For only a day or so, news on the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal has remained quiet. Still, former players are all over the league who must know more about what Houston is doing. Indeed, that is the case.
Furthermore, Arash Markazi has a great read in the LA Times about two former players and their feelings on the Houston sign-stealing scandal. Those players are Delino Deshields Jr. and Ramon Laureano, and these are some of the better quotes to come out of the storyline as of yet.
I talked to two former Houston Astros who weren’t surprised by the sign-stealing story. “(MLB) really needs to do something that is going to scare the shit out of everybody. It can’t be a slap on the wrist. They have to scare the shit out of everybody.” https://t.co/LufAuubFNi
— Arash Markazi (@ArashMarkazi) November 28, 2019
Now, allow us to take a look at what Deshields Jr. says about the whole situation. These really are money quotes, and well worth the time to digest.
“I would talk about it all the time with my teammates, whether it was on a plane or in the clubhouse after a game,” DeShields Jr. said. “We’d wonder how certain things happened. One day they would look really bad, and the next they’re putting everything in play. I was in that organization and I’m close with a lot of those guys and I’d ask them, ‘What’s different about you guys? How do you go from being the worst team in baseball as far as strikeouts go to being the best team as far as not striking out?’
After that, Deshields continued. It’s interesting to know that while he didn’t know exactly what was taking place, as a colleague he realized that something was rotten in the waters.
“They would just say they stick to their approach and have a selective, aggressive mind-set. They were teaching us that when we were coming up so it made sense, but looking back maybe there was more to it than that. I always thought they were really good at picking up signs, but what gets lost is they were also really good at not letting other teams pick up their signs. We could never figure it out. They were really good at the sign stuff on both sides. The paranoia when teams played them was extreme. You knew when you went into Houston you had to really be prepared.”
Then, Laureano says that sign stealing was a constant topic of conversation while in Houston.
“We’d talk it about it before the game, after the game, during the game,” Laureano said. “It’s obvious. You hear those whistles and sounds when we’re at Minute Maid Park. It’s one of those things where we know they’re cheating but that’s OK, we have to find a way to beat them.”
Finally, Deshields commented that he doesn’t understand why Mike Fiers went on to blow the whistle on his former team. Of course this is something we initially wondered as well. There must be a reason behind it.
Without question as time passes, we are going to get more interesting reads like this one. Eventually someone will come entirely clean on the whole thing, and possibly even write a book. We are far from done on this storyline.
