The Edge: Houston Astros

In the conclusion of our series finale, the Astros return for the 2020 season as the villains of baseball – without their fired G.M. Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch. Meanwhile, skepticism rages about whether justice was served. Other developments in baseball raise questions about who really loses – and who wins – in a world where everyone is seeking an edge.

After an intensive investigation, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred issued his report about the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal and punishments for some of its key figures. G.M. Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch received year-long suspensions, and were quickly fired by the Astros. But did the right people face consequences? In part 1 of our season finale, Luhnow breaks his silence about who knew what and when they knew it - and reveals that the Astros’ scheme extended beyond trash can banging.

The revelation of the Astros’ trash can-banging, sign-stealing scheme ignited a firestorm. Players emerged to say that they’d known the Astros had been up to something – like Danny Farquhar, a former White Sox reliever who’d been the first to detect suspiciously-timed sounds from Houston’s dugout. But the scandal really accelerated on the internet, where amateur sleuths like Tony Adams scoured video evidence to figure out what exactly the Astros had done. Adams’s work allowed statisticians to analyze the impact of the Astros’ scheme – and to arrive at some surprising conclusions.

The 2018 Astros were even more talented than the previous season’s champions. There was just one problem: they couldn’t count on their closer. The good news? There was a great one, named Roberto Osuna, available on the trade market – but Osuna had been suspended for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend. While many clubs wouldn’t even consider bringing him on, Jeff Luhnow’s Astros swooped in. It was the moment when many realized just how far the Astros would go to find a winning edge. And it was a seed that would metastasize into something deeply destructive: a shocking clubhouse incident that made the formerly lovable underdogs a target to be taken down.

One of baseball’s unofficial slogans? “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.” Baseball's history of sign stealing is almost as old as the sport itself. Players have always gone to great lengths to decipher the non-verbal signals that opponents use to communicate on the field: using buried buzzers, military-grade telescopes, even cameras. In 2017, a respected veteran named Carlos Beltran joined the Houston Astros. Aided by the powerful, and largely unregulated, new technologies he had at his disposal, Beltran led the Astros to their long awaited championship – even as defeated rivals, like the Dodgers’ Chase Utley, harbored suspicions about how they’d done it. 

Houston’s first great sports innovator was named Judge Roy Hofheinz. He brought the Astros to town in the 1960s with the promise of what would become known as the Eighth Wonder of the World: the Astrodome, the first ever domed stadium. But there was one thing the Judge couldn’t build: a championship team. That task fell to Hofheinz’s modern successor, Jeff Luhnow, who applied the disruptive, data-driven techniques he’d learned in the business and tech worlds… with controversial results.