Winning Fixes Everything by Evan Drellich

Author:Evan Drellich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

11

McKinsey at the Bat

COMMUNICATION WAS THIN, AND RELATIONSHIPS WERE STRAINED. TECHNOLOGY was ubiquitous, and the goal was singularly to win. It’s hard to say the Astros were the most likely team in baseball to start cheating. But there couldn’t have been a team more poorly prepared to stop cheating.

In Houston, the future had always been the thing, until now. Jeff Luhnow’s 2017 roster was talented enough to be perhaps the best in baseball, although the brain trust wasn’t convinced the group was quite that good, not yet. Over time, the vaunted farm system had produced a spate of stars: Jose Altuve and George Springer and Carlos Correa and Dallas Keuchel and Lance McCullers Jr. and now, entering his first full year, Alex Bregman. Luhnow had filled in the rest of the spots with mostly capable veterans.

On May 15, the Astros were in Miami, playing the Marlins. The Astros had gotten to their team hotel at five in the morning, and were shut down in the early innings by Marlins starting pitcher Dan Straily. Down 1–0 heading into the top of the sixth inning opposite reliever Junichi Tazawa, Josh Reddick doubled for the Astros with one out. Altuve flied out before Correa walked and Evan Gattis was hit by a pitch, loading the bases with two out.

With the count 2–1 against Astros batter Yuli Gurriel, Correa was said by a teammate to be leaning forward with his chest. The gesture was said to be his signal to Gurriel—a fastball is coming. Gurriel ripped a line-drive home run to left field, giving the Astros a 4–1 lead.

“After three seconds like chest out, he knew what was coming,” a member of the team said. “I wasn’t impressed by the grand slam. I was impressed by that.”

The Astros won the game, 7–2.

The team had already joined the ranks of teams that were decoding signs in the video room and getting the information out to runners during the game—the baserunner method.

As planned, Codebreaker, the spreadsheet that Derek Vigoa had created the year before, was a help. Some players and staff understood generally that the Astros’ advance staff was trying to decode signs. But the specific means, the use of an Excel document, Codebreaker, wasn’t common knowledge.

Alex Cora, the new bench coach, would often man the phone in the dugout. He would communicate with the advance staff, the video replay crew, including Koch-Weser, about what the sign sequence was. Sometimes the video room staff would let the dugout know by sending a text message, “which was received on the smart watch of a staff member on the bench, or in other cases on a cell phone stored nearby,” MLB found.

“He was calling the nerds inside,” a member of the team said of Cora. If a runner was on second base, the dugout would get that message out to the runner, who then could let the hitter know what was coming.

But early in the season, what was most notable about Codebreaker and the decoding efforts was their frequent ineffectiveness.

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