Errors On and Off the Field

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America,” wrote French-American historian Jacques Barzun in 1954, “had better learn baseball.” America’s national pastime, more than any other sports, reflects America’s national character.

But baseball’s history—majestic though it is—is checked with indignities. The 1919 Black Sox World Series-fixing scandal, Pete Rose’s expulsion from the game as punishment for his gambling, and, of course, the league’s decades-long involvement in performance-enhancing drugs are only the most high-profile of Major League Baseball’s collective sins. Baseball captures “the heart and mind of America,” One might wonder if the recurrent encounters with corruption or subterfuge represent a decline in the foundations of the United States.

Evan Drellich is a senior baseball writer The AthleticYou would be able to answer that question with a resounding yes “yes.”

Drellich’s latest book, The Winning Solution: How Baseball’s Most Brilliant Minds Made Sports’ Greatest MessThis article details Jeff Luhnow’s rise and fall as Houston Astros’ former general manager. He was fired after Drellich and other Houston Astros players suspended him. Athletic Ken Rosenthal, writer, broke the story on the Astros’ cheating throughout the 2017-2018 season.

Houston used a camera in center field to transmit pitch signs from opposing catchers to their clubhouse. Astros players and staffers would then inform the batter of the next pitch, banging trash cans or—as Drellich explains in one entertaining episode—a massage gun against the clubhouse door. The camera was not prohibited by MLB, but electronic sign theft was. Rob Manfred, the baseball commissioner, sent all 30 owners a letter in September 2017.

Drellich begins his book in 2003, when Luhnow left a career as a McKinsey consultant-turned-internet entrepreneur to join the St. Louis Cardinals’ front office, but he starts the Astros’ story earlier.

“In 1970, the economist Milton Friedman posited that a business’s duty was to increase profits above all, that its obligation was to the shareholder,” Drellich writes. Drellich cites Yale Law Professor Daniel Markovits. Friedman’s ideas on corporate responsibility and management consultants are likened by Drellich. “pursued this duty by expressly and relentlessly taking aim at the middle managers who had dominated mid-century firms, and whose wages weighed down the bottom line” Luhnow was forced to take the Astros team down a slippery slope. The arrow he draws is from cutting down costs in the front desk by automating the scouting and to the sign theft scheme. There are stops at antagonistic negotiations tactics, manipulation of player service times to delay agency.

But maximizing efficiency through layoffs and using MLB’s contract system to one’s advantage—however unseemly—is not the same as cheating, and Friedman is perhaps the wrong thinker to mention in an explanation of Houston’s behavior. One general manager, however, laments about Luhnow’s effect on the game.

My opinion is that the real tragedy was when analytical optimizations started to get on the field. It’s not the same thing to let it control your draft behavior or how you allocate your payroll. … But the fans have suffered and the game has suffered when this shit started creeping directly onto the field. It could have been sticky stuff, sign stealing or any combination of these three things. [strikeouts, walks, and home runs]We’re just trying to get it all together right now.

This complaint conjures German intellectual FerdinAnd Tönnies’s twin concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: community and society; the separation between personal and transactional connections. According to the GM, the draft, budget, and transactions of players are all part. GesellschaftThey are within the realms of financial calculation. But the field—the ground upon which legends tread—is sacred, and there is a higher good, at least where Gemeinschaft cares more about efficiency than optimizing efficiency. It is the time when Gemeinschaft Cultural institutions like the baseball team are in decline.

More than other sports stories, Winnable Fixes Everything Brings to mind Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling by One Timothy P. Carney’s Alienated AmericaBooks that examine the decline of America’s civic institutions, and its loss of social capital. Both books show government missteps as contributing factors to institutional rot. Putnam refers to Washington scandals, and Carney’s blindness to the issue.

Drellich views Rob Manfred (MLB’s version) of the state in a similar light. Drellich claims that the commissioner let every opportunity to stop sign theft go unnoticed. Manfred was once the point man for the league’s investigation into steroid use. He took the players’ word on when cheating stopped, but he neglected to make sure he could punish players without any union retribution.

There is no single explanation for the decline in professional baseball. Those involved in the Astros scandal must be held responsible for their actions. But the rot was everywhere Winnable Fixes Everything details credible accusations of cheating against the Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers, and—I must admit—my beloved New York Yankees, with Boston’s prompting suspensions. It is unfortunate that Drellich wrote this book before MLB adopted new rules for the 2023 season. These included a pitch clock and elimination of extreme defensive shifts. The league’s attempts at pushing itself into the future have only created more distance between diehard fans and the sport they love.

Another example of baseball mirroring America is that there is not one disease plaguing our culture and no single entity responsible for the decline in civic life. The disease, like the scandals in MLB, will only get worse if it is not treated.

The Winning Solution: How Baseball’s Most Brilliant Minds Made Sports’ Greatest Mess
Evan Drellich
Harper, 368 pp., $30

Zach Kessel, a Northwestern University student at the Medill School of Journalism where he is currently leading the campus Alexander Hamilton Society chapter.