I disagree. I'm sure he is a fan (why else would he have that in his sig), but he isn't acting like it. We all understand what happened, but he is taking it to another level. On one hand he is clamoring for us to "band together", "the entire family gets dirty", and on the other hand he is openly trashing them and discrediting everything they did to rebuild the talent on the team and the results that netted. I would argue that calling it a heist, "one of the biggest in human history" adds nothing of value to this conversation. Plenty of teams "cheat" (legally or illegally), but we won the World Series. End of discussion.
The implication of causality is what's bizarre to me. There's no counterfactual as to whether or not the Astros would have won the World Series or not without the cheating. Reasonable people can disagree. If you want to believe the Astros "stole" a World Series, I wouldn't even disagree (I think it's debatable), but it's just opinions at the end of the day. The implication that ~75% of the franchise's value was stolen since it's attributable to cheating (as opposed to media rights, stadium deals, and having a an effective monopoly in the 4th largest city in America) is bizarre. Then, proceeding to claim that the offense got better solely due to cheating - and ignoring literally years of suckitude that led to high draft picks and prospect development, in addition to a dramatic payroll increase -- isn't the perspective of a fan. I don't think people disagree with the sentiment, it's the extreme to the absurd attribution. If PSJ truly believes the offense is solely caused by cheating, I would highly recommend he find a sports book and put everything he can against the Astros. There's no way they're cheating under the current environment, and the Astros seem to be strongly favored to come out of the division on the basis of their bats (since Cole and the bullpen isn't here anymore). I'm sure he could find lines for various counting stats as well.
We'll find out this year. If the team ops remains above 825 I will have no other option than to agree with you. That will be a fact neither of us can ignore. But if it's back down in the 700's you will have to levitate down from your position and agree with me. It's go time. The answer is in fact coming so no use for anyone to be looking for twinkies and finding snowballs right now. We have a season to play. One thing is for sure, I actually hope sure as shiot you are are right.
The 700s is a big range. The 2018 Astros won 103 games and had a .754 OPS. Were they cheating or not??
Yes. They were. When you cheat the question is now much better are you than when you weren't cheating. Our best comparison is to compare last year to this year. Same lineup. If you want I can give you the average of the last 4 years ops in which they were cheating under code breaker. That's perfectly fair to me as well since that is essentially the debate, although it's not exactly apple to apple. But that's fine. We can draw the line exactly there. With our luck they will hit that exact number. So that's.790 ops. I'm willing to let you have that as a peace offering. If they are below 790 That's confirmation enough for me. It's a drop of 60 ops and that's a clear indicator of the ph level and that cheating made a difference.
So the baseless claims of cheating last year are still happening? If they didn’t find any evidence of it, why would anything change? In the end, a healthy lineup of Springer, Altuve, Bregman, Correa, and phenom Alvarez will put up huge numbers. Add a streaky/experienced/professional Gurriel and a professional hitter in Brantley, and I don’t see any reason why last year should be considered a “fluke”. hell, Altuve had down numbers, springer missed a month, and Correa was only healthy for half the year.
I have no idea who you all are replying to so I must have made the right call pulling the ignore trigger some time ago. Cool.
No, it wasn't. Crunching data is NOT stealing. Getting the signs electronically is cheating. Communicating the illicitly obtained signs during a game, whether you crunched them in a spreadsheet or not, is cheating. Spreadsheets aren't cheating.
Yahoo: The shocking history of sign stealing in baseball Funny how its covered when its the MLB darlings....
so you believe them when they say they cheated but don't believe them when they say it didn't have a significant impact on their performance? interesting selective dissonance.
I believe the data, science, and results before humans. See Covid. All of it points to impact. Jump in ops and two world series is proof what they each said and admitted is true. I didn't want to believe it. I do now. Even Correa has come around to say it gave them advantage, affected the game, and impacted other's careers. He wants to walk a straight line now. But I'm willing to double down on it with the 2020 ops results. That's fair to me. If it didn't impact results, we'll know this year.
Prove that it happened last year, despite them not finding evidence. Which player, other than Alvarez and Bregman (who was on an MVP-track) had a career season or performed exceedingly above expectations? Correa, Springer missed significant time. Altuve actually had lower numbers than normal. So basically, you're banking on Bregman regressing to pedestrian/non-MVP numbers to try and prove your point (presuming the rest of the lineup plays at least at the same rate they did last year). I'll go ahead and pre-prepare your excuses... "60 games leads to anomalies... can't prove they weren't cheating last year despite zero evidence... "
Here's the other wrinkle - what impact does Coronavirus have? Three factors come to mind. 1. When the inevitable positive tests occur - who gets effected the most? Do we lose Altuve, Springer, and Bregman for 2 weeks in a ~10 week season? Or do we somehow miss another team's ace? 2. A lot of baseball players are creature of habit - this is anything but habitual. How does that affect performance? Alvarez has a sophomore slump (in part because he missed a chunk of training) -- is that somehow proof he's a cheater? 3. In a 60 game season - I can imagine pitching staffs are used more like they are in the playoffs - quicker hooks, shallower usage. No one is going to have 200 innings on them - you're going to see a lot more elite pitchers going full bore. (Take McCullers as an example - the pitch count / innings count he would've otherwise had is out the window).
