Friday, June 22, 1962 was the day I lived the moment I would like to dwell in for eternity. I was ten and nothing mattered as much to me as my favorite baseball team, the Houston Colt .45s (now the Astros). That evening, they played a twi-night doubleheader against the Mets at the Polo Grounds, and my father took me and my brother to see the games. The moment we finished climbing the ramp and saw the field and, more importantly, my beloved Colt .45s, is one I can conjure up at will. The color of the grass, the color of their uniform… Never have I felt such pure a joy. I’ve remained faithful to the team my entire life, and when they won the World Series in 2017, when I was sixty-five, I sobbed. And when I finished sobbing I wrote an emotional piece for Currents.

https://jewishcurrents.org/the-uncivil-servant-longer-than-the-jews-wandered-in-the-wilderness
Two years later we learned that the Astros throughout that season had cheated, stealing the signs the opposing catcher was giving by means of a camera in center field that transmitted the image to a screen behind the team’s dugout. The type of pitch was then relayed to the batter by banging in a garbage pail.
Evan Drellich, the journalist for The Athletic who broke the story has now written an account of the scandal, Winning Fixes Everything, and though nothing can shake my love for the team, a love that is, like all true fandom, irrational, it was a difficult and disturbing book. It is also essential read for all baseball fans. Drellich’s portrayal of the Astros, which digs deeply into the background of the scandal, and especially of their brilliant general manager, Jeff Luhnow, is a damning picture of the fruits at all levels of the willingness to do anything to win. Destroying the team’s reputation and tainting the championship are far from the only sins of Luhnow’s obsession to be a step ahead of everyone else. Humans beings, both players and staff, were treated as things, tools to advance his project of building a great team. The widespread use of analytics, described in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, is shown here to be a dehumanizing force, obviating the need for human judgment: the numbers, which cover everything from plays on the field to things like the rate at which a ball spins, are all you need. Those who once scouted ballplayers can be replaced by a series of numners? . Fire ‘em! Managerial decisions can be made through use of a spreadsheet. The manager doesn’t agree? Can him! Luhnow and the Astros took what everyone else did in adopting the Moneyball way and pushed it further. The same went fot cheating
The Yankees cheated and the Red Sox cheated by stealing signs. The Dodgers cheated. The Mariners and Indians likely cheated. But their cheating still required someone on second base to relay the sign to the batter. By 2017 it was baked into the Astros’ DNA to be open to anything. Luhnow didn’t participate in the cheating, but he established the setting for it. We should look at Winning Fixes Everything as a kind of anti-Moneyball, revealing the seamy underbelly of what was once a shiny new and thrilling tool.

As an Astros fan, this was a rough read. This was so informative. I learned a lot about front offices and the Astros culture. Some of it had me questioning my allegiance to such a broken team and culture.