Astros Fan Exposes Massive 2017 Match-Fixing By His Favorite Team

If you still wanna look at the facts regarding the Astros match-fixing themselves a world championship and two American League pennants, I don't know what to tell you after this latest data dump.

If you still don't want to think Rob Manfred was openly complicit in all of this, I doubly don't know what to tell you.

Making the rounds, the last couple of days, is a project:  Tony Adams, who may well be drummed out of the Astros fandom for this, created signstealingscandal.com and attempted to use audio from Astros video broadcasts on YouTube to determine how many of the opposition's pitches were tipped to Astros hitters by illegal trash-can banging.

(Note that Adams does say the Commissioner says there may have been other means as well.  This just covers the trashcan bagging.)

The results are mindboggling to anyone who does not believe the championship should be removed:

• Adams was not able to find information on all Astros home games.
• There was a definite uptick in the trash-can signaling about Memorial Day.  Before that date, though Adams could find some trash-can banging as early as the opening series, no home game he could find before the May 28th game with Baltimore had more than 6 detected incidents.
• From May 28 to September 21, Adams chronicled 34 home games in which he found one game with 6, one game with 7, and 32 in double-digits.
• 20 of those with over 30 incidents.
• Nine over 40, including three consecutive -- two with the A's and one with the Yankees, right around July 1.
• The most he could find in one game was the system tipping off 54 pitches against Toronto in an early-August matchup.
• About a third of the 175 pitches Houston got thrown to them in a 17-6 win.

CBS Sports dissected some of the material:

• Five Astros received information on over 100 pitches.
• The most received was Marwin Gonzalez, and the impact was nothing short of steroid-like:

Gonzalez from 2015-16	888	.264/.303/.418	25	4.3%	21.6%
Gonzalez in 2017	515	.303/.377/.530	23	9.5%	19.1%
Gonzalez from 2018-19	1,015	.255/.323/.411	31	8.3%	22.1%

(Plate appearances, BA/On Base/Slugging, Home Runs, Walk percentage, Strikeout Percentage)

• There is reason to believe the sign-stealing scandal could've been the end of two major-league careers -- two pitchers on that 16-7 loss never pitched in the majors again.