I also am not a fan of this dragging on in the courts... but $22 million owed is a little more than "petty shenanigans".
He isn’t pulling petty shenanigans. If MLB and the Astros owner decided to make Luhnow the fall guy (like owners wanted) then they should have bought his silence and they didn’t.
Luhnow was hated by the league office; that’s the only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from how this all played out. He obviously also was not able to endear himself enough to Crane for Crane to stand up for him. Luhnow was scapegoated, but he was scapegoated for a reason: owners and the league office did not like him and did not like the way he did things. Part of that is on Luhnow. People have to be responsible for how likable they are. I don’t believe that Luhnow didn’t know about the sign stealing and trash can banging. This was not a “media” hit job; the “media” really didn’t have a dog in the fight and if they did it would be against MLB because that’s where the bigger drama/scandal was. I believe the reporting specific to Luhnow has been mostly fair and accurate. Of course, at a higher level, the Astros have been subjected to harsher criticism than larger market clubs who also cheated, which I don’t think is right.
He was the best GM in baseball. He was at the absolute top of his profession. He is middle aged. He took the fall for an entire organizational issue and they voided $22,000,000 of his contract. He played the good soldier through the season and when it became clear he was not going to have an opportunity to recoup his losses on the market; he sued. He did what he is supposed to do. The level of incompetence by MLB is amazing sometimes. If the owners decided that the Astros had to be punished hard AND they were not going to punish one of their own (Crane), then they really should have taken care of the fall guy (Luhnow). All they had to do was have a nondisclosure agreement and pay him his money. Instead MLB assumes they could control MLB media and the players, and screw Luhnow and this whole thing would be swept under the rug.... the arrogance is amazing. The thing is, we are in the off season, with COVID and Presidential drama... all MLB has to do is pay him, get a non disclosure and an assurance that the league will not keep him from working in the future... it would all start to go away.
Seriously, I don't understand their logic here. We're gonna force you out, not give you another job, and not pay out your contract all while everybody else involved is back in baseball or went completely unpunished. What possible reason could they have for thinking Luhnow was just gonna accept this and move on without at least being compensated. Unless something has gone unreported he has absolutely zero reason to do so.
The allegation is that MLB couldn't do anything to the players when Lunhow failed to pass on MLB's message to the players that it was illegal to use technology to steal signs. If so, that's another pretty big mark against him. Honestly he seems like a really smart guy, but pretty tone deaf. He's definitely not as blameless in all of this as he tries to paint himself. Plus, he flubbed other PR situations like the whole Taubman fiasco.
He isn’t blameless, neither is the owner (who still owns the team), the manager (who is back managing), the coaches (still coaching)... nor the players (still playing). Yet some how, the GM is out $22,000,000; is taking almost all the blame, doesn’t have a job and has been black balled. Luhnow is taking all the **** for it because owners won’t eat their own so they moved on and made the next man on the totem pole take the wrap. Blame for something that the Dodgers and Yankees had been punished for... and the Dodgers and Brewers were doing after MLB said to stop. He was the best GM in all major sports. If I owned a baseball team, he is the person first on my list to hire. He deserves a second chance and the hypocrisy in MLB is insane. The sign stealing was so devastating that Hinch and Cora have jobs, Beltran got a promotion... George Springer (who was without question the biggest cheater) is one of the 2-3 most in demand free agents. It is all a joke.
Weren't you the one who told me that there wasn't collusion on MLB salaries going into 2021 - but now you think they're colluding to not hire the guy? I think he's toxic based on the way he has handled things in the wake of both the Taubman and the cheating scandals. What team wants to be associated with that? He is not receiving the $22m he says he would have made in salary as GM, because he was fired for cause. I'm asking you, do you think there was not valid cause to fire him, given what happened on his watch? The buck stops somewhere. If there was valid cause based on the issues we've discussed, then he doesn't have a leg to stand on. If those aren't for cause, then his lawsuit has merit (forgetting the part about his contract calling for arbitration of disputes). Was he really god's gift to GMs? I thought he did great and was happy to have him. But isn't what he did really what Sam Hinkie did in the NBA - embrace a full-on tank and rebuild from rock bottom through high value draft picks and some smart FA signings? If the Stros don't win the 2017 championship* do you feel the same way? Is he really better than Tampa Bay's Erik Neander?
You don't need to "collude" when the MLB Commish makes clear someone is persona-non-grata. It's similar to Kaepernick - the league simply makes the person toxic, and then lets each time make a logical decision not to hire him because they don't want to deal with the repercussions. I agree he handled Taubman poorly - I was at front of the line criticizing the Astros for the responses. But since when do GMs get blackballed for a PR mistake? Morey was out of a job for like a week despite making a PR decision that cost the NBA potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. Similarly, there's no need for owners to collude on player salaries when all the owners lose a collective billions of dollars. They will lower salaries on their own just looking at their own financial situations. The results so far in Philly show that "rebuild from rock bottom" is harder done than said. Even without winning in 2017, the Astros make 3 ALCS's and 2 WS's in 4 years. They have one of the best 3-year records in MLB history.
I don't think of him as a scapegoat. Cora and Beltran felt like the scapegoats. He deserved the suspension, but he didn't deserve being blackballed by the league. MLB definitely tried to bury him while painting Hinch as a good guy despite obviously letting it go on.
For clarity, I don't necessarily agree with quotes that I post. Sometimes I do. On this particular one, I agree with you. But I posted it mostly to share what the perceptions and feelings are from other folks on the matter. I am pretty sure the folks over at CTH know that all that money isn't trivial. What it illustrates to me is just how fed up some are with the whole thing. It just wont go away. And while what Luhnow is doing is certainly his right and makes sense, it also pours more gasoline on a flame that was only now (in my mind) starting to show signs of waning.
I am sure there is a lot that has gone unreported or under reported. Luhnow adding his iron to fire may elucidate what some of that is. I am not real sure where Luhnow's lawsuit and the fallout from it will put things, but for those of us that want ALL of the truth to come out, especially that which pertains to other teams, this is a step in that direction. Maybe not directly, but the longer the pot get stirred, the more likely what has settled at the bottom will rise to the surface.
