Should all the players from that team never be allowed to be in the hall of fame?

You are incorrect.The Red Sox used apple watches to relay the signs, not to capture it.

Do you realize that starting last year, there were new rules? You can't have any cameras that are not used for TV. Only the Replay assistant has access to the live feed in real time and that person is moderated by a MLB employee. All other feeds that the players have access to are delayed. MLB is also doing scheduled reviews and surprise reviews on cameras.

Are you going to respond as to why so many non-Astro stud players had horrible years?

 

I always said individual players could have a bad year. I agree with that. Seen it too many times. but we are talking about an entire team of historic players falling off the cliff after admitted they were cheating. How could they all just drop off together.

 

Makes me sick that Valdez and McCullers have given the Astros ace performances and they're still six outs from being down 0-2.

 

Feel like this thread is a jinx

 

I hope I never meet anyone in regular life that introduces themselves and says their name is “what”. The immediate dickpunch that would be instinctual might not be deserved.

 

MLB did say, very clearly, that there was no evidence of cheating beyond the end of 2017. Point to something factual otherwise that proves or insinuates (from the MLB), beyond your opinion, that the Astros cheated in 2019. Why you continue to cherry pick arguments or argue otherwise is beyond silly. I'd like to think you can comprehend things better than you have so far, but you continue to surprise me.

As for 2020, it is an anomaly. It's the same across the league, as has already been pointed out. The following teams had an OPS drop of 100 points or more from 2019 to 2020:

Houston (-128 points)
Texas (-102 points)
Pittsburgh (-100 points)

The following teams had an OPS drop of 50 points or more from 2019 to 2020:

Chicago Cubs (-78 points)
Chicago White Sox (-61 points)
Cincinnati (-67 points)
Cleveland (-70 points)
Colorado (-66 points)
Milwaukee (-65 points)
Minnesota (-89 points)
Oakland (-58 points)
Seattle (-62 points)

Your next argument will be that Houston had the biggest drop; you'd be correct. Houston struggled as a team out of the gate - a likely outcome of being found guilty by the league of cheating in 2017 and losing the reigning AL ROY - a guy with a 1.067 OPS in 2019... his replacement(s) had a combined OPS around .750. None of the other teams above had any such scandal yet they all had monumental differences from 2019 to 2020 in OPS numbers. The fact remains that 40% of the league had a massive OPS drop this season.

 

I could care less about any of the cheating scandal. There’s no way to substantiate whether it even helped them. Tyler White couldn’t hit even when they were banging a trash can. Lol

 

You are incorrect. There is actual research that was done that proved it hurt them (which the home/road splits from 17 also back up). The penalty for thinking a pitch is coming and being wrong is greater than the reward for thinking a pitch is coming and being right. Astros simply weren’t right a high enough percentage of the time.

 

So you’re saying the data actually shows that the sign stealing hurt them? That’s interesting. Makes sense because they were considerably better on the road that year. I think focusing too much on what pitch is coming would put you in your head too much and take you out of your natural flow as a player.

 

So, back to the question posed as the title of this thread:

No. WTF? Hell, no.
/thread

 

The OPS tells the story. That's the data. it's inarguable. You highlighted the case perfectly for me. There is no reason for the team with the best OPS and one of the best lineups in the history of baseball to have the worst cliff drop in the league. From the top to the bottom. Both teams had injuries including Correa and Altuve with no replacement. The proof is inconvenient, but incontrovertible. Pittsburgh and Texas are scraping together lineups from scraps. Neither team has a HOF caliber player, nor an All Star. Let alone five HOF'ers like the Astros. Nobody dropped off like the Astros and nobody had less of a reason to do so than the Astros.

 

by nobody you mean Texas and Pittsburgh too, right? All 3 teams dropped 100 points in OPS... and several others were right behind them. The “story” it tells is that 2020 is a 60-game season with no Spring training and a ton of injuries. There were multiple Astros that had sub .750 OPS for an entire month last season (2019). Brantley had a 1-month stretch at .526. You can’t cherry pick 60-games from a 162-game season and call it proof of anything.

I think at this point your position is clear. You’re taking the contrarian approach regardless of the facts.

 

If you said one players dropped 150 ops in 60 games, then you would have a case, but we are talking about an entire lineup that played 60 games each, so more like 9 players plus at a minimum 560 games. The area under the curve is so significant. That's too much data to shift that far to the left and stay within the +/-. for a team of that caliber.

 

There have been multiple in depth studies showing that the sign stealing didn't help and in fact hurt. Even the LA Times did a story saying this. But @PhiSlammaJamma has apparently done his own detailed research research reviewing every at bat in 2017 and has his own data.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-02-27/astros-cheating-analysis?_amp=true

 

Again, the ops dropped after they were caught. Significantly. An utter cliff drop. It's an orgy of evidence against them which never happens in life, and yet there it is, just like in the steroid era, you can measure the decline after the crutch was kicked out.

 

The orgy of evidence is that you are using a small 60 game sample to compare 162 games. Bregman, Springer, Altuve, and Brantley all spent time on the IL in this short season. Players generally don't come back mashing right away after a stint on the IL, there just wasn't time for them to get their numbers up. Now that they are all healthy and further into the season they have shown what they can do in the payoffs (despite the bad luck against TB of hard hit balls finding gloves). Alvarez playing in only 2 games didn't help the team OPS. The sandal definitely seemed to affect Altuve but it wasn't because he couldn't wear a buzzer. Any Astros fan that thinks Altuve wore a buzzer is a monster. The whole Altuve wore a buzzer thing came from a troll on Twitter pretending to be Beltran's niece. Are you Beltran's nephew?

 

Altuve didn't wear a buzzer. Your talking crazy now. His wife didn't want his shirt ripped off. Trust the OPS.

 

I'm saying 3 Teams dropped 100 points in OPS in 2020 - the Astros being one of the 3. Not 3 players, 3 complete teams. You also keep throwing around 150 points as the drop... the number is 128 points for the Astros.

Altuve missed 20% of the season. Maldonado missed 20% of the season. Bregman missed 30% of the season. Brantley missed 25% of the season. Springer missed 15% of the season. Yordan missed 95% of the season. Your 4 offensive leaders (in H, RBI, HR, OPS) from 2019 missed a combined 111 games... in a 60-game season. Yuli had a .377 OPS in September/October (25 games) after posting a .904 OPS the preceding month (August - 25 games). Bregman had a .692 OPS in September/October (18 games) after posting a .960 OPS the preceding month (August - 17 games). When you have a bad 4-week stretch in a 9-week (regular) season, you can't recover from it. That's how a team drops 128 points in OPS. Not magic, or cheating or wishful thinking.

 

******* says what?

 

Why do y'all even bother arguing with that guy?