Are the Yankees seriously blaming the Astros for manipulating the wind?

Since the sign stealing scandal that rocked baseball in 2017 and 2018, the Houston Astros have been suspected of all sorts of dirty dealing. No matter that it was Boston Red Sox coach Alex Cora who masterminded it, the special wrath that was felt around the league did not travel with the individuals. It was reserved exclusively for the Astros as an organization.

While some residual bad feeling is to be expected, after all once you are dirty, it takes a long time to scrub clean again, it seems that the one team who really leans into it is the New York Yankees.

Yankees fans hate Houston. And I mean HATE.

Partly, it is understandable. It was the Yankees who lost in the 2017 ALCS to Houston. And if that one scandal-ridden season were the end of it, perhaps it all would have died down by now.

But no, the real sin that the Astros committed wasn’t in breaking the rules during one season. It was in continuing to be the dominant force in the American League even after the cheating was dealt with and finished.

After the ALCS Game 2, the suspicion and hinting that Houston were up to no good reached a new high, or low, point.

In the eighth inning, trailing 3-2, Aaron Judge took an 89 mph cutter to the opposite field. It popped off the bat and for a brief moment looked to be good for a homer. But it ended up being caught at the wall by Kyle Tucker. The Yankees would go on to lose the game and go two games down in the series.

In the post game interviews, there was a similar theme developed by Yankees manager Aaron Boone and pitcher Luis Severino.

Boone told reporters that “I think the roof open kind of killed us. I think it’s a 390 ball,” which seems to sound reasonable on the face of it, until you think about it. If the game were played in any other stadium, Yankee Stadium for example, there would be no closed roof and the wind would blow the same.

Then Severino went a step further, not only blaming the wind, but bringing “exit velocity” into the argument and somehow implying that Alex Bregman’s home run was invalid. In one sentence, Severino committed two types of logical fallacy, Appeal to Authority and the Appeal to Consequence.

Many of today’s fans take the pseudo-scientific reasoning of exit velocity + launch angle = home run as an authoritative statement indicating that if Judge’s hit was not a home run, then there must be something untoward, because, under this view, the numbers can’t lie.

Once set up with this logical fallacy, Severino then shined the ball a bit more by compounding it with a false consequence. If you aren’t convinced that Judge’s hit was rigged, then just look at Alex Bregman’s. He managed a booming home run on an even lower exit velocity.

Of course, both assertions are nonsense. If they “prove” anything, and they don’t, but if they did, it could only be that exit velocity is not a reliable indicator of home runs.

But the damage was done. Yankee fans took the bait and ran with it.

In reaction to analyst Devan Fink’s conclusion that similarly struck fly balls traveled an average of 414 feet during the regular season, a fan on Twitter replied “Yeah this feels like something that @MLB should be investigating.”

He was far from alone, with social media awash with disgruntled Yankee fans wondering if the Astros somehow rigged the game by leaving the roof open, despite the fact that the wind blows when both teams bat. Not to mention that the decision to leave the roof open or close it is made by the MLB, not the Astros.

Gerrit Cole tried to toe the line by saying that there were “Some dicey fly balls, wind affected a couple of them, but… it doesn’t affect line drives up the middle, you know?” As a member of the sign stealing scandal Astros squad, the Yankees pitcher can perhaps be forgiven for hedging his bets.

Aaron Judge was more judicious, saying, “I hit it to the wrong part of the park for sure.”

Perhaps the issue for many Yankee fans is that they perhaps don’t appreciate fully just how short that right field porch is in the Bronx. MLB.com’s Sarah Langs noted that Statcast indicated that Judge’s hit would have been a home run in exactly one park: Yankee Stadium.

While it is fun to blame a boogeyman in baseball, and can be entertaining to invent new ways to “catch” the Astros cheating, the real issue that the Yankees must come to grips with sooner rather than later is that the Astros are a great baseball team.

When you hitch your future to the long ball rather than base hits, you run the risk that you may have a few games where the home runs just don’t come. Houston have struck out only eight times in the first two games, while New York have whiffed 30 times. If the Yankees want to get back into the series, they need to put the lumber on the ball.