: Luhnow was an unusual choice
to lead the Astros from the start.
Although he'd spent the previous eight years
in the front office of the St. Louis Cardinals,
he was a creature of corporate America,
with a resume that included a stint at McKinsey,
the powerful and controversial management consulting firm
that advises governments
and corporations how to run efficiently and profitably.
It was a big risk
to hire somebody of my profile.
I didn't play the game professionally.
I have an engineering degree. I have an MBA.
That's not the profile that people typically
look for to run the sports side of a sports organization.
I was hired to help innovate and to help push the boundaries
and to help figure out what's next,
to look at the sort of long-term health of the organization.
REITER: He was hired in by the team's new owner,
a self-made shipping tycoon named Jim Crane.
And finally our crazy money story of the day
comes from Houston.
The Astros were sold to businessman Jim Crane
for $ million.
Why is it crazy?
Well, the Houston Astros are in last place.
We'll sit down with all the executives,
ask them what they think we're doing right,
and ask them what we think we're doing wrong
and we'll make some very, very quick adjustments.
He was buying a team
that wasn't going anywhere.
He bought a bloated roster with old stars.
REITER: Jesus Ortiz was on the Astros beat
for the "Houston Chronicle" at the time.
It wasn't very popular either.
No, no, like, it was an unpopular team.
It was a team that's mediocre.
It was a mediocre team with a very dissatisfied fan base.
♪
REITER: Dissatisfied because despite a few periods
of promise through the years,
the Astros had never won a single championship.
Even lifelong Astros fans like Tony Adams
found it hard to root for the team
by the time that Crane bought it.
I admire the fans that went to those games.
I followed them,
I watched some games,
but I will admit that I didn't
follow them as closely
as when they were winning.
REITER: I would end up talking to Adams
a lot during my reporting.
Obviously, as a fan, you're, you're probably more inclined
to discount or not believe the rumors about your own team.
There was so much hyperbole about the Astros and it was just
become such a viral thing.
It was almost like the national pastime
became hating the Astros.
REITER: When Jim Crane offered Jeff Luhnow
the job in ,
the Astros were not only the worst Major League team,
they were widely viewed as having
one of the worst farm systems as well.
Crane wanted Luhnow to turn that around,
while operating with maximum financial efficiency,
which meant an end to pouring money into a team
that wasn't ready to win anyway.
You know, when you take a GM job,
there's certain sort of conditions usually.
You have to keep the coach, these are the people
you're gonna be working with, et cetera, so I asked him
what are the constraints,
what are the conditions of the job?
And he had a notebook in front of him
and I thought he was gonna hand me a piece of paper
with a bunch of notes on what,
sort of, the requirements of this job,
it was a blank piece of paper
and he handed it to me across the table.
So that was, that was a message that,
look, do it the way you think
it needs to be done, because we obviously need help.
So he's, like, sliding a blank piece of paper
across the desk to you.
Basically, yeah.
I believe within the first to months,
he fired everybody from the business side.
We ended up turning over probably
about half of the baseball operations side,
so a little less than he did over that same period of time.
REITER: Turning over-- firing?
Yeah, I mean not renewing
or bringing new people in, et cetera.
When you're taking an organization
and completely changing the culture
and changing the dynamic,
that's part of what has to happen.
♪
I'd been at the "Chronicle" for years,
and covered multiple general managers.
But Jeff Luhnow was the first time I heard somebody
describe a baseball player as an asset instead of a human.
And it took me back, like, wow.
But with Jeff Luhnow, like, they were assets.
Because a lot of very good, decent baseball people
were let go by Jeff in a way
that a lot of old Astros did not appreciate.
People who devoted their lives to the Astros,
Jeff Luhnow was quick to say, "See ya."
Jeff was very upfront with saying
it's a new wave of baseball people
and he was out to change the way the game was played
and change the way the game was run.
♪
REITER: Dave Trembley was an Astros coach
for two years before Luhnow fired him.
Trembley told me that in nearly years
in professional baseball,
he'd never encountered anyone like Luhnow.
Looked like a Wall Street guy.
[chuckles] He looked like a businessman.
Dressed very nicely.
He was very prim and proper, very guarded with what he said.
He just gives you the impression that he wasn't gonna let him...
wasn't gonna put his guard down, he wasn't gonna let anybody
get too close to him.
The culture was different.
The culture was very distant.
I equated it to almost like Secret Service or FBI.
♪
REITER: Luhnow began staffing up his operation
with people who, like him,
didn't have conventional baseball backgrounds.
He brought in a crew of non-traditional employees.
He established a "nerd cave,"
which was kind of a data center
that was powering the decision making.
And that was led by a guy named Sig Mejdal,
who Luhnow brought with him from the Cardinals.
In his past life,
he had been a bio-mathematician for NASA.
Luhnow called him director of decision sciences.
He brought in all sorts of other unusual people, too--
a mechanical engineer;
a computer programmer;
a Wall Street valuations expert.
These were people who hadn't played the game.
Luhnow didn't have anything against
traditional baseball people,
as long as they shared a certain mindset.
Jeff knew that if you were going to get something done,
you had to hire people that were outside-the-box thinkers.
REITER: One of those outside-the-box thinkers
was pitching coach Doug White,
who was brought in to help reinvent the Astros farm system,
and eventually became their big league bullpen coach in .
They... he just wanted people
who were willing to educate themselves
for the goal of reaching a championship.
REITER: People like you. Yeah, for sure.
REITER: So you feel like you're kind of, like,
inventing a new way of building teams and building players.
Absolutely-- every day was that, every day.
Because we had to literally create a system,
a process of development, and we had to have the feedback for it.
Because it's like, Jeff's the kind of guy,
like, he doesn't want you just doing something.
You don't just throw [bleep] at a board, right?
It's like, I'm doing this for this reason.
Is it working? Yes, no?
If it works, keep it. If it doesn't, drop it.
Try something else.
REITER: Early results were not promising.
Pops it, but it lands, they run into each other.
And he is safe at first.
The ball gets away...
You know, we're picked to be last
by every paper and magazine out there.
So, you gotta be optimistic this time of year,
and I think we've done some things to make the team better.
REITER: The Astros kept losing,
completing a three-year run in which they lost more games
than any team in half a century.
Crane stuck to the strategy
of not trying to throw money at the problem:
their payroll plummeted to the lowest in the Majors.
The first thing they do
is basically cut salary to the bone.
REITER: Maury Brown writes about
the business of baseball for "Forbes."
They were going to do everything through smarts,
through, you know, draft, scouting.
REITER: Brown and others in the industry
saw something cynical in the strategy:
tanking the way the Astros did
meant that they would earn higher draft picks.
They have three consecutive years
where they lose over games.
That allowed them to procure all the draft picks that they had.
I remember at the time, you would talk to people,
and they were furious about this idea.
That you would purposely lose
goes against everything that you're supposed to do in sports.
♪
REITER: In my conversations with Luhnow,
he pushed back on the idea
that the Astros were intentionally losing.
We're never going to not try and win every game.
But we're not going to go all in on
to turn a -loss team into a -loss team.
That's not a sound return on investment.
REITER: In the interim,
you're being made fun of on "Jeopardy."
The large valve used to control wellbore fluids
on oil rigs is this "preventer"; the Astros could have used one.
What's a blowout preventer?
You are right.
REITER: You know, no one's watching the games on TV.
We had a zero rating one night, I think.
REITER: . Nielsen rating, right?
Yes.
REITER: Embarrassing plays, right?
Like the butt slide, you remember?
It looked like the Bad News Bears out there some nights.
REITER: They were still losing when
I first went down to Houston for "Sports Illustrated."
♪
The plan was to write about
whether there was any hope at all for a team that
had become the laughingstock of the sports world.
But what started as an inside-the-magazine feature
turned into something very different.
♪
In June ,
"Sports Illustrated" put my story on the cover
with a bold prediction
that the Astros would win the World Series
exactly three years later.
When that story came out, I remember thinking,
no way.
Like, I think they're on the right track.
But are they really going to win the World Series in ?
REITER: The story, and especially the cover,
was widely questioned.
But after I'd embedded with the Astros,
Luhnow's approach seemed to me
to be the next evolution of a winning strategy
that had begun to take hold a decade earlier.
It was known as Moneyball,
after the title of a book by Michael Lewis,
and later a movie,
about how the Oakland A's exploited data and analytics
to get wins from overlooked and undervalued players.
This is the new direction of the Oakland A's.
We are card counters at the blackjack table,
and we're gonna turn the odds on the casino.
Baseball had been more of an art than a science.
And what Moneyball did was
it emphasized the science of the game,
even the mathematics of the game.
And it really changed the way, I think, teams were built.
REITER: I worked with Tom Verducci at "Sports Illustrated"
for years.
He's been covering baseball for more than four decades,
and has written a lot about the changes to the game.
It became much more scientific,
where people really wanted to believe in the numbers.
We can measure things now to say,
this guy's going to be good.
We know what kind of pitches can work
based on how fast they're spinning.
All this math came into the game,
and the owners were like, let's get fully behind it.
REITER: Still, there's some impression around the league
that the Astros were taking this to an extreme, right?
Like, there was a lot of pushback
against what they were doing.
Listen, there was a lot of pushback because this
threatened the long-standing system in baseball.
I mean, people were worried about their jobs because
now they see, if you're an old-time scout or, you know,
you've been in baseball your whole life
and your wisdom is being valued based on your experiences,
now that's being threatened by kids
who are just out of Ivy League
who have these algorithms that they're running.
REITER: What Luhnow was doing was like Moneyball on steroids.
The Astros' approach went far beyond statistics.
They were systematically combining
both human expertise and technology
to find a winning edge.
A prime example was how they utilized
something known as the "shift."
Re-positioning their fielders, often in extreme ways,
based on data that showed where opposing batters
were most likely to hit the ball.
A lot of guys bunched over there in right field.
People did it, but the Astros were extreme
in their use of numbers and their use of positioning.
REITER: Luhnow's Astros were applying data
to every single thing they did.
It heavily informed
how they maximized their draft money.
Like their surprise move
drafting Carlos Correa number one,
and shaving millions off his signing bonus
to also lure pitcher Lance McCullers.
If you look at how
you scout a player,
you can use the numbers to really ferret out a lot more
than what subjectively I see with my eyes.
And that idea that the numbers can be their--
scouting still matters, but it was that idea
that we could use numbers to really quantify more.
That lowers your risk.
There's gonna be some winners, there's gonna be some losers.
And what you're trying to do
is minimize the number of losers that you have.
REITER: So it's essentially a way of maximizing efficiency
of your operations. Yeah.
REITER: The Astros' use of data also
had the potential to help transform players.
Like drastically lowering a hitter's strikeout rate,
as it did with outfielder George Springer.
And it could help change a solid player
into a potential Hall of Famer.
♪
When Jeff Luhnow came to Houston,
one of the players he inherited
was a slap-hitting middle infielder.
[crowd cheers]
The player had trouble getting signed at all out of Venezuela,
in large part because he was five feet, five inches tall.
Most scouts using their intuition wrote him off.
The guy's name was Jose Altuve.
Despite his height,
the Astros' data analysts saw that
he could get his bat on everything,
even pitches out of the strike zone.
But they wondered:
what if he didn't try to do that?
What if he became more selective,
swinging only at pitches over the heart of the plate?
Pitches the data revealed he could not only just hit,
but hit very, very hard?
Fly ball, that's smacked.
REITER: And it wasn't too long
before this five-foot-five slap hitter
transformed himself into one of the best hitters in the game,
and the face of the Astros.
There was a lot of time and effort
devoted to hacking the percentages of the game
from people who did not grow up within the ethos of baseball,
but in the ethos of the business world.
REITER: Why do you think you upset
the so-called traditionalists so much,
starting around this time?
Change is by definition hard for people to accept
because they get used to things a certain way.
And especially when change is stimulated
by an outsider who may not have the respect for the traditions
and the history and all of the things that people who grew up
and spent their entire lives in the game have.
REITER: One of those criticisms was that
you and the Astros were turning players into numbers,
you know, into widgets.
How do you take that criticism?
It didn't bother me that much to be honest with you.
I mean, this idea that if you're utilizing
technology and analytics, by definition
you are a cold, unfeeling person or management.
It's not true.
REITER: I want to ask you to define something for me.
It's a term that I've heard you used
in the past; you used the term the edge, right?
But there's a next level to that.
I've used it a lot in my career,
it's called the bleeding edge.
And what it means is you test the boundaries
of what has been done.
If you want to excel in the world of sports,
you have to take risks
and you have to be willing to get
the cuts and bruises that come along with that.
I was like, wow, these guys are willing to do
whatever it takes
to, you know, find an advantage
and I knew, like the Astros, were, like,
the team I wanted to work for.
REITER: Antonio Padilla became a manager
in the Astros video room.
This is the first time he has spoken publicly
about his experience with the Astros.
Even though you'd previously worked for three other teams,
this was like a whole new world? Yeah, absolutely.
They were like leaps and bounds over the other teams.
♪
Padilla and his colleagues worked on innovative uses
of data and video,
during training and in real-time during games.
They leaned into radar systems, like TrackMan.
We had live TrackMan data,
where we'd be able to track pitches.
So it's like, "Hey, so-and-so's slider's
not looking that well on TrackMan tonight."
We need to tell one of the coaches.
So, we could call down and...
REITER: So, it's like using real-time data
to make coaching decisions, make strategy decisions.
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, it's up to the coaches,
you know, if they want to relay that information.
We don't wanna, like, tell this guy
his slider's not working tonight because,
it could really, like, get into their head.
REITER: This kind of technology
was helping coaches and players reach new levels of performance.
We had edgertronic cameras, we were the first team
to actually implement them into our video systems.
REITER: These are extremely high frame rate cameras
that can kind of break down what a player's doing
to a level that no one's really seen before, right?
Exactly, yeah, and they're very expensive cameras.
You know, a lot of teams probably knew about it
and didn't want to invest in it.
But the Astros just said, hey, like this is a game changer,
we're gonna put, you know, a lot of money behind this.
Being able to capture live footage
for that is, I mean, so valuable.
♪
It was just a year ago
the Astros were dwelling in the bottom of the cellar.
Well, how things have changed in just one season...
Against the first place Astros,
still sounds funny to say, first place Astros...
Let the celebrations start!
The Astros in the postseason for the first time since .
REITER: The Astros weren't the laughingstock
of the league anymore.
And the Astros have advanced to the division series
against Kansas City...
They battled through
every element of it and made it to today,
and I couldn't be happier for them.
But you know what? They're not done.
REITER: Entering , they were actually contenders.
They started believing
that they were a team that could win the World Series
and not just hoping they were that kind of team.
Back-to-back homers by Correa and...
[cheers and applause]
REITER: But the team still had a few holes.
Their extreme cost-cutting
had rid them of most of their expensive veterans,
and they had developed a new generation
of up-and-coming stars.
But that meant they were very young.
Luhnow knew their roster needed an experienced leader
to tie everything together.
They eventually landed on Carlos Beltran.
They called me and they said, Carlos, we want you.
You know, we need you in the ballclub.
Beltran wouldn't speak to me for this film.
but I interviewed him in early
as I was reporting my book, "Astroball."
I've been in the game for more than , years,
you know, so, you get to know when you see talent.
You get to sense that.
There's a good group of guys, young group of guys
talented in their peak.
REITER: Did they mention in your talks, though,
that they wanted your, like, leadership, your chemistry?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, A.J. called me about
put next to me the guys that you think I could help.
REITER: Beltran was years old in ,
nearing the end of what looked to be a Hall of Fame career.
He had a good season the year before,
but based on analytics alone,
it was hard to make a convincing case
for signing the aging slugger.
But Luhnow agreed to bet big on him--
a $ million dollar contract--
because of the potential effect he could have on the clubhouse.
We were missing that kind of person
that, oh, that's how you do it,
if you want to be a Hall of Famer.
You have to, you have to come in early.
You have to stay late. You have to watch video.
You have to study the game. That's how you do it.
And, and Carlos did that during spring training.
The video room was constantly full with young players
trying to learn from him or watch their own video
and all of that.
So it was... it had the desired impact for sure.
Once we got Carlos Beltran, he was a big part
of bringing the team to, like, the next level.
Everybody kind of felt like he was immediately,
like, one of the leaders of the team.
REITER: What kind of stuff would he do?
What did he bring specifically?
He was just, like, a walking encyclopedia, you know?
He's been around so long and been a superstar for so long.
And you could just tell immediately.
He just has this, like, aura about him that,
especially with the Latin players,
that was kind of like their Michael Jordan,
you know, a guy that they looked up to for a long time.
♪
REITER: With Beltran and a few other key acquisitions,
the Astros became one of the best teams in baseball,
almost unrecognizable from the last place team
Jeff Luhnow had inherited.
[thunder rumbling]
Hurricane Harvey, now a category storm...
We're live here in Houston, waters keep rising,
the city is now facing an unprecedented flood event.
Thousands of people are in need of...
REITER: Not even the devastating category
Hurricane Harvey could break their momentum.
In fact, it gave them a rallying cry.
And throughout that fairy tale season,
no one seemed to notice the unusual banging sound
that would sometimes happen at home games,
right before the opposing pitcher threw the ball.
[two thumps in distance]
Some times the night they beat Baltimore.
[banging sound]
times in a close win over the Yankees.
[banging sound]
times that night Mike Bolsinger and the Blue Jays
went down in the blow out that ended his career.
[banging sound]
Then, in late September,
the White Sox's Danny Farquhar stepped up to the mound.
It was : p.m. on a weeknight,
and the stadium was pretty empty-- and quiet.
Right away, he heard something.
[two loud thumps in distance]
Every time I would throw a change up,
the catcher would put down a four.
I would come set
and I would hear bang.
[two loud thumps in distance]
REITER: He talked to me about it for my podcast.
And then finally on the third change up that I threw him,
in my head, I said,
"If I come set and I hear a bang,
I'm calling the catcher out and we're changing our signs."
Sure enough, I come set, I hear the bang.
[two loud thumps in distance]
I remember being really upset,
staring into their dugout.
I was absolutely sure something was happening.
REITER: Farquhar didn't publicly complain at the time,
and the Astros actually lost that night.
But it didn't matter.
They'd already made the playoffs,
and a month later would face the Dodgers in the World Series.
♪ [crowd cheering]
It's game one of the World Series.
REITER: What was the feel heading into
the World Series?
I think people thought
this was going to be a pretty good series.
REITER: Stephanie Apstein was there with me,
covering the Fall Classic for "Sports Illustrated."
It was the loudest ballpark I think I had ever been in.
Back at the wall, it is another home run!
And the three-run lead is back.
It wasn't until game seven that it felt like
one team got out ahead in a way
that the other team couldn't match.
[bat cracks]
Here's a ground ball right side, could do it!
The Houston Astros are world champions
for the first time in franchise history!
I jumped up and I cheered.
And it was a relief.
And after all the years, obviously,
of being a fan, to finally get there.
The "Sports Illustrated" cover
in and the article by Ben Reiter, they nailed it.
It didn't quite seem real at that moment.
And actually for several weeks after,
it didn't quite sink in, you know?
I would text my brother that they did win, right?
You know, I didn't dream that.
It's like, oh no, they won.
[playing trumpet]
It gave people a chance to celebrate
at a time when there was little to celebrate in Houston.
And all these flooded people,
they had something to rejoice for a little bit.
The city of Houston needed this after Hurricane Harvey!
We'll overcome any adversity, no matter what.
But the Astros picked us up! They gave us some hope!
They gave us something to cheer for!
And now we're champions of the world!
[cheering]
It only took me years to get to this position.
But you know what, I'm happy, I'm blessed.
And I want to give the glory
and the honor to God for this moment.
As the architect, I got to tell you,
there's a lot of people doing the drawings behind me.
This is Houston's first championship in baseball,
and I couldn't be prouder to be general manager
of the team that delivers it to them.
REITER: That night on the field,
Jim Crane told me even when the heat was on them,
he'd always encouraged Luhnow to stick to their plan.
Our once outlandish "SI" cover prediction
had actually, unbelievably, come true.
Three years and four months ago,
the cover of "Sports Illustrated"
was the Astros were going to win the World Series in ,
and Ben joins us.
Congrats on the prediction, how was your night, Ben?
It was short, Dan.
I think I still smell like champagne and cigar smoke
from the Astros clubhouse.
But, you know, when we made that prediction
three-and-a-half years ago, we thought it had a chance,
but to see it actually come through?
Pretty amazing.
♪
[voiceover]: I was always mindful of the more
ruthless aspects of what Luhnow was doing
with the Astros, but it wasn't until
the next year when I was on my book tour
that they did something that really made me
question their tactics and especially their ethics.
It started with a mid-season trade.
We have breaking news to bring you
from the Rogers Center tonight.
Closing pitcher Roberto Osuna
has been traded to the Houston Astros.
The -year-old is awaiting trial for domestic as*ault.
He's also serving a -game suspension
in accordance with MLB policy.
REITER: The fact that Jeff Luhnow and Jim Crane,
especially at the height of the Me Too movement,
would trade for an accused domestic ab*ser
made me wonder if I'd missed something,
if the Astros were willing to go to a darker place
than I imagined in their pursuit of an edge.
The Osuna case,
which casts this model front office
and model organization in a different light,
what do you make of that? REITER: Well, pick your word,
Bob-- problematic, questionable, morally troubling.
[voiceover]: I found it indefensible at the time,
and years later,
I still have trouble fully understanding it.
Roberto Osuna is suspended for games for domestic as*ault.
Walk me through the decision to add him
to the Astros roster.
Roberto Osuna's a player that we had been watching
for a long time since he was originally signed.
I knew the quality of him as a reliever for sure.
We didn't have a closer, and we needed to address that.
We had asked for him the last year during the offseason
and last year at the trade deadline.
And the cost was way too high.
Obviously, the cost had come down,
because he was suspended and, and they wanted to move him.
So I talked to Jim about it, and we discussed it,
and made a decision to go ahead and, and execute the trade.
They saw Osuna as a distressed asset.
The Blue Jays were kind of looking to unload him,
and they were willing to unload him
for a lot less than it would have taken
to get a closer of his caliber, and so where
you might see another team say,
"This doesn't really feel worth, worth it,"
the Astros did the math and were like, "This is great.
"We get a closer for less than we would have gotten him.
Done."
REITER: I feel like the Astros at this point
had been through so much bad PR
and come out the other side as this, like...
you know, as champ... literal champions
that I wonder if
they're like, well, we can take on more of this
and we'll be fine.
You know, memories are short, winning lasts forever.
I think if you think you're right,
you're willing to endure a lot to get there.
And I think that sometimes that is very beneficial
to your career because it helps you ignore the haters,
but sometimes the haters have a point and you miss it.
REITER: Osuna became a key part
of the team's success.
His case never went to trial,
and the PR debacle was largely forgotten.
REITER: But in , as the team celebrated
their second World Series appearance in three years,
Luhnow's top assistant,
a former Wall Street valuation expert named Brandon Taubman,
brought it all back.
Yeah, that was, definitely a,
a night I won't forget.
I'm standing, like, right next to him in the clubhouse,
celebrating, and, you know, there is obviously,
like, champagne flowing.
REITER: Stephanie Apstein was there that night too.
I was in the clubhouse with two other female reporters
and there was an Astros executive,
whose name I did not at the time know,
who started yelling toward us that he was so [bleep] glad
they'd gotten Osuna.
"I'm so [bleep] glad that we got Osuna.
I'm so [bleep] glad we got Osuna."
And, I remember just being, like, so shocked by that.
And eventually, I came to understand that it was
Astros assistant general manager Brandon Taubman
who was engaged in that outburst,
in part because he'd been drinking,
but in part because the team felt that
they got too much grief from writers,
specifically female writers, about having traded for a player
who had been suspended for domestic violence.
And so he was sort of making a point that,
yet again, the Astros were right.
REITER: Taubman's ire that night
was specifically focused on one of the reporters
standing with Apstein,
who'd been particularly critical and persistent.
I went to Astros PR
to request an interview with Brandon Taubman.
They said
they were not gonna make him available
and they had no comment.
REITER: Two days later, Apstein published a story
on SI.com about the incident.
And the Astros PR office went on the attack.
The Astros responded,
calling her article "misleading and completely irresponsible."
Big part of this seems to be
that the Astros suggested this didn't happen.
And said that it was a fabricated story.
REITER: I think the quote was, like,
fabricating a story where there was none.
Where none exists, yeah. REITER: Where none exists.
The Astros claimed that Taubman
had just been trying to support Osuna
after a bad outing on the mound that night.
Fortunately for me, unfortunately for them,
there was a room full of reporters.
So pretty quickly other reporters
corroborated what I had seen.
NPR's David Folkenflik
reported details of the exchange.
I want to be clear it was intense,
it was pointed, it was at this cluster of three women.
♪
REITER: By the end of the week,
the incident was threatening to overshadow the World Series.
Jim Crane issued a personal apology to Apstein.
And Taubman was fired.
First of all, apologies to Stephanie
and to the rest of the people
that were involved in the incident.
We have separated with Brandon Taubman,
he is no longer an employee of the Astros.
His behavior was inappropriate
and not representative of who the Astros are
and our culture and what we stand for.
REITER: Taubman now works in commercial real estate.
He wouldn't go on camera or comment on anything other
than to offer that he still "deeply regrets"
his behavior and the pain it caused to many.
Including putting the Astros in a difficult position.
He said over the past four years,
he has tried to atone for his mistakes
and has volunteered as a data scientist
for a domestic violence organization.
Taubman had led the charge
on many of the Astros' cutting edge initiatives,
like TrackMan and edgertronic cameras.
But he was also seen as overly assertive
and confrontational.
Somebody made a mistake
and they have paid for that,
and we have paid for that and obviously everybody,
if we could do it all over again, we...
I mean, I, I would've...
I would've prevented that from happening,
but I didn't know it was happening, right?
REITER: Well, wait a second, we were talking about Taubman.
Like, he made a mistake,
but it wasn't just limited to that moment, right?
This was like... the roots of this went back years
and, like, involved a lot of different aspects
of the organization.
But Brandon didn't talk a lot about Osuna.
I mean, that... this was...
I was surprised that this even came up.
And I will tell you that the Astros did not
do things correctly in handling that situation.
And I think paid the price for it, basically.
REITER: So you wouldn't kind of draw a connection between
a certain aspect of the organization's culture
and that reaction either?
Well, that reaction
was protecting the Astros,
but it was a completely illogical,
ridiculous reaction to have, and it was wrong.
Completely wrong, and it was above my pay grade.
I had nothing to do with that decision,
and I had to be the one to execute it,
which made me look like the person that
was somehow involved, even though I wasn't.
REITER: But you were in the meetings, though,
when some of these decisions were being made, right?
There was a series of emails
going back and forth.
I was getting ready for the World Series.
I did not have an active role in those conversations at all.
♪
REITER: A couple of weeks later,
after a devastating game seven loss
in the World Series,
things went from bad to worse.
The article in "The Athletic" that has everybody talking
quotes the former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers
directly claiming that in , the World Series run,
the Astros used a camera system to steal signs
and alert their hitters in real time
as to what pitch was coming.
That means the manager was aware of it,
that means the bench coach was probably aware of it.
The players certainly were aware of it!
They were in on it!
The very sad implication
is that somehow
the Astros' World Series title is tainted.
Should the Astros be stripped of their title?
Yes, they should.
The title is illegitimate.
REITER: In a stunning admission,
former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers
and three other members of the organization
told reporters Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal
about the sign-stealing scheme the team had been using
two years earlier.
They used a camera in center field.
They would then transfer the sign from the catcher.
Then, using audible sound in the dugout,
a trash can, to alert the hitter.
If there's no bang, fastball.
If there's a bang, something soft is coming.
REITER: It was a revelation that shocked me.
And it upended much of the mythology around the Astros,
which I had helped create.
The Astros are now
public enemy number one in baseball.
This is just far too calculated.
Far too cunning, far too deceitful.
This is ridiculous, man.
REITER: The Astros had gone over the edge
with one of baseball's most storied traditions:
decoding the signs
opposing pitchers and catchers use to communicate.
Signs are super important in baseball
because the pitcher can throw a variety of different pitches,
but the catcher needs to know what's coming.
Otherwise, you're not going to be able
to catch the ball, literally.
It's basically a way for a catcher
to relay to the pitcher a suggestion
of what pitch to throw to this batter.
Some of these sign systems, I was like,
"Wow, I have to be a mathematician
to figure this out."
How do you do this in the middle of a game
with , fans and a dude on second base?
Some teams and players
are better at reading sequences and signals than others.
And some teams make it a priority
and some teams don't.
It's like poker, right?
So, can I get a tell off of you or not?
REITER: Teams are looking for all this stuff.
All that stuff, yeah.
And that's absolutely one million percent fair game.
REITER: What's not fair game
is using technology to help you figure out
the opposing team's signs in real time.
♪
In the years leading up to ,
the league had begun allowing teams to use cameras
and monitor live video feeds during games,
but only for the purpose of
analyzing players' performance and helping decide
whether to challenge umpires' calls.
Expanded video replay
is coming to Major League Baseball.
There will be cameras at every stadium.
...To make most umpire calls subject to video review.
Having video monitors close to the dugout proximity
was a recipe for disaster.
I mean, it's like if you have a child,
and he's coming home from school and you tell him,
"You know, I'm gonna leave the cookies out.
You can have one cookie when you come home."
Come on.
[laughing]: He's, he's gonna have more than one.
♪
REITER: The temptation was hard to resist.
In , MLB investigated
both the Red Sox and Yankees over sign-stealing allegations.
Breaking right now:
some bombshell accusations against the Red Sox.
The team is accused tonight of cheating in the dugout.
I take any issue that affects
the play of the game on the field
extremely seriously.
Red Sox video replay personnel
reportedly sent pitch info.
They didn't use this between every pitch of every game,
it seems, but rather they waited
for someone to be on second base.
And they did that because
it's very easy when you're on second
to then relay the signal to the batter.
REITER: It would become known as the baserunner system.
And it would eventually come out
that the Astros had a version of that, too.
Antonio Padilla admits
he and his fellow video room staffers
helped run the system to great effect.
So, you could call down and say, like,
"Hey, the catchers are using
"outs plus one for their sign sequence,
so relay that to the runner on second."
I think the codebreaking
could definitely give an advantage.
You know, if you're able to
tell the runner on second
what signs they're potentially using,
I think that could definitely help.
♪
REITER: Inside the Astros clubhouse,
Padilla says sign stealing became a huge focus.
It got to the point where
when we were playing certain teams
that we thought were doing other things,
that we would use multiple signs,
even with, like, no runners on.
REITER: It sounds like an extremely paranoid environment.
Yeah, and that's like the perfect way to describe it.
It was kind of like this paranoia where we just like
had to do everything to protect, to protect ourselves
and try to gain an advantage to...
um, try to compete.
REITER: In September ,
the Commissioner of Baseball, Rob Manfred,
tried to contain the burgeoning sign-stealing problem
without causing more of an issue.
He imposed symbolic fines on the Red Sox and Yankees,
and privately warned club personnel
not talk about the topic to the media.
♪
He also sent a memo on ill*gal sign-stealing
to all teams
and put managers and GMs on notice
they'd be held accountable in the future.
"If you're doing these kinds of things, you better stop now,
because you're going to be dealt with harshly."
That should have set off
alarms and sirens and whistles everywhere,
among all teams.
And it didn't in Houston.
REITER: But after Commissioner Manfred
sent out that memo,
the Astros would not only continue to carry out
a baserunner scheme similar to
what the Sox and Yankees had done,
but also something far more insidious.
Padilla told me it had begun earlier in the season
with an unusual request
from the Astros bench coach, Alex Cora.
This was probably like two months into the season.
We're like well into our way,
and I get asked
to put a TV monitor down below the dugouts.
And...
at the time, we didn't have, like, any TVs down there,
So, I thought when I asked to put a monitor down there
I thought they just wanted to see, like,
when the inning was over, or, like, who was batting,
so I was happy to oblige by that.
REITER: What was it actually used for?
From my understanding, it was used for, um,
looking at the signs from the catcher
and then relaying those signs
to the batter at the plate.
REITER: And how were they doing it?
They would look at the TV monitor,
and then be able to see the signs of the catcher,
and then have some type of audible...
sound.
Or, like, a bang on something
to relay that to the hitter, what type of pitch was coming.
I mean instantly I knew, like, it wasn't right,
but what was I gonna do?
I was, like, the lowest guy on the totem pole there.
You know, if the coaches knew, and the other players knew,
then I got-- you know, I'm just rolling with it.
REITER: Did you feel, like, guilty
as the season went on and this kept happening?
'Cause, like, I know you weren't
doing it night to night, but you facilitated it.
[sighing]: Yeah.
I mean, it was definitely something
that's kind of on your conscience,
and then, um...
you know...
you're thinking that, like, "Okay, like,
maybe this has a part of our success,"
so you start to feel more guilty about that,
and then obviously, like, it's kind of like
in the back of your mind over the years,
before it, like, gets out to the public.
REITER: There was a big incentive
for guys like Padilla to not rock the boat.
It could jeopardize what's known as their playoff share.
One thing that people don't understand
or maybe don't know about
is the way that compensation
for a lot of team employees works.
They get paid by the team, but at the end of the year,
teams that make the playoffs are allowed to vote on
who gets a share of the gate money from the playoffs.
And so,
especially if you make the World Series,
especially if you win the World Series,
that's a lot of money.
And so, I think that
a lot of team employees are aware that...
the team is their boss,
but also the players are kind of their boss.
And so, I think that that...
leads to some difficult incentives.
REITER: So, ,
the Astros win the World Series,
do they vote to give you a playoff share?
Yeah, a full-time share. A full share.
REITER: How much was that?
$,, I think.
REITER: And you're making $, a year?
Yeah, it was like ten X my salary.
REITER: Wow. Yeah.
I mean, I was able to pay off my student loans,
able to pay off my car.
You know,
it just, like, alleviated a lot of, you know, things I...
had going on as far as, like, finances.
REITER: It's like winning the lottery.
Oh, exactly. It is, it is.
It's a-- I mean, it's a windfall.
REITER: With the playoff share system existing,
did it feel like this was a big incentive
to always keep the players happy
and always stay in their good graces,
and anything they asked for, you were gonna give, to you?
Yeah, I wouldn't say it's a,
I wouldn't say that was, like, the incentive,
because that was-- I guess that was part of the job.
You know, we were there for the players.
We were there for the coaches as well.
REITER: If an influential player
asks you to do something,
like, you're probably not gonna say no, right?
Yeah, I don't think I've ever said no
unless it was just something that couldn't be done.
But...
Yeah,
I always tried my best, I guess,
to appease whatever, you know, they needed me to do.
REITER: Once the Astros' banging scheme
finally became public in November ,
the league began investigating the team.
So did one extremely die-hard Astros fan--
Tony Adams.
REITER: When you first read the reports,
and there was all this supporting video,
did that start to change the way you had viewed
that championship
two years earlier?
Uh... I think at that point, no.
I was still kind of
waiting to get more information.
Obviously you don't want it to be true,
so you were hoping that there was a chance
this just wasn't accurate.
Um...
But I went onto some other sites
and found some information,
and somebody had posted some video of...
some plays where they were banging on the trash can.
REITER: Adams realized that he might be able
to figure out how widespread the banging was by watching--
and listening closely to--
old broadcasts of the games.
And that kind of became
the puzzle that I wanted to try to solve.
REITER: What led you to make this decision, though?
The core of it is I wanted to know the truth.
I really wanted to know what happened.
REITER: Adams would have to review
more than , pitches
the Astros had faced at home that season.
So he developed an app.
Well, I'm a web developer,
so I went with what I knew,
and basically developed a web application
that would allow me to view the pitches,
make a selection if there was a bang or not,
and jump to the next pitch.
So I was able to segment each pitch into an audio file
and the spectrogram shows
the full spectrum of the frequency,
so this allows you to see basically all the sounds.
These lines here are actually the announcers talking.
Beltran with just one of his home runs
hitting right-handed this year.
This line here is actually
where the ball either hits the bat
or hits the catcher's mitt.
[ball hitting glove] Upstairs, two and one.
And you can see here, in the lower frequency,
a little spike here,
a little blob here.
That's actually a bang.
[muffled thud]
REITER: These really jump out.
Yeah, yeah. REITER: Even I can see these.
[laughing]: Yes... REITER: And I haven't
looked at , of these.
[both chuckling]
Adams ended up logging , bangs
out of those , pitches
across dozens of home games.
He also pinpointed when the banging may have come to an end:
that night when Danny Farquhar was on the mound.
Danny Farquhar on the season between Tampa...
This is the Farquhar game.
Gattis pinch hitting for Brian McCann.
So it's the bottom of the eighth.
Gattis was up.
And you can see here that there was a bang in this one.
If we listen to it,
it's very obvious.
The crowd wasn't very loud that time.
The announcers were not talking a lot during this game.
[two thuds echo in distance]
Very clear. REITER: Very loud.
Here we go with another change up,
and there's a double bang.
[two thuds echo in distance]
REITER: Man, that sounds like thunder or something, right?
Yeah, it's-- it's very obvious.
[distorted cheering] You can see that the crowd
is, is pretty sparse,
so there's not a lot of crowd noise.
Some point,
Farquhar made a connection
that whenever he was throwing a breaking ball,
he was hearing this sound.
He gets a signal.
[two thuds echo in distance]
Here.
[crowd cheering]
And if you look, you can see...
"I think they have the signals."
REITER: So you're reading his lips.
Yeah, yeah. REITER: You can see he says,
"I think they have..." Right.
REITER: This is the moment. Right.
And if you look at the game here,
after this four-seamer,
they called for a breaking ball, and they got the bang
and that's when he stepped off.
And there was no more bangs for the rest of the game,
even though there were plenty of pitches
that were breaking ba*ls and should have been.
REITER: Essentially,
the second that Danny Farquhar heard this,
it stopped. It stopped.
REITER: At least this form of...
of sign stealing. Correct.
There were no more bangs during the regular season,
and I wasn't able to hear anything in,
in the postseason, either. REITER: And we know that
the moment that happened with Farquhar,
the guys behind the dugout were taking the TV down,
like, hiding everything. Right. That was...
REITER: Like, that was a moment of panic for the team.
They, they panicked at that point.
♪
REITER: After six weeks of research,
Adams was on the brink of doing
one of the hardest things he'd ever done--
making all this damning evidence
against his beloved Astros public.
It was a Wednesday,
and I had the site ready.
I'd written the tweet.
And then I... I paused for a second,
because I knew if I hit send,
that was it, it was out there.
♪
[keyboard keys clacking]
I'd never been part of something that went viral.
[chuckles] That did.
It took off pretty quickly.
One of my buddies actually texted me.
He was like, "Man, have you seen this?"
I remember looking back on, like, MLB.com, like,
"Man, when was the last time I pitched against them?"
And I looked at it, and I saw it was the highest one.
And that's when I finally was like,
"Man, okay, this is for real."
Like, they really cheated on my game,
against me.
♪
It was a heck of an edge to take.
When you know it's coming, you're taking everything away.
Especially a guy that
is not as elite as a lot of people.
How you think it's okay
would be probably the number one question
that I'd ask.
How can you not think this was wrong, what you did?
♪
REITER: In the end, Adams linked
at least Astros hitters to the scheme.
A few, most notably José Altuve,
showing little to no involvement,
while most others were in deep.
[distant sirens wailing]
But there would be very few formal consequences for them,
because of a fateful decision
unknown to the public at the time
by the commissioner at the outset of his investigation.
He decided to grant them immunity
to speak openly to him.
In part, I think, to avoid
a union grievance, in part because
I think he felt that nobody would tell him the truth
if they were worried about punishment,
in part because he felt that
it was going to be hard to determine
who used the system for three games,
versus , versus the whole season,
that it was going to be hard to assign
degrees of culpability.
For all of those reasons,
he decided to give them immunity.
REITER: Also probably in part because he didn't want
to damage his own product at a certain point.
Sure. I mean, if you suspend the Astros,
are they not supposed to field a team?
Do they bring up all their Triple-A guys--
that's a big... that's a big decision.
♪
REITER: Commissioner Manfred wouldn't talk to us
about the decision or answer written questions.
None of the Astros players we approached would talk,
nor the players' union.
But when it came to light,
some players from other teams
were publicly critical of the immunity decision.
I thought Manfred's punishment was weak,
giving them immunity.
To cheat like that and not get anything,
it's, it's sad to see for sure.
You know they're gonna be able to go out there and compete
with no ramifications at all, which is wrong,
and I think the commissioner completely handled it
the wrong way.
REITER: Manfred went on ESPN to defend the decision.
Well, and... you could've made the choice to go
with the management people, um, and sort of given them immunity
and found out how the players were involved.
Whatever, um, dissatisfaction is out there
with the grant of immunity to players,
I think it would have been ten times worse
if you let the management people off and then tried
to go after the players.
I mean, I would have thrown
some of the ringleaders out of baseball
for a considerable period of time.
When you cheat on the field,
telling people when a fastball is coming,
you're really playing with the heart of the game.
♪
REITER: Former MLB Commissioner Fay Vincent
told me that granting the players immunity
sent the wrong message.
Baseball and Manfred decided it was better
to have it be a minor event than a major event.
In other words, to have it a major event,
you were going to have to teach players
that one of the problems of cheating
is you can get caught.
And if you get caught,
it can cost you.
REITER: Let me ask you--
it's kind of like a devil's advocate position
that I've heard.
People have cheated in baseball
since, like, just after the first sign was put down.
What's the difference?
People have been doing it forever
and this is just the latest iteration of that.
The reason we have to have compliance with rules,
is that if you don't have rules, you don't have a system.
The rules are what make a game a game.
So the question is,
what would I have done as commissioner?
I'd have thrown them all out.
I would have said they're out for the rest of their lives.
REITER: Rest of their lives? Lifetime ban?
Lifetime ban.
REITER: But when it came to accountability,
Commissioner Manfred's focus was where he said it would be
after the Red Sox and Yankees cheating dust ups back in --
on the manager and general manager.
The one question they just kept hammering,
they wanted to know if Jeff knew about it,
and they wanted to know if any of it continued into .
And, I told them, you know, from my knowledge,
I don't think Jeff knew.
REITER: Did it feel like they're kind of
zeroing in on Jeff Luhnow's responsibility here?
Yeah, it seemed like that from that testimony.
That, you know, they really wanted to find out
if, if he knew or not.
The league ended up interviewing witnesses
and reviewed tens of thousands of emails,
texts, video clips, and photos.
When the commissioner's investigation was finished,
the only Astros sanctioned for the cheating were Jeff Luhnow,
and the manager, AJ Hinch.
Both were suspended from baseball for a year.
The people that created it,
that ran it, that ex*cuted it,
essentially those people didn't get punished.
And I took the responsibility
for the organization, as did AJ.
REITER: While the league's investigators
didn't uncover evidence
that Luhnow knew about the banging scheme,
they did find evidence that he had "some knowledge"
of the team's other ill*gal sign-stealing efforts.
A charge Luhnow continues to deny.
Manfred pointed out that
Luhnow had never circulated his memo
about electronic sign stealing back in ;
and as GM, it was his job
to make sure the team was following the rules.
I was punished because I was the general manager
overseeing baseball operations
of a team that violated the rules.
And I was punished for not forwarding a memo.
I guess if I had pressed forward to the memo
and forwarded it to AJ, which he already had the memo,
so I didn't feel there was a need to do that.
And this memo was well known in the industry.
It's not like people lack the information.
Every player, every person involved knew
what was in the memo.
REITER: Since the scandal,
I've tried-- unsuccessfully-- to talk to AJ Hinch,
who's now the manager of the Detroit Tigers.
The league's report noted that
while he didn't stop the cheating,
he signaled his disapproval on at least two occasions
by smashing the video monitor used to carry it out.
His only extensive interview about the scandal
was on MLB Network with Tom Verducci.
My mindset at that point
was to demonstrate that I didn't like it.
So what did, what did you do?
I hit it-- I mean, I just, a bat, I mean, I didn't like it.
You took a bat to it. Yeah, I didn't like it.
I should've done more.
I remember one day I saw the monitor was broken.
I think he felt like it was actually
hurting the team at the time,
and I think he just
got frustrated with it and decided to try
to end it there without, without telling anybody.
Just kind of doing it on his own.
REITER: In your understanding,
who was the driving force behind
wanting to implement this system?
Yeah, so it seemed like it was Carlos Beltran's idea.
You know, obviously he didn't force everybody to do it,
but it seemed like,
from my perspective at the time,
he was having, you know, one of his worst seasons
and he probably thought,
"Hey, like, I'm here to help this team win.
"I'm having a bad season, let me try to drum up something
to get this team going and get myself going as well."
REITER: Did anyone try to push back against him?
I've heard of some other players saying, like,
hey, this isn't right, we shouldn't do this.
But honestly, it ultimately came down to the coaches.
Like, the coaches knew about it, the hitting coaches,
our manager, obviously the bench coach as well.
But if they didn't shut it down then, I mean,
players are just gonna follow their leaders, in my opinion.
REITER: Was it almost like Beltran
had more power than AJ Hinch?
That's, that's tough to answer.
I mean, he definitely had a way of having the team, like,
go behind, like, anything that he wanted to do.
I think AJ kind of bought into that as well.
REITER: Beltran was the only player mentioned by name
in the commissioner's report.
He's apologized,
but also spread the blame to an organizational culture
that didn't exactly emphasize rule following.
I wish I would've asked more questions
about what we were doing.
I wish the organization would have said to us,
"Hey man, what you guys doing, we need to stop this."
Nobody really said anything. We're winning.
REITER: After the report came out,
Beltran lost his new job as the skipper of the New York Mets
before managing a single game for them.
But now he's back with the Mets,
as a special assistant to their general manager.
The report also singled out bench coach Alex Cora,
who was by then managing the Red Sox.
Boston fired Cora.
And though he was later cleared of wrongdoing
in a sign-stealing investigation there...
He was then suspended by the league for the
Astros' cheating.
Cora apologized.
And like Beltran, he was rehired
and continues to lead the Red Sox today.
For Jeff Luhnow,
the commissioner's year-long suspension
was only the beginning.
I was on a plane
on the way to Cabo with my wife
to celebrate her birthday and our anniversary.
And I had asked Jim a few days before, I said,
"Hey should I cancel my trip?
Because I know they're getting ready to make a decision."
He's like "No, no, no, don't worry about it.
"Go, go on the trip, enjoy yourself."
I got a call from Jim as we were in baggage claim.
And I took it.
And he told me what his decision was
as far as my employment goes-- very short conversation.
REITER: How long was that phone call?
It was like seconds maybe.
I'm going above and beyond MLB's penalty.
Today, I have made the decision
to dismiss AJ Hinch and Jeff Luhnow.
We need to move forward with a clean slate,
and the Astros will become stronger,
a stronger organization, because of this today.
REITER: As for Jim Crane,
Manfred went out of his way to make it clear in his report
that he'd had nothing to do with the scandal,
noting he'd instructed Luhnow
to make sure his team abided by the rules.
My question is why would the Commissioner
go to such pains,
so prominently, to clear the owner of the team
of any responsibility for this scandal?
Because the commissioner works for the owners,
and, you know, the most difficult thing in the world
is to be working for people
in a situation where you also have to discipline them.
In baseball, the commissioner has the duty,
the obligation, to police the very people he works for.
That's a relationship that is totally all by itself.
That's a conflict. That's a challenge.
That's an impossibility.
♪
REITER: As commissioner, Fay Vincent was famous
for his clashes with owners,
and was ousted after just three years.
He recalled something one of the owners once told him.
Well, he said, "Your job is to make us money.
"You know, we can run the baseball part.
"We understand baseball. We don't need you.
"All we want you to do is think of ways
"to expand our revenue base and make money for us.
"And if you're not making money for us,
you're getting in the way."
REITER: The commissioner is there
to serve the interests of the owners.
Hundred percent.
REITER: In the end,
Commissioner Manfred took away four of the Astros' draft picks
and fined the team $ million--
the largest allowable by the league, but
a drop in the bucket for Crane's roughly $ billion business.
Did the fallout from the sign-stealing scandal
materially affect Jim Crane or the Astros?
In the long run, no.
In the long run, it didn't affect them at all.
I mean, look, you know, there's this report,
in the eyes of fans outside of, you know, Houston
or fans of the Astros, they're vilified.
They're gonna get booed, you know,
in perpetuity due to this thing.
Was Jim Crane affected? No, of course not.
I mean, all the successes
that have come along with the World Championships,
all of the money that would come in due to attendance.
♪
REITER: Earlier this year,
Manfred actually made a surprising admission.
He told a reporter he now regretted
giving the players immunity.
That it was "maybe not my best decision ever."
A month later,
the league's owners voted to extend him as commissioner
through .
♪
The Astros win it.
Welcome to first place, Houston Astros,
for the first time in .
Astros get the win, moving them into a virtual tie
with the Seattle Mariners for first place.
- victory,
and they have their biggest lead of the season now.
♪
REITER: With the Astros battling
for the playoffs, and having won on the World Series
again last year,
I returned to Houston to try to talk to Jim Crane
and others in the organization
about the legacy of the scandal and how they'd moved forward.
No one inside the team would speak to me
or answer written questions,
other than to say that Crane doesn't do interviews
about things from the past.
And to point out the team was on pace
to draw three million fans in .
But for an issue that team and league
have tried to put behind them,
there is lingering sense of injustice on all sides.
I understand where they're coming from.
I'm not saying it's right, but every team does it.
We just happen to be the ones that get caught.
I would just ignore them.
They say whatever they wanna say, it's all talk.
I think they dispelled any thoughts
that they were bad after that, right?
They just won, so.
REITER: In '.
Well, they kept, they didn't win the World Series
every year, but they were dominant over... since then.
They've been dominant since then,
and then they won last year, so.
REITER: So the people who say
that World Series ring is not legitimate,
you're not buying that. That's what they say.
REITER: Yeah, that's what they say.
I mean, this last one is pretty legit.
REITER: Despite their success,
the asterisk on the Astros
continues to feed conspiracy theories
about cheating beyond the banging.
Like the persistent accusation
that Jose Altuve knew what pitches were coming
the night he lifted the Astros to the World Series,
thanks to a buzzer hidden under his jersey.
But what about Jose Altuve?
Don't take off my shirt!
Buzzers taped to their bodies?
This electronic device business
really takes it in a different direction.
At least one player had heard from multiple sources
about a buzzer system...
And when he's asked about it...
I don't know, I'm too shy.
Last time I did that, I got in trouble with my wife!
In this case,
there is a villain.
REITER: Was Jose Altuve wearing a buzzer?
No.
No, there is absolutely, like, zero truth to any of that.
You just hate to see, like, the media kind of run
some really, like, good people into the ground with that.
And... even some other players around the league
just buy into the conspiracy theory of that.
And that just, like, absolutely was,
like, never even discussed.
Obviously, the bad stuff
is going to get more clicks and more headlines,
but I think the good stuff needs to be talked about a lot more,
just because they're doing things that teams are still
trying to catch up with today, that they were doing years ago.
REITER: When you look around baseball today,
a few of the Astros from that team
are still in Houston.
More are playing for other teams.
And many of the people who helped Luhnow
reinvent the Astros, who helped him go after the bleeding edge,
are now spread throughout the league.
You look at the Baltimore Orioles.
You look at the Giants.
Milwaukee, when they took Sterns.
People started hiring folks away from the Astros,
because everybody wanted to do what the Astros were doing.
The baseball world's been against them from day one.
Because these weren't baseball guys.
♪
And now, you know, in ,
people realize the Astros are the standard
for building winning baseball.
They were at the forefront of what
is just standard procedure now
in terms of what we know about
leveraging technology,
in terms of evaluation,
training.
What really, I think, got the Astros in trouble
is they didn't know where to stop.
REITER: But who ultimately benefits from
maximizing efficiency in a baseball context?
The benefit of it is not for the benefit of the fan.
We didn't wind up with a better game.
We wound up with a more boring game.
To me, we lost some of the reason why we're fans.
And that is the mystique and the chemistry and the magic,
and the things that don't matter to a technocrat.
REITER: Baseball has always been a business,
but it became more a business
like any other business in a certain way.
Yeah, I mean, listen, you don't want to be nalïve
and think baseball was always just a game.
[chuckles] It always was business.
But it became just a brutally efficient business.
I don't think it's going to be
one of the proud moments for baseball,
what happened during that era,
when technology outpaced baseball's ability
to deal with it.
REITER: Over the past few seasons,
Major League Baseball has clamped down.
They've required dugout video monitors to be on a delay,
and hired an outside security firm
to police the replay rooms.
And this season, they put heavy restrictions
on the infamous shift.
The dark art of sign stealing was also dealt a blow
with new technology called PitchCom
that allows the pitcher and catcher
to communicate via transmitters.
Something that has yet to be hacked,
as far as we know.
What do you think is the lasting legacy
of the Houston Astros of the past decade?
Well, it is a lasting legacy, first of all.
It's too big of a sin in baseball to be washed away ever.
And we'll be talking about the Astros years from now
as a team that stole signs.
And the second paragraph will be about how talented they were.
And they won their first world championship.
But I think in a broader sense, what they did was they defined,
in its own way, a dirty era in baseball.
♪
REITER: In exile from baseball in Spain,
Jeff Luhnow remains defiant.
Here in Spain,
I've never even been asked a question about it.
I've never even been asked a question about baseball.
They don't care.
[speaking Spanish]:
REITER: The second division soccer team he purchased here
with investors after being fired from the Astros
is in first place, and he's not stopping there.
We're buying and operating second, third,
and fourth division clubs in key strategic markets.
My motto in the Astros
was find and develop the best young talent in baseball
and build a sustainable winner.
We're doing exactly the same strategy here
in football that we did in baseball.
[cheering]
REITER: I still have questions
about some of the results of that strategy--
including the degree to which the Astros
continued to steal signs in the playoffs.
Between Tony Adams' research,
the league's investigation,
and all the other reporting, it's just not clear.
Of course, it's also unclear
how many of their opponents were also cheating,
and to what extent.
[bat cracks, crowd cheers]
But in a game of razor-thin differentials,
we'll never know if the cheating
was what had given the Astros the ultimate edge.
The scandal is, like, five percent of the story.
percent of the story is, how did we create a system
that has proven to be pretty dang good over
a long period of time?
And I don't think that has anything to do
with one cheating scandal.
When did the cheating help?
And when did the cheating not help?
And who wanted to get the cheating?
And who didn't want to get, I mean,
you could go down a million different roads on that.
And so that's why I'm saying like,
it's not just we cheated, we won, game over.
That's not how this works.
REITER: To me, it's almost like
the biggest tragedy is that, like, we don't know.
And we never will.
That's the deal that they made.
They get to have their title questioned forever.
I think that is the outcome,
that people are allowed to say whatever they want about you,
and there's nothing you can do about it.
And it's what the Greeks would call a tragedy, right?
The thing that made you great is the thing that brought you down.
♪
The players that decided to do this,
they made that decision. That's on them.
It's the fans' team, you know,
and so I will always be an Astros fan.
I think most Astros fans feel the same way.
[fireworks crackling]
...Major League Baseball trade deadline,
the Mets deal Justin Verlander back to Houston...
Framber Valdez, the first lefty in franchise history
to throw a no-hitter.
This team is about October.
This team is about another ring...
I feel great
about the players that we have now,
the team that we have now, the organization.
But they will go away at some point.
The thing that remains are the fans.
This is our team and, um...
...it's H-Town versus everyone.
And when you talk about the Astros, remember:
the championship pedigree,
the addition of Verlander.
Here they are a playoff team for the seventh consecutive
year, the fourth longest run in major league baseball history.
You know, sky's the limit.
It looks like the same old Astros again, here they come.
Just took them a little longer to get there.
♪
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The Astros Edge: Triumph and Scandal in Major League Baseball (2023)
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