JOSE ALTUVE SWUNG at the very first pitch of the game on Aug. 3, a high fastball from Los Angeles Dodgers starter Walker Buehler, and launched a 400-foot drive that arced high above Dodger Stadium before barely hooking foul. It was a wholly unremarkable moment, quickly lost amid the commotion of a short series stuffed with high drama, and yet Houston Astros general manager James Click was still thinking about it nearly two months later.
In the 90 minutes that preceded that pitch, Altuve seemed to absorb the pent-up frustrations of an entire Dodgers fan base that still feels cheated out of the 2017 World Series. The Astros' second baseman heard a steady stream of boos as he navigated through pregame batting practice, got showered with a litany of expletive-laden insults as he made small talk near the first-base dugout, felt the hostility of a swelling crowd as he stretched alone in center field. And in that moment, Click believes, Altuve "wanted to send a message."
It was one violent swing, but it seemed to embody the quiet, subtle defiance that keeps pushing these Astros.
The Astros have been subject to unrelenting provocation ever since the players' illegal sign-stealing methods were brought to light almost two years ago. Fans ripped them -- first from afar, during a fanless, coronavirus-shortened season in 2020; and now from ballparks throughout America -- and some of the most prominent members of their sport spoke out against them.
The Astros have navigated through the vitriol almost robotically, saying little of substance outside of the basic apologies they communicated at the onset. But those who have spent time in their clubhouse see this as a team on a mission to prove its success was never rooted in sign-stealing. A team -- led by Altuve, Alex Bregman, Carlos Correa, Yuli Gurriel and Lance McCullers Jr., the five core players remaining from 2017 -- that wants the respect of the league back. A team motivated by the absence of it.
Asked what he believes the Astros have shown this season, after winning their fourth American League West title in five years, Correa said: "That we're a great ballclub. That we're very talented. I know a lot of people put that into question, what happened in '17. Even though the report said we didn't do anything in '19 -- we put up great stats, great offensive numbers -- it was always going to be that question. But the way we performed this year -- there's no question about it that we're talented, that we're a great team, that we're here to compete."
Their best opportunity to prove that will come on a national stage, beginning with a first-round series with the Chicago White Sox. The Astros' lineup -- also featuring Michael Brantley, Yordan Alvarez and Kyle Tucker -- is lethal. Their pitching staff seems inferior to most of the teams making up the playoff field, but the success of young pitchers such as Luis Garcia, Jose Urquidy, Framber Valdez and Cristian Javier gives Astros manager Dusty Baker the flexibility to be creative. The Astros enter with the second-best odds to win it all (and a 14.8% chance, according to FanGraphs), and few would be surprised to see them in the World Series for the third time in five years. Even fewer would be surprised if they advanced to their fifth consecutive AL Championship Series.
Their latest run -- however long it lasts -- began with a hitters' meeting on March 31. Astros bench coach Joe Espada felt a certain edge in the room that day, roughly 24 hours before the season opener on the road against the Oakland Athletics. He saw a group that didn't want to languish through the summer like it did in 2020, one that knew it needed to ratchet up the intensity level to overcome the acrimony it would encounter.
Through jeers much louder than one would expect from a limited-capacity crowd, the Astros swept a four-game series and never once trailed, setting the tone for a 95-win season in which they boasted the sport's fourth-highest run differential.
"We are like the villain, and they embrace that," said Espada, who replaced Alex Cora as the Astros bench coach after the 2017 season. "They want to show the world they're the best team in the big leagues."
DUSTY BAKER CAME to Los Angeles in 1976, as the missing player poised to catapult the Dodgers to a division title. He homered in his first at-bat, then went 97 days before hitting his second. As the struggles prolonged, the Dodger Stadium boos directed at Baker escalated. He began to hear insults whenever he ventured out in public and eventually feared stepping out to shop for groceries. A quarter century later, while managing the Chicago Cubs in 2001, FBI agents showed up at his office to inform him of powdered anthrax spores that might have slipped into the hate mail that overflowed his cubby.
Baker referenced those instances to demonstrate how he relates to his current team. The circumstances are vastly different: Baker, who is Black, has often been the target of racism; the Astros are merely scorned for their own transgressions. But his point is simple: He knows what it's like to feel as if the entire world is against you.
"I think I was chosen by God to be in this situation," Baker said. "It had to be. I had no idea that this job was gonna come available, but I don't think they had any idea what I've been through in my career to prepare me to help prepare them for some of this."
Baker, 72, was hired to bring respectability back to a maligned franchise in late January 2020, barely two weeks after Major League Baseball levied unprecedented punishment toward the Astros, including: a season-long suspension for their head of baseball operations (Jeff Luhnow) and their manager (AJ Hinch), the loss of four draft picks within the first two rounds and a $5 million fine, the largest allowable under the collective bargaining agreement.
Baker beat out eight other candidates for the job, two years after the Washington Nationals became the fourth organization to let him go. He viewed this as his final opportunity to guide a team to the title.
Over the course of his second year -- also the final one on his contract -- Baker has often been jarred by the animosity spewed at his players. He has seen full-sized garbage cans chucked onto the Angel Stadium warning track, foul balls thrown back onto the field at Dodger Stadium and the most loathsome of insults tossed around Yankee Stadium. Before all that, Baker said he heard from several prospective free agents who wanted no part in joining the Astros and subjecting themselves to such hostility (a revelation James Click, the GM, predictably downplayed).
"It was big," Baker said of the difficulty to recruit players after the sign-stealing fallout. "The general manager gets a lot of criticism like, 'Why didn't you get this guy, that guy?' I'm here to divulge that and to defend him."
Baker won't go so far as to defend the Astros' actions, but he'll come close. He'll point out how young some of the key figures were in 2017 (Bregman began that season at 22, Correa at 23) and assert that "none of these guys were the ringleaders of that." He'll note that only five position players remain from that team (as well as Marwin Gonzalez, who rejoined the Astros as a free agent in August). He'll point to the numerous players who are booed despite having nothing to do with the sign-stealing scandal. And he'll plead for the public to either forgive or forget, with full understanding that it won't.
"I'm proud of this team for putting so many distractions on the backburner," Baker said. "It's been tough on them, it's been tough on me, when you're constantly bombarded by negatives, because these guys are still human."
Baker sees a team that hasn't necessarily embraced the villain role but has come together because of it. He thinks the Astros "have proven some things" this season but claims that seeking validation "is not their objective." He doesn't believe it should be.
"I think that can only carry you so far," Baker said. "That's just how I feel."
During his time with the Atlanta Braves in the early 1970s, when fans began to turn on him for not living up to his billing as the next Hank Aaron, Baker took a liking to a Funkadelic song called "Maggot Brain." It includes a line that still resonates with Baker, one he tried to channel five decades ago and now applies to present circumstances:
For I knew I had to rise above it all or drown in my own s---.
"That," Baker said, "is the choice we've got."
NGUYEN LE SAT in the first row beyond the left-field corner at Angel Stadium, clutching a scorebook with his left hand and resting a glove on his left knee. He arrived when the gates opened to try to catch a batting practice fly ball and was dutifully writing in the lineups a half-hour before the first pitch of a game on Sept. 23. Le, 51, was born in Vietnam toward the tail end of the war and hopped on a boat headed for the United States at the age of 8. His parents would only arrive four years later. Le eventually arrived in Houston, made a friend who taught him baseball, fell in love with the Astros and began traveling to watch their road games in 2015, the first year -- after an average of 104 losses through four prior seasons -- they lifted themselves back into contention.
A business owner in Houston and a prominent superfan who was chronicled by Wright Thompson four years ago, Le usually averages about 100 Astros games a year, traveling alone for most of the ones away from Minute Maid Park. This year, he watched 139 of their 162 regular-season games in person, and he plans to attend every one of their playoff games. The uptick in his attendance, Le explained, stems from "embracing the hate."
The anger was most notable in early June, when the Astros returned to Dodger Stadium, the site of their tainted championship. It was the only series Le was hesitant to attend. His concerns were validated immediately.
"I'd be walking, they'd lean in, 'F--- you,'" Le recalled. "Why? I'm walking to my seat and it's like, 'F--- you.'"
Le moved to the right-field bleachers, perhaps the rowdiest section, for Game 2. A swarm of people heckled him as he approached his seat in his Astros gear, turning their smartphone cameras in his direction in anticipation of a reaction. Le remained stoic, an approach he also took at Yankee Stadium. At other, less hostile venues, he sought opportunities to illuminate inconsistencies, citing a young Detroit Tigers fan who held up a "CHEATERS" sign even though his team's manager is now Hinch.
"It's been brutal," Le said. "It's been brutal, and it's been frustrating."
He has adopted a go-to retort.
"Yeah, we cheated," Le said. "Yeah, we got caught. And the way I explain it is, 'We were the best at cheating.''"
It's the type of response -- for a morally unethical act that swung outcomes and cost jobs -- that infuriates people like Brendan Donley, a 28-year-old Cubs fan residing in Michigan. Donley started the popular "Astros Shame Tour" account on Twitter last year to document the trolling of players who went undisciplined by the league. In a two-day span near the end of February, after videos of fans booing from the first few rows of spring training complexes began to populate his timeline, his account grew from 1,000 followers to 100,000.
Donley cataloged every trace he could find of fans scorning the 2020 Astros, even amid the limitations of the COVID-19 pandemic, then switched the account's handle to promote a baseball newsletter. The success of the current group doesn't necessarily impress him.
"The funny thing with this entire story is that it's always been hard to know how good they really are," Donley said. "A lot of Astros fans would say, 'Hey, these guys are great players; they didn't need to cheat.' I think most people have always agreed with that -- or at least they were thinking that might be true.
"But what everybody was angry about wasn't sort of the fraudulent talent that they were showing. I think most people realize that they're good players, they're a good team. It's just that they did a really wrongful thing. And I think a lot of Astros fans and maybe a lot of players quite don't get that. We're not mad that their numbers were inflated a little bit. It's that they made a really bad decision."
Le will argue that the Astros "weren't the only ones," a popular refrain by supporters of the team.
"MLB just served us up as a sacrificial lamb and said, 'Here you go; have at it,'" Nguyen said. "That's what happened."
In April of 2020, three months after MLB laid down the Astros' punishment, the league took away a second-round pick from the Boston Red Sox and suspended their video replay operator, J.T. Watkins, for their own sign-stealing transgressions in 2018.
The Red Sox were repeat offenders, having also been fined for using an Apple Watch in an effort to decode the New York Yankees' signs in 2017. But MLB commissioner Rob Manfred ruled that Boston's conduct was "far more limited in scope and impact" because the system was only utilized with a runner on second base and a catcher's signs were decoded "in only a small percentage of those occurrences."
There have been whispers of other teams engaging in similar activities, but those acts aren't frowned upon like using sounds to bypass a baserunner and alert hitters of pitches in real time. And there hasn't been any tangible evidence of another team venturing to that extreme.
"Not to compare them to murderers," Donley said, "but as an analogy, if a murderer says there's a bunch of other people in the world who murdered somebody, they just haven't been caught yet, well, that could be true. It might be true. But as of right now, we know that you have done it, and we're dealing with that."
IN EARLY JUNE, the Astros were at Sahlen Field in Buffalo, New York, a ballpark they'd never played in previously, to face the Toronto Blue Jays, who were taking up a temporary home base there. Capacity remained at 35%, but people began to trickle in as soon as the gates opened. One fan saw Altuve chatting with a reporter in front of the first-base dugout. The fan made his way down, got as close as he could and told Altuve he went all the way out there just to call him a cheater. Altuve looked up and stared right through him, letting the moment linger in silence.
As the Astros have navigated through life post-scandal, Altuve has worn the brunt of the criticism, even though Correa attested -- and statistical data confirmed -- that the diminutive second baseman didn't benefit from the trash can-banging scheme during his MVP season in 2017. Altuve, who declined an interview request for this story, has seemed especially wounded by the hate.
During the 2020 regular season, he batted just .219/.286/.344. In the ensuing postseason, as the Astros' offense suddenly came alive, Altuve developed the yips, his errant throws partly costing his team a chance at another World Series appearance. Altuve has bounced back this year, his slash line increasing to a more customary .278/.350/.489. Baker has noticed "more joy."
"I find myself praying for him more than anybody," Baker said. "I know that he's a believer, and it's easy to pray for somebody that believes too."
Correa grabbed Altuve for a long embrace as soon as the Astros wrapped up another division title on Sept. 30. Bregman kept his arm draped around Gurriel. Minute Maid Park, filled with nearly 32,000 people, exploded in joy. At home, the Astros are beloved by a city that is still touched by the way the 2017 team helped lift it from the tragedy of Hurricane Harvey. On the road, the Astros are admonished, a reality that will only be exacerbated during this postseason.
"It's tough to not get caught up in all of it," Bregman said, "but at the same time, we as players have to move forward."
"They get it," Joe Espada, the team's bench coach, added. "They understand sometimes we deserve the booing and stuff like that. But at the same time, we have a job to do."
Kendall Graveman, a starter-turned-reliever who has spent the last seven years in the AL West, most recently with the Seattle Mariners, joined the Astros in a trade just before the deadline and eventually became sympathetic to their plight
Shortly thereafter, Graveman began to experience what it meant to wear the Astros uniform. "I wish I had a dollar every time someone called me a cheater," he said. As the regular season was winding down, Graveman began to appreciate a clubhouse environment he considered singular.
"I wish more people knew how much everybody cared about each other," he said. "I think that what went on brought a closeness to everyone."
Graveman views the sign-stealing scandal as a widespread issue throughout the sport that "needed to be addressed" and thinks doing so "was a positive for our entire game." He believes the villain role key members of the Astros have adopted in the wake of it -- a fault of their own, of course -- is too exhausting.
"I think that's the toughest part at the end of the day," Graveman said. "Maybe not during the season, but potentially, emotionally, at the end of the season, dealing with some of that is difficult."
The animosity at road ballparks dissipated as the regular season concluded, but it will undoubtedly rise to another level for what remains of their postseason run, as the Astros assume their role as October's heels.
They all seem to take to the part in vastly different ways. Altuve has seemingly been hurt by it. Bregman prefers not to even acknowledge it. Correa, meanwhile, has leaned into it. He said the booing "motivates us to play better" and "adds gasoline to our fire." Asked about how hostile it might get in postseason road games, Correa smiled and said, "I cannot wait."
The villain role seems to suit him, whether he likes it or not.
"At some point," Correa said, "you have to embrace it."