Astros and Asterisks

After the conclusion of the 2019 World Series, and before the sport and wider society suffered through a prolonged COVID-19 shutdown, Major League Baseball experienced one of the more bizarre scandals in its lengthy history. As the nature and scope of the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal was revealed, and the simultaneous vitriol and moralizing it elicited from players, fans, and sportswriters became apparent, scholar Jonathan Silverman pitched the idea of a contextual snapshot of the scandal to an editor of the Terry and Jan Todd Series on Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas Press. His idea was “to find writers who could put this weird scandal in perspective in a lively and thoughtful way” (vii). The result is Astros and Asterisks, a wide-ranging edited volume that examines the scandal from historical, journalistic, legal, ethical, and cultural perspectives and considers the implications the scandal has for the sport and its future.Consisting of fifteen chapters, Astros and Asterisks explores this subject in five sections: (1) “Histories of Cheating in Baseball,” which covers the period before the scandal came to light; (2) “The Scandal Unfolds,” which tells the story of the cheating scheme itself; (3) “Fans and the Scandal,” which covers how the fans reacted and why they reacted as they did; (4) “The Scandal and Its Ethical Dilemmas,” which explores some of the ethical issues attached to the scandal; and (5) “Technology and the Scandal,” which examines the implications of using technological and informational means to cheat.Baseball historians will find particular joy in the first section, which lays out the long, storied history of cheats and cheating in the Major Leagues. While much of the content here—from Gaylord Perry's spitter to the emery board in Joe Niekro's back pocket—is oft-repeated baseball lore, some lesser-known instances shine light on the reaction to the Astros scandal. Contributor Steve Gietschier of The Sporting News relates the story of the 1900 Phillies, which assigned a reserve to sit in the clubhouse beyond the center field fence with a spyglass to steal the opposing catcher's signs. The signs were then transmitted via a buzzer system to another reserve who would stand in the coach's box and gesticulate his legs in an exaggerated manner to relay the information to the batter. While Gietschier notes that “mechanical and electronic malfeasance has not soiled baseball's quest for integrity very often” (9), the use of a buzzer system more than a century ago not only calls to mind subsequent allegations brought against the Astros but challenges the contention that the Astros were without precedent in violating some cherished component of the game by employing technology to decode and communicate an opponent's signs.Working from Gietschier's observations, one of the more interesting questions posed by this volume is what distinguishes cheating from gamesmanship? Anthropologist George Gmelch offers that “a lot of what baseball fans regard as ‘cheating’ really is not since it does not violate any of the sport's official rules. Rather, it is better regarded as ‘gamesmanship’” (24). And in his own contribution, Silverman quotes baseball analysts Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller who wrote, two years prior to the Astros scandal breaking, that “it's not that cheating is socially acceptable in baseball . . . it's that certain kinds of cheating are socially acceptable in baseball and being competitive means engaging in the ambiguous negotiation of the acceptable vs. the unacceptable” (Lindbergh and Miller, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, 49). What distinguished the two, in Gmelch's view, is that while stealing signs using human guile alone is acceptable, once technology is employed the line between the two has been crossed. It is a single-minded focus on winning that inclines players, or in this case an entire franchise, to engage in borderline activity, if not deliberate rule breaking. And it is the opinion of several contributors to this volume that upper management in the Houston Astros organization fostered an especially toxic atmosphere and extreme win-at-all-costs mentality that drove the sign-stealing operation.For contributors Allison Levin and Matthew Staker, yet another question persists: “How long will using technology to steal signs be verboten? It will be interesting to revisit this topic in the future and see where the ‘unwritten’ rules have moved” (147). As technology becomes more ubiquitous in baseball, they surmise, we may see tactics similar to those employed by the Astros become part of the game's “normative ethics.”Still, as law professor Mitchell Nathanson reminds us, after the scandal broke, there were rumblings inside Major League Baseball that it was the whistleblower, former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers, who was considered to have committed the real sin. In the volume's most effective piece, Nathanson bluntly declares, “Baseball has no love for truth-tellers. They're rats, turncoats, lowlifes for violating the omerta of the clubhouse” (121). Nathanson considers the perception that there is something sacred about a Major League clubhouse, and everything that goes down within them from steroid use to sign-stealing, as the “misguided assumption that has been dragging baseball down for decades” (121).The book's contributors have demonstrated that the Astros sign-stealing scandal, and the blurred reactions to it, have succeeded in pulling baseball further from its mythical image as a nineteenth-century pastoral game based on supposed American virtues of fair play and meritocracy. And that may be what angers people most of all; Silverman reminds readers that no team was more committed to the stat-driven analytics movement than the Astros. Again, he quotes Lindberg and Miller, who wrote, “Over the last two decades, the sabermetric movement has plowed across Major League Baseball like a glacier, leaving a strange-looking landscape behind” (Lindbergh and Miller, 5). The game has been taken from the wisdom gathered by managers and scouts over decades of experience and placed in the hands of Ivy League–educated McKinsey consultants, who boiled everything down to data points, like those on the spreadsheet the Astros used to develop their “Codebreaker” program

Sign (mathematics · History · History and Developments in Astronomy · Mathematics · Psychology · Space exploration and regulation