MLB World Series, 2019.

[Presti35]

Well done to them.

My cousin was raised just outside Washington and is a fan.

So thats the Nationals and the Capitals winning their titles... over to you Redskins... the one Washington team I follow....

The Wizards (NBA) are on quite a dry spell too. Their one title came in 1978 as the Bullets.

[Pies4shaw]

Trent Williams is back from holdout! Everything will change, now, Presti35.

[K]

Baum taking another stab at a sport he has no familiarity with:


It's all about number won

https://www.theage.com.au/sport/it-s-all-about-number-won-20191101-p536lm.html

[K]

The Stories That the Houston Astros Have Told

https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-stories-that-the-houston-astros-have-told

"But the Astros had a new approach, one borrowed from outside of baseball. Already baseball was moving away from the traditional emphasis on experience and relationships, and toward exploiting inefficiencies in the game through analytics. The Astros took that to extremes. Under the new owner, Jim Crane, who made his billions in shipping and logistics, and led by the general manager, Jeff Luhnow, who had spent time prior to working in baseball as a consultant at McKinsey, the team reconstructed its whole approach to building a baseball team. They slashed the payroll and started from scratch. As Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik explain in “The MVP Machine,” they stopped relying on reports from scouts and made a massive investment in data-driven player development. Eventually, they started firing scouts. The problem was that scouts were human. A human eye can’t see the precise way a pitcher’s fingers come off a baseball’s seams, or ascertain the exact exit velocity at which the ball leaves the bat. The other problem with humans is that they are sentimental. They have hidden biases. Their decisions are distorted by loyalty and risk aversion. They have trouble adapting quickly or admitting error. They model the world narratively instead of mathematically, and narratives are always, on some level, subjective. The problem with humans is that they can’t see past their own stories.
...

What made the Astros invest in Altuve wasn’t that he had a compelling background, or that he was an underdog, or that he was good at karaoke and his teammates liked him. The reason they helped him improve wasn’t that he was a good person. They did it because the data showed he wasn’t meeting the ball far enough out in front.

People were expendable. People could be replaced—probably even Altuve, if that’s what the market dictated. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, by the realities of modern business. The Astros were building a product: a winning team. And, by that measure, their approach worked. During the last three years, the Astros have been one of the most dominant teams in history."

[K]

Aha... After that part, we find out the story's really about Roberto Osuna, who allegedly assaulted his partner in 2018 and was recruited by the Astros in 2019. That's a mind-boggling conflation of two different stories.

[Pies4shaw]

And despite all of that, they got beaten 4 times at home by a team boasting about half the talent.

[K]

Report: Multiple Astros Officials Were 'Appalled' by 2018 Roberto Osuna Trade

https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2859296-report-multiple-astros-officials-were-appalled-by-2018-roberto-osuna-trade

OCTOBER 23, 2019

"When the Houston Astros acquired closer Roberto Osuna from the Toronto Blue Jays in the midst of a 75-game suspension for domestic violence last season, the entire front office reportedly wasn't behind the trade.
...

Although the charges against Osuna were dropped when the woman involved refused to testify, it still resulted in the third-longest suspension in MLB history related to the domestic violence policy.

Osuna's past returned to the headlines this week when it was reported by Sports Illustrated that Astros assistant GM Brandon Taubman yelled, "Thank God we got Osuna! I'm so f---ing glad we got Osuna!" in the direction of some female reporters, including one who was wearing a purple bracelet for domestic violence awareness, ..."

[K]

Ernst & Young distancing itself from Houston Astros executive

https://nypost.com/2019/10/29/ernst-young-distancing-itself-from-houston-astros-executive/

October 29, 2019 | 4:19pm

"Ernst & Young is scrambling to scrub online evidence of its ties to Brandon Taubman, who was fired last week from the Houston Astros for a misogynistic, post-game rant, The Post has learned.
...

“Thank God we got Osuna! I’m so f—ing glad we got Osuna!” Taubman reportedly shouted half a dozen times to a group of female reporters on Oct. 19, the day the Astros cinched the American League Championship Series after beating the Yankees.

Sports Illustrated called the outburst “odd,” noting that the women were not even talking to Taubman at the time, and also not talking about Osuna, who had pitched poorly that game.

... After first defending Taubman, the Astros fired him on Thursday as other journalists corroborated SI’s version of events."

[K]

More scandal for the Astros:

Astros sack manager over Major League Baseball cheating scandal

"The Houston Astros on Tuesday (AEDT) fired manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow, an hour after Major League Baseball suspended both for a year for their roles in an extensive sign-stealing scheme – a swift and powerful downfall for the duo that turned the Astros into the most ruthlessly efficient winning machine in baseball, producing a World Series title in 2017 that is now tainted.

An investigation by MLB found the Astros used cameras and video monitors to steal the signs of opposing catchers, then signal those signs to their hitters before pitches throughout the 2017 regular season and postseason. In addition to the suspensions of Hinch and Luhnow, Commissioner Rob Manfred fined the team $5 million ($A7.2 million) and took away its top two draft picks in both 2020 and 2021.
...

The scheme – baseball's biggest cheating scandal since members of Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning 1951 New York Giants acknowledged decades later that players used binoculars and buzzers to steal signs – first came to light in November in a story by The Athletic, quoting former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers and other unnamed personnel, who confirmed its existence. According to those players, Astros personnel, after the catchers' signs were decoded, banged on a trash can to signal to their batter whether the next pitch would be a breaking ball or not.

Although sign-stealing is a long-standing and accepted tradition in baseball when executed by traditional means – typically, a runner on second base watching the catcher's signs and signaling pitches to the batter through subtle movements – MLB has had to confront an explosion of the practice, and a swelling tide of accusations and rumors, in the digital age. Baseball has banned the use of electronic equipment to steal signals, a rule that was underscored in a memorandum Manfred issued in September 2017."

(WaPo)

[K]

Cora out as Red Sox manager amid sign-stealing controversy

"Just over a year after manager Alex Cora led the Boston Red Sox to a World Series championship, the team parted ways with him on Wednesday (AEDT) amid Major League Baseball's investigation into illegal sign-stealing.

Cora was identified by MLB on Tuesday (AEDT) as a ringleader in the Astros' scheme to steal signs en route to their 2017 World Series championship, when he was Houston's bench coach. He became Red Sox manager the next year and led his new team to the title – albeit with lingering suspicions regarding similar illegal sign-stealing.
...

MLB's findings regarding the Astros included: "Cora arranged for a video room technician to install a monitor displaying the centre field camera feed immediately outside of the Astros' dugout."
...

Cora had no previous coaching or managing experience before landing as the Astros' bench coach in 2017.

As a player, he was a major-leaguer from 1998-2011, appearing with six teams and hitting .243 with a .310 on-base percentage, a .338 slugging percentage, 35 homers and 286 RBIs in 1273 games."

(Reuters)

[K]

Amazing effort by Astros fan T. Adams to investigate sign stealing:

https://twitter.com/adams_at/status/1222506644761911296

http://signstealingscandal.com/

"To understand the scope of the cheating and the players involved, I decided to look at each home game from that season and determine any audio indicators of the sign stealing.

I wrote an application that downloaded the pitch data from MLB’s Statcast. This data has a timestamp for every pitch. I then downloaded the videos from YouTube and, using the timestamp, created a spectrogram for every pitch. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies in an audio file. I could then playback the video of the pitches and, helped by the visual of the spectrogram, determine if there was any banging before the pitch.

I initially thought it would be quick work, and the application did make it pretty straightforward, but there are a lot of pitches in an MLB season. I ended up watching and logging over 8,200 pitches. And some more than once to be sure I was as accurate as possible."

[K]

‘Dark Arts’ and ‘Codebreaker’: The Origins of the Houston Astros Cheating Scheme

"MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s previously undisclosed letter to Astros GM Jeff Luhnow details the team’s spreadsheet and algorithm to steal signs in one of the biggest scandals in baseball history"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/houston-astros-cheating-scheme-dark-arts-codebreaker-11581112994


['Dark Arts'? 'Codebreaker'? These sound like rejected James Bond titles.]

[K]

Gerrit Cole forced by New York Yankees to shave off beard for [US$324] million contract

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-20/gerrit-cole-forced-to-shave-for-$470-million-payday/11817698

"The New York Yankees have coughed up the eye-watering amount to gain the services of ace pitcher Gerrit Cole on a nine-year deal from the Houston Astros.

However, thanks to a policy started in 1973 by former owner, the late George Steinbrenner, the oft-dishevelled-looking 29-year-old has had to present a more clean-cut image with his new club, removing his distinctive stubble and slicking back his once-wild mane of curly hair before donning the pinstripes for the first time.
...

The story goes that shortly after acquiring the team in 1973, Steinbrenner noted down the numbers of all the players whose hair fell below their collars after they removed their caps to sing the national anthem.

He handed the list to his player manager with the edict that those players needed to get a haircut, pronto.

That gave birth to the following policy:

"All players, coaches and male executives are forbidden to display any facial hair other than moustaches (except for religious reasons), and scalp hair may not be grown below the collar. Long sideburns and "mutton chops" are not specifically banned."

Incredibly, some players have been fined and benched for not adhering to this..."

[K]

'Former Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Mike Bolsinger sued the Astros earlier this month, alleging that sign stealing during Houston's World Series-winning season led to the end of his career.

An inning against the Astros in which Bolsinger let up four runs during a 16-7 August rout undermined his reputation as a "successful" relief pitcher, and he was "immediately sent down to Triple A after the game never to be called up again," according to the lawsuit.'

(Reuters)