Baseball’s toothless response to the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal lays bare uncomfortable truths about society’s tolerance for cheating
One of the harder-to-believe tales in
American sports over the past decade involved the stunningly rapid transformation of the Houston Astros from a historically lousy
baseball team to World Series winners and emerging dynasty. The impetus behind the American League club’s dramatic reversal of fortune was the 2011 appointment of general manager Jeff Luhnow amid a three-year stretch where the Astros lost a combined 324 games. A former McKinsey consultant and University of
Pennsylvania graduate with dual degrees in engineering and economics, Luhnow expanded on the advanced sabermetric groundwork popularized by Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane to rebuild the organization into a forward-thinking, analytics-driven powerhouse. He installed a former Nasa rocket scientist as the team’s director of decision sciences and marshaled a wholesale overhaul of the scouting department, synthesizing traditional methods of player evaluation with advanced statistical analysis into a proprietary system that guided the club’s decision-making. And it worked. A mere four years removed from a 111-defeat season, Houston captured the first championship in the team’s 56-year history – and came within a game of winning a second only three months ago.
Related: How the Houston Astros went from champions to a shamed shambles