Tonight, the Texas Rangers and the Houston Astros, from the same American League Division and with the same regular season record (a modest 90-72), will begin playing the American League Championship Series to decide which team will represent the league in the World Series. If you’re a baseball fan or an ethics fan, you will root for the Rangers. The Astros are ethics villains, and among the worst ethics corrupting teams in all of professional sports history. They do not deserve to be forgiven, for the multiple blights they inflicted on the game are still causing tangible damage, and despite the exposure of the team’s rotten culture in 2019 ( exhaustively discussed on Ethics Alarms) they were never sufficiently punished, and the main perps in the team’s scheme have never adequately acknowledged that they did anything wrong.

All of this is brought back in the Frontline documentary that premiered this month, and can be seen in its entirety above. As you may recall, the Astros were discovered to have cheated on the way to their 2017 World Championship by using cameras to capture opposing teams’ signals. These were relayed to the Astros dugouts and communicated to Astros batters by the low tech method of banging on a metal trash can: no bang meant a fastball was coming; one bang a curve, two bangs, a slider, depending on the pitcher. That plot led to the 2022 introduction of an annoying electronic pitch-signaling system between pitcher and catcher that frequently interrupts games as the things break down and have to be replaced.

The Frontline piece also notes that the Astros are responsible for popularizing “tanking,” having built their current winning team by deliberately stinking up the field for three straight season and being rewarded with high draft picks in the MLB draft. It is an unethical and ruthless practice that breaches a team’s duty to try to put the best possible team on the field for the enjoyment of the team’s fans, but because it “works” in the sense that it saves money while the team is tanking and makes money when those draft choices pay off in championships later, several baseball teams “tank” every season now, especially near season’s end, when they sell off their most desirable players to contenders for promising minor league prospects.

The most disturbing aspect of “Astros Edge,” however, are the interviews with the architects of the cheating scandal. Most revolting is former general manager Jeff Luhnow, the business school-trained Houston GM who created the Astros unethical culture. He sees nothing whatsoever wrong with his management, though he was suspended by MLB and fired by the team for having the scandal occur on his watch. I had forgotten (though I wrote about it at the time) that Luhnow had traded for a Toronto Blue Jays closer who was suspended for domestic abuse and considered unfit to wear a Jays uniform. But winning was (and, I suspect, is) all that mattered to Houston and profits were all that mattered to is GM, so when they realized they could get an effective relief pitcher cheaply, they jumped at the chance. Asked about the ethics of the decision, especially in the midst of the renewed attention on sexual abuse and harassment, Luhnow shrugs and says, “We needed a closer, we didn’t have one, and we got one.” So he beats up women…nobody’s perfect. Luhnow is out of baseball: a soccer team has hired him to create a “win at any cost” culture for them. You know: soccer.

A.J. Hinch, however, the Astros manager during the scandal, is back and managing again in Detroit. Asked about his complicity, he says of the cheating scheme, “I didn’t like it.” Hinch displayed his disapproval by once destroying a TV monitor with a bat. He never came right out and told his cheating players to stop, however, or directed his bench coach, current Red Sox manager Alex Cora, to cease and desist orchestrating the sign stealing. Does Hinch really think a leader who sees dishonest activity by his subordinates is acting responsibly by symbolically expressing disapproval but taking no further action? Why did anyone hire this guy after he was dumped by Houston?

The Frontline piece also introduces us to the low level Houston clubhouse employee who was responsible for setting up the monitors that relayed the stolen signs to the Houston dugout. He admits that he knew the team was cheating and that he was helping, but didn’t think it was his responsibility to blow any whistles—after all, it was a great job. He also reveals that after the Astros won the World Series, the players voted him a full share of the post-season winnings, as much as any player: about $450,000. Gee, what generous guys! This is like leaving a $5000 tip at a diner. It was a pay-off.

Then we hear from Carlos Beltran, the fading veteran star and team leader in the 2018 Astros season who came up with the idea of using the cameras and TV monitors to steal signs. His complicity lost him his job as the new Mets manager when it was revealed. Beltran thinks the criticism of his actions are unfair. Nobody told him not to cheat, he says.He just suggested the conspiracy: it wasn’t his fault that nobody said “No.”

This was the team leader that Luhnow signed to show the young Astros players the “right way to play the game.”

Particularly revolting is the Astros owner, billionaire logistic entrepreneur Jim Crane. He was given no punishment by baseball’s Commissioner Rob Manfred, and haughtily declared that his manager and GM were bad seeds as he dismissed them. Yet it is obvious that Crane played the oldest corrupt business management game in the world: first, set a difficult goal for managers and tell them they have complete discretion and no restrictions; second, happily accept amazingly positive results without asking questions about methods; third, when it is revealed that subordinates broke laws and rule to achieve such success, exclaim, “I had no idea! I certainly would never have approved that!”

Crane is still the owner: the rotten fish that is the Houston Astros has the same head it did in 2017.

Boo them with gusto.