Snarking at Mike Fiers last week, Evan Gattis apologises for Astrogate this week.By Yours Truly
https://throneberryfields.com/2020/04/03/at-last-an-astrogate-apology/
A video capture made infamous by Jonboy after the first
Astrogate revelations: Evan Gattis at the plate in 2017, about
to face a pitch from Danny Farquhar just before Farquhar
called his catcher to the mound to switch signs . . .Maybe Evan Gattis felt a little too much heat last week, when he
snarked about being the last to land a nasty drinking cup with Mike Fiers’s face and the caption “Snitches Get Stitches.†And, when he hastened to walk it back after his boast got him a small firestorm (including “Cheaters Get Heatersâ€) of snark-back.
Maybe, too, the former Astros backup catcher was reminded that was him at the plate in a 2017 game against the White Sox,
on preserved and notorious video, getting electronically stolen signs banged his way until White Sox pitcher Danny Farquhar smelled the proverbial rat, called his catcher out to the mound, and changed signs posthaste.
Whatever compelled him, the now-retired Gattis isn’t feeling too snarky about Astrogate anymore. He
unloaded to
The Athletic‘s podcast
755 is Real this week. He unloaded a no-holds-barred apology for the Astro Intelligence Agency’s illegal, off-field-based electronic sign-stealing of 2017-18, even while acknowledging that by now no apology on earth will untaint or restore the Astros’ image.
And he’s also more than willing to give Fiers—the original Astrogate whistleblower, the only one among four 2017 Astros who was willing to put his name on the record to
The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich
last November—his props, rather than saluting even a just-kidding threat against the now-Athletics pitcher.
“I don’t think I can win the hearts over of anyone right now at all, or maybe ever,†Gattis
told 755 is Real. “I don’t know how to feel yet. I don’t think anybody—we didn’t look at our moral compass and say, ‘Yeah, this is right.’ It was almost like paranoia warfare or something. But what we did was wrong. Like, don’t get it twisted. It was wrong for the nature of competition, not even just baseball. Yeah, that was wrong. I will say that.â€
Retired since the end of the 2018 season, Gattis didn’t stop there. “If our punishment is being hated by everybody forever, then (so be it),†he said, after saying he hated to see general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch fired almost the moment their suspensions for 2020 were handed down by commissioner Rob Manfred.
“And I don’t know what should have been done, but something had to be [fornicating] done,†the former catcher continued. “And I do agree with that, big time. I do think it’s good for baseball if we clean it up. But I really don’t know to this day, and I’ve thought about it a [spit] ton, know what I mean? And I still don’t know how to feel.
“I’ll get ripped by somebody—‘That’s not an apology’—and if I do apologize, that’s still not going to be good enough. No [spit], it’s not going to be good enough. I understand that it’s not [fornicating] good enough to say, sorry. I get it.â€
Luhnow and Hinch may have been suspended from baseball through the end of the 2020 season, whenever the season might be played if it’s played thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, but
they’d be free to seek other baseball employment afterward. Even if 2020 ends up canceled entirely. There are those
who say nobody should even think about hiring them even as concession hawkers.
Luhnow fostered the victory-
uber-alles culture within the Astros organisation that too often operated according to Major Strasser’s law (expressed in a memorable line in
Casablanca), “You’ll find that human life is cheap.†A culture that allowed Luhnow to dismiss internal alarm when he dealt for a relief pitcher still under suspension for domestic violence and call for an internally-developed sign-stealing algorithm that paved the way to the AIA.
Hinch didn’t exactly look the other way when he caught onto the AIA, but he did nothing to stop it other than smashing one or two of the monitors in the clubhouse from which the opposing signs picked up by an illegal camera were transmitted for translation to pass on to Astro hitters. He fiddled while the plot apparently led by his then-bench coach Alex Cora and his then-designated hitter Carlos Beltran—both of whom eventually lost managing jobs over their Astrogate culpability—burned opponents with little to no idea they walked into a stacked Astro deck.
“For some players that we faced, that I’d never faced before or something like that, even selfishly we didn’t get to find out how good those people are—and they didn’t either,†said Gattis to
755 is Real. “I think that was the one cool thing about playing in the big leagues, was just to find out how good you are, which I think is valuable. Everybody wants to be the best player in the [fornicating] world, man, and we cheated that, for sure. We obviously cheated baseball and cheated fans. Fans felt duped. I feel bad for fans.â€
Gattis may have handed ammunition, inadvertently, to former major league pitcher Mike Bolsinger’s legal team, in Bolsinger’s
lawsuit arguing that—when he was trying to hang in as a remade relief pitcher with the 2017 Blue Jays—the Astros’ illegal sign-stealing operation destroyed him in what proved his final major league appearance.
In that game, the Astros got more stolen signs banged on the can to their hitters than in any other game for which banging-the-can-slowly could be determined. They also got more when Bolsinger was on the mound than when they faced any other Blue Jays reliever that day. Bolsinger was torn apart for five runs when he entered with two out in the bottom of the fourth, escaping only when he managed to get Alex Bregman to fly out.
The Blue Jays sent Bolsinger to Triple A right after the game. He might have been a former starter reduced by injuries to a journeyman trying to remake himself as a reliever, and I’ve said this before elsewhere, but it’s worth a reminder: Even a marginal relief pitcher has the right to know that his major league career got torpedoed straight, no chaser.
The Astros have had the original Los Angeles judge in the Bolsinger lawsuit removed for “prejudice,†never mind that the judge was chosen at random. They followed that by filing to have the suit either thrown out or moved to Texas in the name of “fairness.†They also face a lawsuit back east from a group of fantasy baseball players arguing that the AIA tainted the games through which they played their fantasy ball.*
Aside from handing both lawsuits’ plaintiffs valuable close air support, Gattis isn’t so willing to be snarky about Fiers anymore, either, if his comments to
755 is Real are any indication.
“With Fiers, he had something to say, dude,†the former catcher continued. “It probably started out with him saying exactly what he said—some of these guys coming into the league, they don’t [fornicating] know yet that this [spit] goes on. And I respect that. And he had something to say. So he had to [fornicating] say it. And then we had to get punished. Because if not, then what? It’ll get even more out of control.â€
Gattis acknowledged that previous reports citing an anonymous 2017 Astro had it right that Brian McCann, the longtime Brave who joined the Astros for 2017-2018, who retired after a final tour with the Braves last season, objected to the AIA “and made his feelings known at least a couple of times,†as
Athletic writer David O’Brien phrases it.
“I could tell it was eating him up,†Gattis told the podcast. “He didn’t like it one bit . . . He’s played so long, and he just understands what it takes to get to the big leagues, and he’s got a lot of respect for ballplayers. You could just tell.â€
But you can also just tell that a man making his objections known at least a couple of times isn’t quite the same thing as a man in McCann’s position—a veteran with respect in the clubhouse, whose voice would be heeded assuming he puts more weight into it than a couple of objections made known—pushing a little further within his particular boundaries to turn mere objections into a needed confrontation.
And Gattis isn’t exactly ready to lay the Astrogate onus as heavily as others upon Beltran, whose standing as so respected a veteran, with a Hall of Fame-worthy playing resume, is said often enough to have felt just a little omnipotent among his younger teammates.
“[N]obody made us do [spit] — you know what I’m saying?†Gattis said. “Like, people saying, ‘This guy made us do this’ . . . That’s not it. But you have to understand, the situation was powerful. Like, you work your whole life to try to hit a ball, and you mean, you can tell me what’s coming? What? Like, it’s a powerful thing. And there’s millions of dollars on the line and shit? And what’s bad is, that’s how people got hurt. That’s not right; that’s not playing the game right.â€
The Astros weren’t exactly overcome with remorse when
Manfred’s Astrogate report was released in January. They weren’t exactly allergic to (depending on your viewpoint) non-apologetic apologies or apologetic non-apologies when spring training opened. Owner Jim Crane persists in his delusion that the Manfred report “exonerated†him and his ignorance that, when you lead, you assume responsibility for what’s done by your subordinates.
Now it’s only to lament that Gattis couldn’t have said upon his retirement what he finally said to
755 is Real. It might have made a far larger difference. Still, the fact that Gattis was willing to go on the public record as he now has is staggering enough. Whether he saw the light, felt the heat, or came up somewhere in between.
* -
Roughly an hour after I first wrote and published the foregoing, the fantasy players' lawsuit against the Astros, the Red Sox, and MLB, was thrown out by a federal judge---who opened his opinion by suggesting (wait for it!
) that a game that honours the stolen base "does not provide the perfect encouragement to scrupulous play." The lawsuit may have lacked evidence (which the judge said in ruling it dead), but ponder that if you will the thought that unlawful off-field-based electronic cheating is all Rickey (The Man of Steal) Henderson's fault!------------------
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