TAMPA — Nothing beats spring-training lingo, right? Best shape of my life. Working on a new pitch. Looking forward, not back.
Seemingly premeditated retaliation.
The last one comes courtesy of new Astros manager Dusty Baker, who on Saturday urged Major League Baseball to protect his players from beanballs, dangerous slides into second base and any other tactics the other 29 clubs have in mind to punish Houston for the sign-stealing scandal that has shaken this sport like nothing else in modern times.
The sage Baker as usual speaks the truth. Rob Manfred, who will meet with the media Sunday at the Braves’ new complex in North Port, should authorize his umpires to enforce a zero-tolerance policy against opponents who attempt to exact justice on the field. Even if that wish gets granted, though, no one can deny the Yankees’ top rival will experience a most unique season that will test its collective constitution.
Consider that, when I asked veteran Yankees reliever Adam Ottavino on Friday whether he thought his club could turn its Astros anger into 2020 fuel, he turned the question on its head.
“I don’t think so. You can’t play with anger the whole year,” he said. “If you’re like us, the person who was spited or whatever, I don’t think that’s how it works.
“I think on their side, yeah. They’re going to have to probably embrace a little bit of a different role this year this year as a team. That might last the whole year. It might be exhausting. But I don’t think for us.”
Asked to clarify what he meant by “a different role” for the Astros, Ottavino said, “Everybody’s gonna hate them the whole year. Really, the only thing they can really do is kind of embrace it, I think, at this point, if they want to have a successful year. That’s more of what I’m interested to see.
“I think our team is so focused on what we’re doing. We only play them a little bit. It’s not in your face.”
The widespread Astros hatred and its aftershocks show no sign of alleviation. In addition to Baker’s public plea, Saturday also produced Carlos Correa’s interview with Ken Rosenthal for MLB Network and The Athletic in which Correa contended that 1) 2017 American League MVP Jose Altuve didn’t engage in his teammates’ high-tech chicanery (a study published on SignStealingScandal.com largely confirms such a notion), and 2) awesomely, a partial reason why Altuve didn’t want to remove his shirt after he cracked a pennant-winning homer off the Yankees’ Aroldis Chapman last October — which launched the conspiracy theories that he was wearing a buzzer alerting him to Chapman’s slider — was … an ugly, unfinished tattoo on his collarbone.
Good god, this scandal is the gift that keeps on giving.
The respected PECOTA projection system, courtesy of Baseball Prospectus, calculates the Yankees to finish 99-63 and the Astros 98-64, with the Twins (93-69) the only other AL team pegged to surpass the 90-win threshold. Understanding that you can’t fully predict baseball, a reasonable chance exists that the Yankees and Astros will once again duke it out for the league’s top record, with this tension informing such a race.
“Really since I’ve been here, we’ve had a championship-caliber club. And one of those handful of teams that feel like we’re truly in that mix,” said Aaron Boone, the Yankees’ third-year manager. “It’s been important for us to kind of embrace that, maybe even this year to a different level. I think that’s fair.
“And one of my first messages to the guys is, we’ll embrace that every single day, because those expectations don’t go away, especially when you play in New York. We’re going to hear about that all the time, and you’ve got to be able to deal with it.”
A playbook exists for the Yankees to deal with this. The Astros will deal with an entirely different beast, first of its kind. Ottavino will be far from the only one interested to see how it goes.
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