The Houston Astros’ 2017 Cheating Scandal: What Happened

Update: The original version of this article was published in January 2020 and has been updated periodically.

The Houston Astros have reached the World Series for the third time since one of baseball’s biggest cheating scandals in years tarnished the team’s championship in 2017.

Here’s what to know about the sign-stealing scheme, which reverberated across the sports pages and through stadiums across the country.

What penalties were handed down?

The Astros fired Manager A.J. Hinch and General Manager Jeff Luhnow in January 2020 after Major League Baseball fined the club $5 million and docked several top draft picks over the scheme.

Both had been suspended for one year by Robert D. Manfred, the baseball commissioner, who has been intensely criticized for not punishing any of the players and not vacating the Astros’ World Series title from 2017. (Hinch’s exile from baseball did not last long. He was named manager of the Detroit Tigers on Oct. 30, 2020, less than 72 hours after his suspension expired.)

Then, the Boston Red Sox parted ways with Manager Alex Cora — only to rehire him less than a year later — after the M.L.B. report implicated him in the scheme from his time as the Astros’ bench coach in 2017.

The next domino to fall was the newly hired manager of the New York Mets, Carlos Beltran, who resigned before he ever managed a game for the team. He was an outfielder for the Astros during the 2017 season.

Is it just the fans who care?

No. Players around the league wondered whether they had been robbed of baseball immortality because of Houston’s cheating ways.

Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees slugger known for giving diplomatic answers, didn’t mince words at the start of spring training in 2020.

He finished second to Jose Altuve of the Astros for the American League Most Valuable Player Award in 2017, the year that Houston defeated the Yankees in seven games in the American League Championship Series.

“I was pretty mad, pretty upset,” Judge said. “To hear that you got cheated out of that opportunity, that’s tough to kind of let go.”

Judge added, “I was sick to my stomach.”

Cody Bellinger of the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team that lost to Houston in the World Series in 2017, amplified the criticism of the Astros in February 2020.

“I think what people don’t realize is Altuve stole an M.V.P. from Judge in ’17,” Bellinger said. “Everyone knows they stole the ring from us.”

Did the Astros have to forfeit their World Series trophy?

No. Manfred has said he thought about stripping the Astros of their 2017 title, which culminated with their victory in the World Series over the Dodgers in seven games.

But during a news conference at spring training in 2020, Manfred said he was concerned about the extraordinary precedent of vacating the title of the Astros, who have now won the American League pennant in three of the past five seasons.

“Once you go down that road of changing what happens on the field, I just don’t know how you decide where you stop,” Manfred said.

Manfred didn’t do himself any favors when he referred to the Commissioner’s Trophy, which is made by Tiffany & Company and given to the World Series winner, as a “piece of metal” in an interview with ESPN in February 2020.

The commissioner later apologized for his remarks, but was criticized by baseball players — and even LeBron James.

What’s the significance of buzzers?

It was the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 6 of the American League Championship Series in 2019, with the score tied at 4 between the New York Yankees and the Astros. Altuve was ahead in the count, two balls and one strike against the Yankees’ hard-throwing closer Aroldis Chapman, when Altuve turned on an 84-mile-per-hour slider for a home run over the left center field wall, sending the Astros to the World Series.

As Altuve rounded third base and his teammates were about to mob him at home plate, he motioned for them not to tear off his jersey.

The video of the curious reaction is baseball’s version of the Zapruder film.

Fans of opposing teams — and even some rival players — have questioned whether Altuve was wearing a buzzer underneath his jersey that alerted him of Chapman’s pitch selection. A batter would have been more likely to get a fastball in that count.

Manfred has said that Major League Baseball found no evidence that could corroborate that the Astros players used buzzers as part of their sign-stealing ruse. At the same time, the commissioner also said that he couldn’t be 100 percent certain that they didn’t.

For their part, the Astros players, including Altuve, have insisted that they did not use buzzers. Chapman characterized Altuve’s actions as “suspicious.”

What is sign stealing?

For more than a century, baseball players have been trying to decode the unspoken cues exchanged by pitchers and catchers over what pitch to throw next and the location: a practice known as sign stealing. The biggest advantage a pitcher has over a batter is the element of surprise.

For a fastball, a catcher will usually put down one finger as his sign. Two fingers is the signal for an off-speed pitch like a curveball. Catchers will relay multiple sets of signs if there is a runner on second base or if they think someone is trying to steal the signs. Pitchers will sometimes shake off catchers if they disagree on the pitch selection.

There was even a scene in the movie “Bull Durham” in which Nuke LaLoosh, played by Tim Robbins, shook off his catcher, Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), who then tipped off the batter that he would get a fastball. The batter hit a home run.

Some of the earliest accounts of sign-stealing go back to the 1870s, when the Hartford Dark Blues, a charter member of the National League whose fans included Mark Twain, were accused of using a shed and a telegraph pole outside the ballpark to steal opponents’ signs, according to the book “The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime” by Paul Dickson.

Numerous teams have been implicated in sign-stealing plots over the decades, including the Philadelphia Phillies in 1898, the Cleveland Indians in 1948 and the New York Giants in 1951, James E. Elfers wrote for the Society for American Baseball Research.

In 2017, the Yankees filed a complaint that the Red Sox had used electronic equipment to steal signs. The league found the Red Sox in violation, but also investigated the Yankees and fined the team $100,000 after concluding that the Yankees had illegally used electronic devices to relay signs to a batter when there was a runner on second base.

How did the Astros steal opponents’ signs?

Since the 2014 season, Major League Baseball has given managers one chance per game to challenge a call on the field — but not balls or strikes — using a video replay system. Each team has a video replay review room, including the Astros, who M.L.B. investigators said used the center-field camera feed to steal opponents’ signs.

At the start of the 2017 season, one of the Astros players would act as a “runner” and would relay the signs to teammates in the dugout and eventually to the batter, according to the investigation.

Early in that championship season, the bench coach, Cora, would call the video review room to get the signs. On some occasions, the signs were relayed via text messages to either a smartphone in the dugout or a smartwatch of a staff member, the report said.

Cora eventually arranged for a television monitor to be installed outside the Astros’ dugout with the center-field camera feed on it for the players to watch, M.L.B. investigators said. The players then banged on a trash can with a bat or a massage device known as a Theragun once or twice to signal to the batter to be ready for a curveball or another off-speed pitch. If it was a fastball, they would not bang on the trash can.

Did any of the players face disciplinary action?

No. Although the baseball investigation said the sign-stealing scheme was driven by the players, the report ruled out discipline against individual players as “difficult and impractical.” The commissioner, Manfred, said he wasn’t in a position to evaluate whether the scheme helped Astros hitters or helped the team win games.

In 2017, Houston won 101 regular-season games before its championship run in the playoffs, during which baseball investigators said the team’s sign-stealing scheme continued. In November 2019, Mike Fiers, a former Astros player, provided details about the team’s sign-stealing culture to Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich of The Athletic, a sports journalism website that was acquired by The New York Times in 2022.

Before the 2018 season, Joe Torre, then the league’s chief baseball officer and now a special assistant to the baseball commissioner, issued a warning to all teams that they could not use the video replay system or electronic devices to steal signs.

The directive stemmed from another episode, involving the Red Sox in 2017, when the team used videos to relay stolen sign information to an athletic trainer in the dugout who was wearing a smartwatch. M.L.B. fined the Red Sox an undisclosed amount, with Manfred warning that future violations by teams would lead to penalties against managers and general managers.