In politics, it began with the troika of Gingrich, Starr and FOX News, along with "Medal of Freedom" winner Rush Limbaugh, doing what Don Herzog so aptly termed "poisoning the minds of the lower orders" and creating a festering undercurrent of white working class resentment that found expression in myriad forms of self-righteousness.
Which of course eventually gets us to the Orange Menace and zombie politics, which thrives on caricature, exaggeration, and outright falsehood--three related behavioral gradations of self-righteousness whose practice leads to a uniquely American brand of holier-than-thou nihilism.
And in the little world of baseball, that's where we've been at since the steroid era, a time when offense (already criminally out of control...) was unleashed in a way that allowed a select group of hitters to focus on home runs in a way that shattered previous records. It's hard to tell which was worse to the reactionary media that rose up against these players--the "cheating" (which cannot be quantified in any meaningful way) or the outsized nature of the record-breaking itself. Being in the thrall of a foaming-at-the-mouth reaction, of course, they were unable to clearly articulate anything resembling a rational position.
But it's left a culture of outrage that is now in the hands of younger, ever-wonkier bloggers, including many who want to seize upon the social and political aspects of baseball's less-than-exemplary practices and its most feeble ex-post-facto policing mechanisms. And that brings us to those cheatin', trash-can bangin' Houston Astros, whose crime and punishment will be forced to linger amongst us in a Dostoyevskian haze for an indeterminate time (or, perhaps, until another ballplayer, like Harry Chiti, becomes his own "player to be named later").
Yes, the Astros cheated. And they came up with a consummately silly (but somehow uniquely appropriate to the times) method of doing so. But in the midst of those in the media who are dead-set on employing their variation of holier-than-thou nihilism to this incident so that it will linger in the air like a foul stench indefinitely, we want to remind them that they're behaving just like those who harangued about steroids.
Worse, they have done downright lousy work in quantifying the results of the Trashtros' cheating, which has reached an ongoing fever pitch because Houston won the 2017 World Series (despite no evidence of the "bang a gong" method being employed in the post-season that year). Folks have rolled through the videos of 2017 Houston home games and have apparently located the at-bats where sign-stealing was transmitted via the blunt edge of the "trash phenomenon." Jayson Stark and Eno Sarris did synchronized cartwheels around the Astros' "alarming" improvement in strikeout percentage (K%) in The Athletic, ultimately crashing into each other and collapsing in a heapin' helpin' of inhospitable bet-hedging.
In tandem with the Iowa caucus snafu, the actual value of the Astros' malfeasance is being magnified to keep in place a set of principles that are often oversimplified and misapplied. The media prefers to frame things in ways that force the individual to view those actions/results/conclusions in a highly straitened forms: that the "disaster" of the Iowa caucus might actually lead to a more useful political process is simply too far down the road for them to contemplate. The bandwagoneers in the baseball media who are still stomping on the Trashtros want punishment, not reform--but they can't even recognize that there are forms of punishment that could be far more inhibiting to future transgressors.
But we're here to tell you that the Astros' cheating, at least as manifested in 2017, was not very effective in terms of actual wins and losses. The table (at left) makes this abundantly clear: these are the Astros' homestands and road trips broken up into individual units.
The top group features all the home stands after the initial "bang a gong" experiment on May 28 (the emergent Trashtros scored eight runs in that game, but they did it against the Orioles, who had a 5.38 road ERA in '17). The Astros hit better in these games than in their five earliest homestands, and struck out a bit less--but these games produced the weakest winning percentage amongst our four categories (just 28-23).
The odd thing to be found in the data is that the correlation of run scoring and K% is pretty random. K% and WPCT correlates in the way that the semi-ersatz analysts expected, but it only does so in road games--where the Astros were apparently not cheating. Even there, the correlation between run scoring and K% is all over the map. (Note that we organized the road data in ascending order of K%--which also helps to show the random nature of R/G and team batting average.)
Being the semi-focused full-service diatribists that we are, we also fashioned a scatter chart that captures the intersection of R/G and K%. Since such a chart can't quite capture the third dimension (WPCT), we color-coded some of the data points on the scatter chart to indicate how random the results really are. The orange-colored diamond-shaped symbols represent the homestands or road trips with the very best WPCT; the yellow-colored symbols show the ones where the Astros had < .500 records in homestands/road trips (only two); the white-colored symbol is the homestand where they played .500 ball despite hitting .303, scoring 6.7 runs per game, and having a low K%. So, as you can see, the results are all over the map...even when we move beyond this highly granular level, there are no correlations between sign-stealing, run scoring, and WPCT.
So are we suggesting that since there was much ado about nothing--both by the Astros and by those whose thirst for inflicting punishment upon them has yet to be slaked--that there should be a collective shoulder-shrug? No, of course not. Any instance of cheating needs to be rooted out, investigated, evaluated, and punished. The third step in this process seems to have been a) sidestepped by MLB and b) exaggerated and caricatured by a bloodthirsty media (which includes the neo-sabe types who used to decry the moralizing nihilism of the steroid reactionaries). With that third step belatedly emerging, and telling us that the Trashtros were essentially chasing their tails, we are left with the lingering residue of resentment and ill-feeling that permeates 21st-century America and is far more destructive to the national fabric that a small group of jock-strapped jackasses with a hair-brained cheating scheme.
We still prefer the penalties we suggested--restrictions that impact and impede the teams' ability to compete on the field in actual games. "Fixing the past" is pointless: informing cheaters that their future will be filled not only with scorn, but with impediments that will redress their efforts to create an unfair advantage, is the only way to introduce truly effective preventive measures.
(To which we say: calm down, and wise up. And quit poisoning the minds of the lower orders: we're going to need them to rise up one day, and do the right thing. This is not the way to make that happen, kiddies...)
