Evidence of the Houston Astros’ cheating has now been collated into short, easy-to-sort audio files for your listening pleasure.
An intrepid baseball fan has done the dirty work of sifting through hundreds of hours of game footage to highlight thousands of examples of the Astros apparently cheating throughout 2017, the year they won the World Series.
Tony Adams, a graphic designer and web designer, said he’s an Astros fan who took on the tedious project “to understand the scope of the Astros cheating.”
The result is a no-frills database with a simple list of each of the team’s home games in 2017. Click into a game which has been denoted as having at least one “bang” heard in the background — when Astros players would supposedly bang on a dugout garbage can to signal the upcoming pitch to their teammate in the batter’s box -- and you’ll find the corresponding 10-second audio clip next to the at-bat and pitch in question.
The clips can also be filtered by specific players, and features bar graphs showing how frequently the banging can be detected game-by-game. The clips also link out to the respective YouTube pages for each game, with the time set to the at-bat or pitch in question on the progress bar.
The banging of the trash can is deep in pitch, and sounds a bit distant – something like the approach of a t-rex in Jurassic Park. Check out the final pitch of Jake Marisnick’s fourth-inning at-bat on August 4 for a good example.
Speaking to The Athletic, Adams says he spent as much as 50 hours on the project, which appropriately lives at the URL signstealingscandal.com. He started before the holidays, before MLB had even issued its scathing report on the rampant cheating within the Astros organization.
Adams, 54, told The Athletic he was displaced from his Houston home in 2015 by Hurricane Harvey. The lifelong Astros fan explains he was captivated by the 2017 World Series run but later disappointed by the cheating revelations. His findings jibe with some of the specifics detailed in MLB’s investigation, but he maintains he's “definitely” still an Astros fan.
The scandal cost Houston GM Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch their jobs. Red Sox manager Alex Cora and Mets manager Carlos Beltran, who were members of the 2017 Houston squad, were also fired.