Andy Martino - Cheated: The Inside Story of the Astros Scandal and a Colorful History of Sign Stealing

Tell your fucking hitting coach Im gonna kick his fucking ass! Yankees coach Phil Nevin screamed at Astros third baseman Alex Bregman.

It was not long after the Houston Astros and the New York Yankees began Game One of the 2019 American League Championship Series at Minute Maid Park in Houston.

The trouble had started a few minutes earlier, when the Astros were batting. As Yankees pitcher Masahiro Tanaka began his windup, he noticed a whistling sound but assumed it was coming from the stands. Opposing fans often tried to distract him, and Tanaka figured thats all that was happening here.

Inside the Yankees dugout, the coaches knew better. They believed that Astros hitting coach, Alex Cintrn, was the whistler and that he was doing it to convey stolen signs. The exact tone and volume of the whistle would vary, depending on the pitch that Tanaka was about to throw.

Yankees manager Aaron Boone and a few of his coaches started yelling across at Cintrn, telling him to stop.

What the fuck are you gonna do about it? Cintrn called back from the Astros dugout, dismissing Boone with a flip of his hand.

Ill tell you what Im gonna do, yelled Boone. Im gonna raise it with Bill.

As promised, Boone left the dugout between innings to notify home plate umpire Bill Welke of his concerns. Boone explained that in spring training, top MLB officials Joe Torre, Chris Young, and Peter Woodfork had visited his office during their annual rounds to all thirty clubs and explicitly said that whistling in the dugout to communicate with the batter was illegal and the rule was going to be newly enforced.

Welke told the Astros to knock it off. Coaches and players jawed at one another from across the field.

When Nevin jogged out to his position next to third base, he looked back at the Astros bench to see Cintrn sticking his middle finger in the air and pointing it at Boone: Fuck you, skip.

Nevin now turned to Bregman and barked the epithet about Cintrn. The Yankees were sick of suspecting the Astros, sick of having to change their sign sequences constantly, and sick of trying to beat a team they viewed as deeply unethical in order to advance to the World Series.

The Yankees won the game anyway. Afterward, general manager Brian Cashman walked into the clubhouse, smiling and ready to celebrate, only to find a current of anger rippling through the players and coaches.

Those guys are fucking cheating, one of the coaches said.

Cashmans first thought? Well, Im not surprised. After all, his own front office had asked MLB to search every crevice of the ballpark that same afternoon for clues of illegal activity.

Still, neither he nor anyone else in the ballpark could have guessed that this heated momenta spat about whistling, of all thingswould end up as one of the final on-field incidents in one of the worst scandals ever to befall American professional sports.

In a matter of weeks, it would all come apart.

The scandal that destroyed careers and left fans questioning the integrity of the national pastime began three full seasons earlier, but it was rooted deeply in baseballs traditions.

Cheating and sign stealing had been part of the game for more than a century, with many colorful examples sprinkled through its history. But beginning in 2017, the Astros incorporated technology in new ways to win illicitly, and that changed everything.

That year, they used a camera mounted in center field to steal signs and relay them to hitters in real time. The 2018 and 2019 seasons brought a wave of complaints from other clubs about increasingly advanced methods of cheating and resulted in MLB investigations into the Astros during that period.

During the 2019 playoffs, the era of electronic sign stealing began to crumble. First, the Tampa Bay Rays lodged several complaints with the league before the American League Division Series, hinting at the wilder charges later leveled against Houstonsome that have never been reported, and some of which were later debunked. Then in the ALCS, the Yankees made their complaint about Houstons whistling. Five games later, the Yanks caught the Astros using flashing lights in center field. All through that series, whispers about the Astros behavior in recent yearsthe garbage-can banging, whistling, wearable technology, hidden GoPro cameras, and morespread through the Yankees clubhouse and executive suites. No one was yet sure what exactly was true and when it had happened, but suspicions ran hotter than ever.

Reporters were picking up on the gossip, too. What had long been a secret, the game-within-a-game that the world never heard about, percolated closer to the surface.

As the National League champion Washington Nationals prepared to face Houston in the World Series, they heard from contacts around the game about how to defend against the Astros. The Nats developed extra sign sequences and other preventive measures, and won the series. By now, everyone knew you had to be extra careful when playing in Houston.

That November, former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers went public, laying out the 2017 trash-can scheme in an interview with the online publication The Athletic. Innovative Twitter sleuths found video proving Fierss claims, which went viral and lent a unique modern touch to this scandal.

The revelations shocked fans and led Major League Baseball to launch a major investigation. When it was over, three of the smartest managers in the game had lost their jobs, and America found itself talking about baseball more than it had in yearsthough not for reasons the league wanted. The sign-stealing fallout crossed over from ESPN to NPR, from MLB Network to the Today show and Fox News.

Even Congress would join the conversation, when Representative Bobby Rush, Democrat of Illinois, requested hearings on sign stealing. In his letter to the chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Rush called the Astros designated hitter Carlos Beltrn the mastermind in the teams systematic cheating. Baseball had gone mainstream again.