I honestly thought I wouldn’t say anything more about this. There have been way too many words written about it already and most of them have been pointless. I’m partly doing this as personal therapy, but I also want it as a record for when things go really wrong. My whole life has teetered somewhere between being a cautionary tale and screaming “I told you so!” at people who never learn. This is one of those times I fear it’s the latter.
I’m talking about the mess with the Astros, of course. What else can people talk about? I’ve addressed what the team did and I stand by every word I said. I suppose that once the country you live in has descended into being a third-world-style kleptocracy, you’re going to be pissed off about the circuses because you can’t do squat about the bread anymore. Man, if only people got as upset about the Emoluments Clause in the actual Constitution as this… But that’s crazy talk.
Somebody is going to get hurt. I don’t know if it’s going to be a player getting beaned by a pissed-off pitcher, somebody sliding in spikes-high into a base, or some dumb-ass righteous “fan” seeking a ballistic redress of grievances. But someone is going to get hurt. The Outrage-Industrial Complex is going full bore. We haven’t heard from the hotdog vendors at Dodger Stadium yet, but I’m sure it’s penciled in somewhere in The Athletics editorial planner. I bailed out of all social media back in November, and I’m so glad I did. People are nuts. It’s just a matter of time before someone with an AK-47 goes looking for the basement of the basement-less pizza parlor where the Astros stored all those buzzers.
Here’s “the take” you’re unlikely to see anywhere else: I don’t believe knowing the called pitch in advance helps the batter that much. Computationally the amount of information that provides versus the cascade of real-time calculations that have to be performed in order to place the bat on the ball is way too small. If you can tease out the effect of that little information on the overall task of hitting, you don’t need to be worried about baseball; You need to be worried about your travel plans to Stockholm to pick up your Nobel in Medicine.
I know, I know, I know. Every major league hitter is lining up to talk about how much it helps. I’m sure they believe it. Strongly. And we all know that the strength of an anecdotal personal belief constitutes reliable evidence of empirical phenomena. Ask any Anti-Vaxxer or Biblical Literalist. They’ll be happy to explain it to you. In excruciating detail. Attribution Theory is a thing, y’all.
I’m sure knowing what pitch is coming helps. Except for all the times that it doesn’t. Good luck finding the difference between the two. Sure, you might know slow or fast. But placement? Trajectory? Break? And have I really stolen a sign if the pitcher actually throws the pitch to the backstop? I’ll be happy to look at any evidence that it works, but I’m profoundly disinterested in the opinions of people who won’t wash their socks during a hitting streak. For Jobu’s sake, think for a minute.
And, yes, I know about the L-Shaped screens for live BP. Of course no one actually got hit once in an entire season-and-a-half of systematic sign-stealing during actual games, but they … could have? But remember: it was only wrong if it was a pitch known in advance because of an electronically-stolen sign. Analog sign stealing isn’t illegal, it’s tradition. It’s only when those darn electrons get involved that things go wrong. So be selective in your outrage when a traumatic brain injury occurs.
It’s not that what the Astros did was right. I’ve explained what I see wrong in what they did, and how the punishment they were given was richly deserved. What I can’t — and won’t — accept without saying something is the degree to which people are willing to shut off their brains in order to be sanctimonious.
Somebody’s going to get hurt. And when that happens, no one is going to understand how that happened. This is just my way of telling you that you could see this coming. Don’t try to say you couldn’t. And it will be your fault. After all, everybody who’s calling for automatic lifetime bans for everyone in the organization is clearly fine with collective sanctions regardless of personal participation.
Hey, I don’t make the rules. But I’m perfectly fine applying the ones you make for others to you.
The hammer dropped the other day when I wasn’t looking. The long-awaited report and sanctions against the Houston Astros dropped on Monday. Hinch is gone. Luhnow’s gone. Money and draft picks are gone. Any sense of proportion about this whole thing was gone a long time ago, so nothing much changed on that front.
Carla and I are traveling and I wasn’t paying attention to any news. Carla told me later she saw it, but decided to let me find out on my own. That was good. I was having a good day Monday. I was having a good day yesterday, too, but on Monday the news would have been an intrusion while yesterday I was poking my head up to see what was going on in the world. I seldom assume what’s going on in the world is it’s going to be good, so it’s not like I wasn’t prepared. It didn’t upset me. It was never going to.
I read the report (that link is a PDF, by the way). I think it’s fair in the same way I think Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich’s reporting in The Athletic has been excellent (I’m not linking to specific articles because I don’t know what they do and don’t have behind the paywall). I hate what I read, but I’ve never hated that it was written. They did good work. I don’t know if they’ll be recognized for what they wrote — awards are screwy things — but good for them if they do. Rosenthal has been very clear (and studiously ignored by everyone) in his stance that the problem with the use of technology to decode pitcher’s signs isn’t limited to the Astros. The difference between the Astros and everyone else is that Mike Fiers decided he didn’t want to get Christmas cards from anyone on the Astros anymore. This doesn’t happen without Mike Fiers deciding to settle some score he had in his head. (When are you sending back the money Mike? It’s tainted, right?). The cheating isn’t what distinguishes the Astros from other teams, it’s the fact that someone was willing to drop the dime on them.
This, to me, is the most important paragraph in the nine pages:
Some Astros players told my investigators that they did not believe the sign-stealing scheme was effective, and it was more distracting than useful to hitters. I am neither in a position to evaluate whether the scheme helped Astros hitters (who were unquestionably a very talented group), nor whether it helped the Astros win any games. There are so many factors that impact the outcome of games that addressing that issue would require rank speculation. But for purposes of my decision, regardless of whether the scheme was effective or not, it violated the rules and, at a minimum, created the appearance of unfairness, and for that, it necessitates severe discipline.
That really is the crux of the matter. Anyone who lived through that season knows we were a much better road team than home team in almost any meaningful statistic. We could all see something changed when we came home and it’s pretty hard not to argue now that people were changing their approach at the plate. The report says Hinch broke the screentwice. Carlos Correa’s ribs got off easier with his masseuse. He clearly wasn’t happy with it. What I’d like to know is what really stopped him from shutting it down. We’ll never know. I’m most disappointed in him, but I suspect he feels the same way. After the warning came down from the Commissioner’s Office, Hinch and Luhnow should have shut it down (given that it was too late to shut it down before warnings became necessary). They didn’t, and that’s why I can’t get too upset about the consequences. The suspensions were justified and I can’t fault Crane for firing them both. Hinch took the hit. Luhnow blamed the players. I think that says all that needs to be said about their characters. (And Taubman? Fuck that guy. He was employed several days longer than he should have been. And despite Crane’s defense of them, he needs a new Media Relations department).
So what have we learned? Players will seek an edge wherever they can find it (whether it works or not) and senior management can range between spineless and malevolent. When I was younger I saw with my own eyes a senior member of the Baseball Operations Office run halfway across the Astrodome to make the ambulance coming to get the stricken J.R. Richard turn around and come in around the warning track. The guy is literally dying and this jerkwad is worried about the already-worn-out Astroturf. So pardon me if I remain standing when I hear that front offices are a snakepit just before getting hit by a feather.
The thing that has driven me nuts about this whole thing — and is literally the reason I closed all my social media accounts — is the reaction of “fans” that hang out there. This “Say it Ain’t So Joe” attitude is tiresome at best, and sociopathic at worst. They could dissolve the team, burn the stadium to the ground, behead Orbit and plant his head on a pike in the smoking crater where the pitching mound used to be and Joe from East Bumfuck still won’t be happy about it.
“But they knew what pitches were coming!”
“Gee Mr. Psychic, Arnoldis Chapman is going to throw you a fastball. Go ahead and hit it.”
I never knew how easy it was to hit major league pitching until this happened. Apparently it’s pretty damned simple. Don’t get me wrong: knowing off-speed vs. fastball is a good bit of info to know when you’re going to the plate, though in principal it’s OK for you to know that. You can steal signs all day long. There just can’t be any electronics involved. There were and there have been consequences. But STFU with all this “tainted championship” crap. Your head is closer to your taint than you are to any demonstrable evidence that this was more help than hindrance.
They shouldn’t have done it. One of my favorite books from my time teaching in Media Informatics at NKU is Bernard Suit’s The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. It’s a philosophical exploration of games and how they work written as a dialog between the Grasshopper from the Ant and the Grasshopper fable and various characters who question him about his … well .. lifestyle choices. It’s a serious work wrapped in a playful package (and it occurs to me that I’ve written about it before). Everything in the book flows from his definition of a game:
To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs […] using only means permitted by rules […] where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means […] and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity […]. I also offer the following simpler and, so to speak, more portable version of the above: playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.1
Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia . Broadview Press. Kindle Edition.
The Astros were guilty of two things: doing something counter to the rules and doing it in such a way that showed contempt for the idea that rules need to be followed in order for the game to be a game. A rap against the Astros front office has long been that it was run by management consultants who didn’t understand that the point of playing baseball is to accept that there are things you just aren’t allowed to do because … The Game. Suits called it the Lusory Attitude and it was the key to understanding the difference between playing a game — any game — and every day life. But for Baseball to start going nuclear — lifetime bans and stripped titles — they’d have to show that routine violations of rules are rare and swiftly punished. I swear on Javy Molina’s chest protector that I have my doubts that would hold up in court. MLB gets to decide how it handles this since they set the rules. And now they have. Feel free to adopt your local independent baseball team if that isn’t pure enough for you. (You actually should adopt your local independent baseball team anyway).
I was an Astros fan before many of the people who were involved in this were born. And they’ll be gone someday, as will I. God willing and the creek don’t rise2, the Astros will still be there. My personalized license plate reads simply “Astros” and will continue to do so. I will continue to wear my 2017 Astros World Series Championship hat with pride, and will politely tell you everything I don’t like about you in excruciating detail if you say a goddamned thing to me about it. I will judge you. And I won’t be nice about it. You wanna play? I’ll play. Bring it.
And get back to me about the sanctity of the rules the next time this happens:
Also in 2017…
1 What I left out of the quote were his use of terms that he clearly explains elsewhere, but would be more distracting than helpful since they have very specific meanings that can’t be explained quickly.
I’ve lived a lot of places. I’ve liked all of them for what they were, but the sheer number of places I’ve lived always makes me a bit of an outsider. I see things that natives take for granted that are special and see things they claim as unique that are really quite mundane.
There are good things and bad things about Cincinnati. I don’t have the feelings for this place that natives have. I never will. There are things people go nuts over that I just don’t get. That’s not unique to here. It’s been the case everywhere I’ve lived.
There’s something unique about today in Cincinnati that’s unique both for what it is and the fact that people here understand how unusual it us. Opening Day for the Cincinnati Reds is a civic holiday. There’s a parade that takes about three hours to complete. Every bar in the city is crowded. I’m sure there are smaller businesses that actually close, but even the big Fortune 500s don’t expect to get much done. A lot of people just take the day off and even more knock off at 2 or 3 PM if they can. The game is always a sellout.
The Reds are going to have a tough year this year. Today it didn’t matter. I hate that MLB has taken away the tradition of letting Cincinnati be the first team to start the season (even if only by minutes) since it’s the oldest professional team still playing. I don’t consider myself a Reds fan in any useful way, but Baseball is making a mistake not honoring the commitment this city has to its team. No other city celebrates Opening Day like Cincinnati. It’s not something that can be described. It’s something I’m glad I’ve experienced.
Today is more of a day of relaxing than anything else. Monday and Tuesday are kind of a blur. A pleasant blur, to be sure, but a blur nonetheless. I’m still annoyed at WordPress for eating most of my post from last night so I’m going to fill in some of the blanks from yesterday. Going to the game yesterday was a lot of fun. Then again, so was having this view for breakfast this morning.
Does. Not. Suck.
I got in the pool, which is the first time I’ve been in a pool in I don’t know how long. It was glorious. I was able to stretch leg muscles that haven’t been stretched in quite some time. I’ve been getting a lot of walking (for me) in, and I can tell it’ll get easier the more I stretch. I talked about “the streak” I’ve got going last week and I’ve not had any trouble hitting the mark so far. I even upped it a bit on Monday. Today? I’ll make sure I hit it, but the closer to a mere one calorie over the mark I can get the better. I’m not exactly a go-go-go guy. Today I’ll be content to do the minimum required.
Yesterday was a lot of fun. I feel kind of weird saying that given how awful the news was from Belgium. I saw the news on my phone pretty early on since I wasn’t able to sleep much on the train. It was jarring to see the news footage in the Sanford Amtrak station on one set of monitors while other monitors were showing videos about Amtrak Security and their use of bomb-sniffing dogs. It was just coincidence. The day before at the Lorton, VA station they’d been playing the same video. And at one point we saw an officer come through that station with a gorgeous black Lab. It wasn’t a search or anything. They were just passing through. So this is the way I see it. Chances are my day yesterday was better than yours. And no matter how bad yours sucked, it wasn’t as bad as your average Belgian. Count your blessings.
Local regulations require selfies be taken at all Spring Training games.
It’s just 11 days until the Astros open the season, so the starters are getting in a lot of work. It’s impossible not to be excited about this team. Altuve was on fire yesterday. Correa hit a monster line-drive home run that hit about 20 feet above the wall above the 410 sign in right-center in the batter’s eye. It have easily been a 450-foot shot had it not hit the netting. Both guys competing for the first base job played well. Mike Fiers got banged around in the fifth inning. I don’t know if he was trying something different that didn’t work, or whether he just didn’t have his stuff today. But hey! It’s March! Go ahead and get it out of your system now! In the end there was a five-run comeback and Good triumphed over Evil 8-7.
“Pitchers and catchers report today.” Is there anything more beautiful?
A few teams actually had their folks report yesterday, but the teams I care about waited until today, so that’s what counts to me. To say I’m looking forward to this season is an understatement. After years of frustration for both of us, it’s nice to know that the idea of Carla’s Cubbies and my Astros meeting in the World Series isn’t laughable. It’s a long season. Lots of things can happen and I’m not in the habit of making predictions. It’s just that it’s actually possible. Possible matters.
Of course I live in Cincinnati Reds country. This is going to be an awful year for them, more than likely. Possibly historically bad. Given the rebuilding job they have, it could be three years before they start showing signs of life. It hasn’t been that long since my Astros were going out and losing 100 games in a season, so I have sympathy for the real fans. It’s going to be hard.
It’s easy to support a team when they’re winning. Real fans support them when they’re losing. Seats are easy to get and you’re never more than half an inning away from seeing a Major League lineup. Unless the Phillies are in town.
In March I’m going to get to do something I’ve wanted to do ever since I worked at the Astrodome more than 30 years ago. Carla and I are going to Spring Training.
I’m probably jinxing us to a massive freak April snowstorm, but I’m going to say Spring has finally arrived. Not that it’s all that spring-like out there at this moment. It’s 44℉ and I think it’s only supposed to hit 52℉ today. But the sun is out and the birds are singing and the grass is greening up. The Astros are 2-2 and took two out of three from the Yankees. They got hammered last night 11-1 by the Angels, but it’s a long season and I feel OK thinking at this point that they won’t lose 1oo games this year.
So of course I’ve fired up The Egg.
Part of the motivation came from texting back and forth with my friend Nate last weekend when we were down in Evansville, IN visiting Carla’s nephew. Nate has writes a blog called Bread & Whiskey that documents his passion for cooking. Before I had the Egg I had an offset New Braunfels Black Diamond that my mom bought Carla and me for our wedding present. When I was turning 50 and decided to step up my game with respect to smoking, I knew I wanted the old smoker to go to a good home. It had always served me well. Long story short, I ran into Nate out at the 50 West Brewing Co. and we talked barbecue. It came up in passing that he was looking for an offset smoker to restore and modify and I told him he could have mine for the price of coming to get it. It was a win-win-win. He got his smoker and I got it off my back patio and it went to a home where it would be treated with the love it deserves. I haven’t seen the smoker itself, but I’ve seen pictures of the restoration job he did. It looks awesome. I’m so happy that it all worked out.
Aaaaaaand we’re underway
So anyway, Nate was getting a chance to cook on a Big Green Egg for the first time last weekend. He was over at some friends who bought their Egg the same place I bought mine (Wardway Fuels on the West Side. Cannot recommend them highly enough). He was excited, to say the least. He did things a little different than I’ve been doing. He ran his top vent open all the way and just used the bottom to regulate the temp. He was also using a water pan, which I hadn’t done up to this point. The pictures he sent looked great and I’m sure the meat was fantastic. But what it mostly did for me was get me in the mood. Then Tuesday was really nice and Carla and I were able to sit out on the back patio. Looking at the covered Egg I decided that I was going to cook something today. And here we are.
Thursday I had my “Congratulations! You’re 50! Let’s shove a camera up your ass!” colonoscopy. It went fine. No problems. Don’t have to worry about another for 10 years. Knowing it was coming, then the joy of the prep on Wednesday, made it a less than fun-filled week. Funny thing about the anesthesia: I wasn’t knocked out all the way, but its effects really hung on. I slept for much of the day Thursday and even last night I slept hard. How this all matters to what I’m cooking today is Carla rightly suggested I do something easy. I rushed the last cook. The country ribs were terrible (about half were pitched) and the sliced butt was uninspiring. Edible. OK, even. But not all that great. I need to nail something to get the season off to a good start, and a good tray of country ribs are the way to go. They only take 4-5 hours and that let me sleep in and take it easy this morning.
Country ribs aren’t ribs, of course. They’re actually chops from the shoulder near the front end of the baby back ribs. I love the damned things. My usual pattern is to do a tray of country ribs in addition to something else — a pork butt or brisket, even — with the intent of eating on the ribs that day to scratch the itch of getting some barbecue and giving the larger hunk of meat the time it deserves. Since I just have a tray of ribs on now I decided to try a couple of things a little differently this time around.
I started the fire the same way I did last time, but it started much easier this time. I may have had too much small lump pieces the last time because I got to the nice blue smoke really fast this time. Last time I let the fire establish itself for 20 minutes with the lid up and the vents all the way open, then went another 20 minutes with the lid down but the vents wide open before the smoke cleaned up. This time? Once I got the plate setter and the grids placed after the first 20 minutes the fire and the smoke were perfect. I’m thinking I had too many small pieces of lump in a single layer that choked the air flow. This time the lump was piled much looser and I think that’s the difference.
I’m using a water pan this time. That’s straight from Nate’s experience last week and I figured it was time to try it. So far so good. If nothing else, having another thermal sink between the fire and the grid has kept the temps pretty well planted between 215 and 220. I’ve been writing this post for several hours now and — as I was expecting — using the water pan is inhibiting the formation of a good bark, but the color on the meat is beautiful and I’m really happy with the moisture level inside. I suspect I’ll be using a pan of water when I do my next large cut of meat. I started with just under a gallon of water in a 9 x 17 pan. Three hours about half the water was gone and I put the remainder water from the glass jug so the pan won’t go dry. What I may do when I do a large butt or brisket is just let the pan go dry so bark has a better chance of forming.
I thought about doing what Nate did and trying to control the temperature strictly with the bottom damper, but I wimped out. I did some reading on any number of the Big Green Egg forums and came to the conclusion I’d try it the other way around. So what I’ve done is tried to keep the bottom damper at a single position and tweak the top damper to adjust the temperature (open increases the temperature, while closing lowers it). Following what I was taught by Chef JJ the weekend I got the Egg, I’ve always moved the top and bottom dampers together under the assumption that the input and output should be equal. I don’t think you can ever go wrong doing it that way.
What I’ve seen today, though, is that you can seemingly affect the rate of airflow through the bottom simply by manipulating the top damper. Opening the top allows more air to vent which forces air to be drawn in faster through the bottom damper because the pressure has to remain equal inside and the bottom aperture size remains constant. The only way to account for the increased outflow due to a larger top opening is to draw more air faster through the same sized bottom opening. This sets up more rapid air circulation within the Egg, which encourages a bit hotter fire and the temperature rises. I’m probably screwing up the physics, but that’s what I think is happening. The key thing to remember is never let the top be open less than the bottom. The top isn’t tight enough to shut off all airflow, but you could easily starve the fire and create some nasty smoke.
I’m well over 1300 words and I apologize if at any point I’ve actually had anything useful to say. I don’t write regularly enough and spending the day tending the Egg gives me an excuse to write about something I actually care about. I start and stop as the day goes on and I do other things as needed. My practice up to this point has been to start a post and publish it before things are done, then add to it throughout the day. Since I’m doing things differently today while cooking, why not blog it differently as well?
That said, this is how the meat pictured above looked 4.5 hours later when I was taking it off. You can assume they taste as good as they look.
I honestly thought I wouldn’t say anything more about this. There have been way too many words written about it already and most of them have been pointless. I’m partly doing this as personal therapy, but I also want it as a record for when things go really wrong. My whole life has teetered somewhere between being a cautionary tale and screaming “I told you so!” at people who never learn. This is one of those times I fear it’s the latter.
