MESA, Ariz. — Kris Bryant was the latest prominent Cub to swear in the face of the Astros cheating scandal that the Cubs did it the right way when they won their championship in 2016, the year before the Astros were determined to have stolen signs electronically and signaled to their hitters what pitches were coming.
“When you’re out there competing and you hear something like this, it’s disheartening, man,” Bryant, the Cubs’ union rep, said of the Astros this week. “I can honestly say that what we did in 2016 is absolutely clean.”
Baseball fined the Astros $5 million and suspended their general manager and manager — both of whom were subsequently fired. And a similar investigation into the 2018-champion Red Sox is expected to conclude as early as this month — already having cost their manger, former Astros bench coach Alex Cora, his job. Newly hired Mets manager Carlos Beltran, a reputed ringleader in the 2017 Astros scheme, also was fired.
Team president Theo Epstein and first baseman Anthony Rizzo already were among those who defended the Cubs as, in Rizzo’s words, “100 percent” clean.
Not that the Cubs raised any particular suspicions.
If they’ve been using stolen signs to decode what pitches are coming, they’re not very good at it. They’ve swung and missed at more pitches than anyone in the National League except the Padres the last three years and have the third-worst contact rate in the league during that span.
One Cub, Addison Russell, the 2016 All-Star, admitted last year he didn’t always know even his own team’s signs.
“I’ve been saying you could put a guy on at second, and he wouldn’t even know how to relay to each other [the catcher’s sign],” Bryant said. “That’s just something we’ve never concentrated on doing.
“We can all look in the mirror at night and be proud of everything that we’ve done here.”
