The Edge: Houston Astros Audacy

The Houston Astros were the worst baseball team in half a century. But when Ben Reiter wrote about the club for Sports Illustrated in 2014, he came to believe that they would soon be champions. In fact, he predicted on the cover of the magazine that they would win the 2017 World Series. Then they actually did, and Reiter wrote a bestselling book about their novel strategies and earned a new nickname: Astrodamus. But there was one thing Reiter hadn’t predicted or known about, a secret that wouldn’t come to light until two years later.

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Houston’s first great sports innovator was named Judge Roy Hofheinz. He brought the Astros to town in the 1960s with the promise of what would become known as the Eighth Wonder of the World: the Astrodome, the first ever domed stadium. But there was one thing the Judge couldn’t build: a championship team. That task fell to Hofheinz’s modern successor, Jeff Luhnow, who applied the disruptive, data-driven techniques he’d learned in the business and tech worlds… with controversial results.

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One of baseball’s unofficial slogans? “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.” Baseball's history of sign stealing is almost as old as the sport itself. Players have always gone to great lengths to decipher the non-verbal signals that opponents use to communicate on the field: using buried buzzers, military-grade telescopes, even cameras. In 2017, a respected veteran named Carlos Beltran joined the Houston Astros. Aided by the powerful, and largely unregulated, new technologies he had at his disposal, Beltran led the Astros to their long awaited championship – even as defeated rivals, like the Dodgers’ Chase Utley, harbored suspicions about how they’d done it. 

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The 2018 Astros were even more talented than the previous season’s champions. There was just one problem: they couldn’t count on their closer. The good news? There was a great one, named Roberto Osuna, available on the trade market – but Osuna had been suspended for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend. While many clubs wouldn’t even consider bringing him on, Jeff Luhnow’s Astros swooped in. It was the moment when many realized just how far the Astros would go to find a winning edge. And it was a seed that would metastasize into something deeply destructive: a shocking clubhouse incident that made the formerly lovable underdogs a target to be taken down.

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The revelation of the Astros’ trash can-banging, sign-stealing scheme ignited a firestorm. Players emerged to say that they’d known the Astros had been up to something – like Danny Farquhar, a former White Sox reliever who’d been the first to detect suspiciously-timed sounds from Houston’s dugout. But the scandal really accelerated on the internet, where amateur sleuths like Tony Adams scoured video evidence to figure out what exactly the Astros had done. Adams’s work allowed statisticians to analyze the impact of the Astros’ scheme – and to arrive at some surprising conclusions.

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After an intensive investigation, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred issued his report about the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal and punishments for some of its key figures. G.M. Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch received year-long suspensions, and were quickly fired by the Astros. But did the right people face consequences? In part 1 of our season finale, Luhnow breaks his silence about who knew what and when they knew it - and reveals that the Astros’ scheme extended beyond trash can banging.

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