Throw That Astros Press Conference in the Trash
Houston takes its first step toward apologizing. It was a swing and a miss.
By Jason Gay WSJ
They’re
great guys. Remember that. Great, great guys. That should be the takeaway. These Houston Astros, they’re swell fellas, and
they just got caught up in something they were powerless to stop. Come on! Have a heart! You were a grown adult human being once. Didn’t you ever just find yourself trapped in a yearslong period in which you used banned technology to steal signs and relay pitches to your teammates? Of course you did. This thing that happened, it could happen to all of us.
We’re not saying it isn’t a bad thing. It was a bad thing, baseball says it is, and we agree, but listen: it didn’t do anything, it had no impact. Sure, that makes it odd that the great guys kept doing it, for at least a couple of seasons, if it didn’t have any impact on anything, but let’s stop being so logical about stuff. You and your facts! These great guys here are really sorry that whatever happened, happened—we all are—but we are not going to go backward, because baseball says we don’t have to. Please accept our vague apology, and remember, these are really good guys, who shouldn’t be punished, because…well, they’re great guys. Thank you for coming.
I’m paraphrasing the above, but that was basically the takeaway. What a farce. The Cheaty Cheaty Bang Bang (thanks to a reader for that one) Houston Trashtros Apology Tour commenced Thursday morning in Florida, and if you were expecting abject contrition, then I got a garbage can with your name on it we can both thump, thump, thump.
I hope they remember this press conference at Emmys time next season, because it has a shot at Best Comedy. It was that funny, it really was.
The theme was: Say Something Without Saying Anything At All. The Astros set up a little outdoor table at their spring training facility, and they brought out owner Jim Crane, players Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve, and new manager Dusty Baker, and the scene looked like the saddest condo board meeting anyone’s ever attended. Later, the media would be allowed into the clubhouse to question the players, but this was the headline act, the embattled franchise’s first public step forward.
Crane acknowledged his club broke the rules, and
patted himself on the back for firing general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch, but he wouldn’t concede that breaking the rules really did anything. He also agreed with baseball’s recommendation that no players be punished.
“These are a great group of guys who did not receive proper guidance from their leaders,” Crane said, suddenly talking about a group of adults he pays many millions as if they were a preschool T-ball club waiting for the ice-cream truck.
Bregman got up there looking like a horror movie hostage and read a canned statement. Altuve was worse. Dusty Baker tried to get everyone fired up for 2020.
I kept thinking: Poor Dusty. Everyone loves Dusty—precisely why the Astros hired him, and had him out there this morning, taking questions on something he had absolutely nothing to do with. It was terribly weird. Even Dusty thought it was weird. I’m begging you, Astros. Leave Dusty out of this.
There were some wonderful moments. I loved it when someone asked “What do you have to say to the Yankees?” because that’s exactly how the question should be asked—brassily, like
Whaddaya have to say to the Yankees, ya cheats, ya rogues, ya good-for-nuttins’—and this is, at heart, what’s riled people here, that the Astros may have used this sign-stealing, garbage-banging scheme to skulk past the Yankees and the Dodgers. I loved that someone asked this question, but I didn’t love it as much as I loved Crane’s response:
“Our opinion is that this didn’t impact the game,” the Astros owner said. “We had a good team. We won the World Series and we will leave it at that.”
It was a marvel of logic-ducking—yeah, sorry we did this thing, and we did it for a good long while, which ordinary logic would mean doing the thing helped, but, you know, it didn’t really help. Thankfully, someone followed up a moment later:
Q:
Jim, when talking about the Yankees there, did you say this “didn’t impact the game,” and what do you mean by that?
Crane:
I didn’t say it didn’t impact the game.
Me, to myself, watching at home:
Wait, what? You literally said “this didn’t impact the game” barely a minute ago. I heard it. My cat heard it.
Crane:
Basically, you know, as the Commissioner said, in his report, he’s not going to go backwards. It’s hard to determine how it impacted the game, if it impacted the game, and that’s where we’re gonna leave it.
Perfect. Just perfect. In fairness to Crane, baseball has given him a big hole to plow through here, and he’s plowing through it. When baseball decided it was better to get a speedy resolution for a scandal than to drill to the bottom of the whole thing and adequately punish all of its perpetrators, this is exactly what it was going to come to. A sorry-but-not-sorry special.
And yes, there’s something to be said here about the culture at large, and one smart reporter tried to get Crane to bite on this parallel. We live in a deeply cynical moment in which every inconvenient fact can be denied straight-facedly, and true contrition is taken as a sign of weakness. Saying sorry and meaning it? That’s for suckers. The best apology is either ambiguous and scripted or not offered at all. In the free-for-all of modern life, it’s become easy to dispute facts, obfuscate fair questions, yowl “fake news” and muddy the waters with conflicting explanations. It’s now a sadly acceptable crisis strategy to simply push on to what’s next, because attention spans move quickly, and nobody—or at least not enough people—cares. I wish we got more from the Astros today. I’m not the least bit surprised we didn’t.