“Winning Fixes Everything”

[Owen21]

"If you know how to cheat, start now"   Earl Weaver

[RZNJ]

14 minutes ago, Owen21 said:

"If you know how to cheat, start now"   Earl Weaver

There's probably a "without getting caught" in there somewhere.

[btdart20]

49 minutes ago, emmett16 said:

It’s hilarious to me that people think:

1. This is new

2. All teams were not doing this 

I don't think most people think it's new nor that it's isolated.  People just get shocked and appalled for discussion boards and twitterverse for all sorts of internal/external reasons.

Baseball has always had a 'wink-wink-nod-nod' type relationship with cheating (or at least what is/isn't considered cheating).  From substances on balls or shrinking them, to the guy on second base (or AB) sneaking a peak at the C, to 'leaning on a tag' to give a slight push off a bag...  When the systems and public nature of them have grown to where 'plausible deniability' is reasonable.

[Moose Milligan]

1 hour ago, Just Regular said:

Nope, the names in that part of the drama fit.    S was for Sig and for slower, and Fast preferred fast.

Of course that was within the context of the Astros innovating culture.     Some of how the book framed the appeal of BAL for Sig was the opportunity to reiterate some of the beginning stuff.     I'm sure the frontier has kept moving the last half decade.     Clearly 2023's cutting edge wisdom involves ongoing constraint (ahem, wise and judicious usage) in the deployment of your best players!

I haven't quite finished cover to cover but have read all the Elias index pages and haven't encountered anything on fidelity yet, so unless an insinuation is hidden on an un-indexed page, I'm going to go with all those bits are Twitter-sphere rumors, not anything Drellich wrote.

I haven’t got there either but judging how he writes about these people involved it doesn’t seem like he’d discuss these topics. There’s not much at all about their personal lives except how they relate to their jobs. 

[Sports Guy]

1 hour ago, Just Regular said:

Nope, the names in that part of the drama fit.    S was for Sig and for slower, and Fast preferred fast.

Of course that was within the context of the Astros innovating culture.     Some of how the book framed the appeal of BAL for Sig was the opportunity to reiterate some of the beginning stuff.     I'm sure the frontier has kept moving the last half decade.     Clearly 2023's cutting edge wisdom involves ongoing constraint (ahem, wise and judicious usage) in the deployment of your best players!

I haven't quite finished cover to cover but have read all the Elias index pages and haven't encountered anything on fidelity yet, so unless an insinuation is hidden on an un-indexed page, I'm going to go with all those bits are Twitter-sphere rumors, not anything Drellich wrote.

Good to hear. Drellich shouldn’t be writing about that anyway.

[Frobby]

32 minutes ago, btdart20 said:

I don't think most people think it's new nor that it's isolated.  People just get shocked and appalled for discussion boards and twitterverse for all sorts of internal/external reasons.

Baseball has always had a 'wink-wink-nod-nod' type relationship with cheating (or at least what is/isn't considered cheating).  From substances on balls or shrinking them, to the guy on second base (or AB) sneaking a peak at the C, to 'leaning on a tag' to give a slight push off a bag...  When the systems and public nature of them have grown to where 'plausible deniability' is reasonable.

Sneaking a peak at the catcher’s signals isn’t cheating.  If a team is sloppy enough to let a baserunner or coach steal their signs, that’s their problem.  But there was a specific directive against using technology to steal signs, that was directly violated by the Astros.  

[btdart20]

1 hour ago, Frobby said:

Sneaking a peak at the catcher’s signals isn’t cheating.  If a team is sloppy enough to let a baserunner or coach steal their signs, that’s their problem.  But there was a specific directive against using technology to steal signs, that was directly violated by the Astros.  

Whether sneaking a peak at the catcher is cheating or not wasn't my point.  But it's definitely part of those 'unwritten rules' of the game that sets the stage for this conversation.  It's part of the spirit of the law vs. the letter of the law debate.  

[deward]

35 minutes ago, btdart20 said:

Whether sneaking a peak at the catcher is cheating or not wasn't my point.  But it's definitely part of those 'unwritten rules' of the game that sets the stage for this conversation.  It's part of the spirit of the law vs. the letter of the law debate.  

I think players on the field using their wits to figure out what the other team is doing vs a team orchestrating an elaborate scheme involving electronic equipment, AFTER being warned to cut it out, is a pretty clear delineation that any team should be able to navigate.

[btdart20]

2 minutes ago, deward said:

I think players on the field using their wits to figure out what the other team is doing vs a team orchestrating an elaborate scheme involving electronic equipment, AFTER being warned to cut it out, is a pretty clear delineation that any team should be able to navigate.

And PEDs were banned in 1991 too.  Wink-wink...

[AnythingO's]

2 hours ago, Frobby said:

Sneaking a peak at the catcher’s signals isn’t cheating.  If a team is sloppy enough to let a baserunner or coach steal their signs, that’s their problem.  But there was a specific directive against using technology to steal signs, that was directly violated by the Astros.  

Who knew that banging a trash can qualifies as "using technology".  Obviously I kid, but that was the thought that crossed my mind when I read your post.

[deward]

2 minutes ago, AnythingO's said:

Who knew that banging a trash can qualifies as "using technology".  Obviously I kid, but that was the thought that crossed my mind when I read your post.

Using the replay room is the tech part

[deward]

5 minutes ago, btdart20 said:

And PEDs were banned in 1991 too.  Wink-wink...

I'm not sure what your point is here. 

[AnythingO's]

1 minute ago, deward said:

Using the replay room is the tech part

I know that but was just messing with Frobby, it was the first thought that popped into my mind when I read his post. lol (imagine green font)

[btdart20]

16 hours ago, deward said:

I'm not sure what your point is here. 

You seem like you're trying to determine the brass tacks line between what's cheating and what isn't.  I'm just pointing out that baseball's adherence to its own rules (written or unwritten) is more nuanced than what's right and wrong.  My post was never about specific ways of playing (cheating or not).  It's about our grinning approach to those who push the limits of the rulebook.  It's not new.  It's not appalling.  We joke about.  We think it's clever.  We have quotes like Weaver's earlier in this thread.  We have thoughts that say if the opponent isn't smart enough then it's on them.  Unless, of course, it's against our guys or gets "too technical" or too openly "unfair" on a different plain of our collective moral codes (i.e. for the kids, health, optics of fairness).

Did Bobby Thompson know what pitch was coming when he hit the 'shot heard around the world'?  Yes, he did.  But he framed it as "more no than yes."  (wink-wink)

Focus on the Giants’ Cheating Scandal of 1951 – Society for American Baseball Research (sabr.org)

 

[Moose Milligan]

Finally finished this book last night.  

In regards to the OP, there's a brief paragraph where it talks about Luhnow and Elias being Trump supporters and they'd rag on Brandon Taubman for being a Bernie Bro.  Luhnow and Elias also went on a diet that was almost all meat based (I've done this before, it's ****ing fantastic) and Elias would call Taubman a ****y for eating vegetables which would make Luhnow laugh.

There's also a quote about Eve Rosenbaum "Eve Rosenbaum left," an Astros executive said. "And it's not like she went to the Orioles because she just really liked working with Elias."  I suppose someone could take that as the two having more than a professional relationship.  

That's really all that I saw.   Truth be told, Elias really isn't in the book all that much.  IMO, this book is really about Luhnow and how he got the Astros to where they were towards the end of the decade.  There's a lot of talk about Mejdal, Taubman, Mike Fast and a couple other guys that were key in getting the Astros to the top.  There's also a lot of discussion about the cheating that the Dodgers, Red Sox and Yankees were doing.  And, surprise, surprise, I knew Alex Cora was a douchebag.   

However, if you're reading this through a lens of an Orioles fan and looking for things to apply from this book to what Elias has done here there are a few corollaries, namely that Luhnow didn't want to spend a dime more than he had to.  He didn't want to spend on Free Agency unless he absolutely felt that it was necessary and that seems like it could be a parallel for what's going on here.  

I parsed out some other quotes that reminded me as I was reading about what Elias has done since he's been here or things that are interesting and I've included them below.  Pardon the formats didn't know there was an upload limit.  Reached it after the first 3 jpegs, the rest of the quotes are after:

 

 

 

“Taubman, who was making six figures in investment banking, had never been to Texas before his job interview. He read up on Luhnow and Mejdal and Elias. He grew inspired by the idea of building a sustainable pipeline of players and then being religious about letting those players walk in free agency when they no longer became cost-effective assets.”

— Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich
https://a.co/cLRf7v5

 

“The attempt to sign Springer was just one piece of a larger puzzle. The Altuve extension had emboldened Luhnow to direct Taubman to construct a flurry of similar offers for young players, including Jason Castro, Matt Dominguez, Robbie Grossman, Jon Singleton, and, eventually, Dallas Keuchel and even prospect Carlos Correa. Castro’s offer was dated March 9, a $ 12 million guarantee with the potential to make $ 30 million. Grossman’s was dated March 10, a $ 7 million guarantee with the potential to make $ 23.5 million. Both players declined. The scattershot approach was purposeful and, in fact, targeted. The Astros knew that some of the deals, had they been accepted, likely would have worked out poorly. “The idea of the strategy was that it would be OK to go bust on thirty to forty percent, which is like an alarmingly high number, because the surplus value on the ones that do work out more than compensates for the losses,” an Astros exec said. “It’s a venture capitalist sort of approach. You take a handful of big bets instead of making a multitude more of small, safe bets.””

— Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich
https://a.co/0Pb8x2V

“Meanwhile, the international market, by Taubman’s calculations, was an area where the Astros had not been aggressive enough. Uncertainty with international amateur players, most of them from Latin American countries, was high. Many do not pan out as big-league players. But teams at that time had no cap on how much they could spend internationally.”

— Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich
https://a.co/2DMthAa

 

““Once Jeff started having to make decisions of, ‘Should we sign this free agent? Should we trade for Verlander?’ Sig started pushing back on him a lot on those sort of things,” a different executive said. “Sig was never able to switch gears. He wanted to hoard every single, not even prospect-prospect, but like, org piece that we had. He didn’t like spending free-agent money; he didn’t like trading for established players. I think he really thought that building through the farm and staying with those players was the way to build a ball club.””

— Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich
https://a.co/aCpOE1Z

 

“As with Hinch’s extension, Crane got involved to make Altuve’s happen, although it wasn’t as acrimonious. In the early going, Crane and Luhnow had both been adamant that the Astros would spend at the right time, and by ensuring Altuve would stick around, they were making good. Crane and Luhnow still never wanted to use free agency as anything but a supplement, but the extension for a homegrown star, even at a team-friendly price, was encouraging. “It comes down to a question of how much of your payroll do you want to tie up in one or two players, and when you have a lot of good young players coming through that you’re going to have to pay through arbitration and potentially locking them up in free agency, you have to keep that in mind,” Luhnow said about a month before Altuve’s extension.”

— Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich
https://a.co/6CQbgZ9

 

"Elias was keen to keep costs down, just as Luhnow was. The Astros had begun offering club option years in contracts not only to players, but to their own employees, including scouts. When he left the Astros in 2017, Alex Jacobs had an offer from Elias to stay for one year, plus an additional club option for another year, with a $ 10,000 buyout.”

— Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich
https://a.co/1hMQWox

 

““Sig was not offered a contract renewal,” an Astros executive said, echoing others. “He did not choose to leave.””

— Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball's Brightest Minds Created Sports' Biggest Mess by Evan Drellich
https://a.co/3ZILrWu