The week started with Houston Astros owner Jim Crane firing general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch. The week is ending with more controversy in Houston. This time the focus is on the players and not the staff. Did the sign stealing evolve from banging on trash cans and yelling in 2017, to buzzers on the players in 2019 to signal when a certain pitch was coming?
The controversy has picked up steam on social media and sports talk radio in the past 24 hours. After looking at the most damning piece of evidence, I think there was a buzzer of some kind on Jose Altuve, when he hit the walk off home run to end the 2019 ALCS. You can look on YouTube and watch the video yourself. As he is rounding third base and heading towards home plate, you can clearly see him tell his teammates, who are at home plate, "Don't rip my jersey."
While he is saying, "Don't rip my jersey," he tugs on it. As he extends his arm, with his jersey in his grip, you can clearly see underneath the jersey, a white square attached to his skin. It looks like the lead you would have attached to you for a tens machine.
If Altuve wasn't wearing anything, then why did he go into the tunnel or locker room, while his teammates were on the field celebrating. Altuve then comes back out to do an interview with Fox Sports reporter, Ken Rosenthal, wearing the ALCS Championship t-shirt and hat, but he does not have a jersey on underneath it. I have never seen anything like that. To me, that suggests he had something to hide.
Ken Rosenthal even asked Altuve during the interview after the ALCS, why he told his teammates not to rip off his jersey. Altuve responded with, "Last time they did that, I got in trouble with my wife." While funny at the time, with everything that has come out about the Astros organization since the end of the 2019 World Series, I think everyone has a legitimate right to question if he was really hiding something.
A Google search for "Jose Altuve walk off home run" uncovers a picture that makes you think that there is more to Altuve hiding something, than making his wife mad.
In this picture you can clearly see something in mid-air as Altuve's teammates are tearing the jersey off of him. While Robinson Chirinos and Alex Bregman are celebrating with Jose Altuve, it appears that George Springer is clearly starting to freak out. Is that a button in mid-air, or is it the buzzer that was attached to Altuve?
Joel Sherman with MLB Network reached out to Altuve's agent, Scott Boras and asked about the buzzer controversy. Boras responded with, "“When this came up today, Jose Altuve immediately contacted me and this is his statement: ‘I have never worn an electronic device in my performance as a major league player.’”
The evidence is circumstantial, but there are photos and images of Altuve acting in a way that could indicate he was hiding something under his jersey during some of his most iconic postseason home runs.
But at this point, his word alone may not be enough to salvage his reputation.
Both he and the rest of the Astros have a lot of work to do moving forward to help their reputations, though.
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