HarthorneWingo wrote:GEOLINK wrote:Those f*ckers basically had Guess Pitch On (for those who play MLB The Show) the entire time they played at home.
Imagine all those home games they won that they could've lost had they not had that advantage.
How many players and manager's jobs they cost because of their cheating effecting performances.
Altuve's and Springer's hitting stats were better on the road. Altuve's were much much better on the road. Not even close.
The Astros as a team basically stopped swinging at balls and making much more contact as soon as the cheating started. It appears it was hugely beneficial, and is born out statistically.
https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/55450/the-astros-offense-took-a-huge-leap-after-they-started-stealing-signs/But despite the certainty that the Astros were stealing signs, there’s been frustratingly little confirmation that it actually helped them at the plate. Ostensibly, the scheme was limited to home games, but the Astros somehow performed better on the road. Likewise, there’s little signal that they improved more than expected from 2016 to 2017. Rather than slicing the data either of those two ways, I looked for when in 2017 the Astros first began cracking catcher codes. It turns out that the Astros offense jump-started at around the same time, suggesting that the sign-stealing scheme was extremely effective.
Houston posted the fourth-biggest improvement in swinging strike rate, and the ninth-biggest improvement in swinging at likely balls, from before the sign stealing started to after (compared to other teams in the last seven years). Independently, those refinements are unlikely. But together, they are unprecedented: No team in the last seven years, 209 other rosters, has ever had both plate discipline metrics improve so rapidly and massively over the same timeframe within the same season. (The Astros also gained the 22nd-most exit velocity and the most launch angle from this point forward in the season compared to all other teams in the Statcast era.)
New details are bound to come out, but in the meantime we can tentatively conclude that their sign stealing probably had a major impact on the team’s plate discipline numbers. This was not innocent cheating that barely affected the game; according to the available data, it may have yielded an unprecedented improvement in the Astros’ ability to make contact and lay off outside pitches, helping to turn a talented lineup into one of the best-hitting teams of all time.
