How Social Media Uncovered the Astros Sign-Stealing

If you are a sports fan and follow news, even slightly, that involves professional sports, you have heard about how the Houston Astros used a camera in center field at their home ballpark (Minute Maid Park in downtown Houston), a video monitor in their clubhouse, and a trash can to steal and relay the signs of what kind of pitch the pitcher is going to throw the Astros hitters. It is probably the second most trending story in sports behind what LeBron James ate for breakfast this morning. And what he ate for lunch. And dinner. 

The point is, you probably have been made somewhat aware that the Houston Astros cheated, especially in the year 2017 when they defeated a 104-win Los Angeles Dodgers squad en route to Houston’s first World Series championship. Major networks such as ESPN and Fox Sports have contributed their takes on the case, but probably what gave fans and viewers the most insightful look at what went down was on YouTube, specifically the YouTube channels, Jomboy Media and CFBin30.

Jomboy Media is a YouTube channel ran by sports fan, Jimmy O’Brien, who goes by the nickname, “Jomboy,” who posts videos of him breaking down and analyzing sports plays, with most being baseball related. He has over 476k subscribers on YouTube. He posted a video on November 12, 2019, just when the story was starting to come out about the Astros using an outfield camera to steal signs, that showed an at-bat of a 2017 game between the Astros and the Chicago White Sox at Minute Maid Park. 

The video shows the entire at-bat of a player named Evan Gattis batting for the Astros and a pitcher named, Danny Farquhar, on the mound for the White Sox. The video shows when a breaking ball was called by the catcher, there would be a bang coming from the Astros dugout, which was them banging a trash can to alert the hitter that an off-speed (off-speed is any pitch that is not a fastball) pitch was coming.

Gattis takes this first pitch change-up like he knew it was coming where this pitch could have fooled someone who did not know it was coming and had them swinging and missing at it. Then when Farquhar got the sign to throw a fastball, no bang came from the Astros dugout, which lets Gattis know a heater is coming.

The at-bat continues and when Farquhar gets the sign to throw a change-up for the third time in the at-bat, and he hears banging for a third time, he steps off the mound and calls the catcher over for a chat. What happens next is the catcher puts down one finger, which usually means to throw a fastball, so no bang came from the Astros dugout, and he threw a change-up that Gattis was fooled by and struck out on. Obviously, Farquhar picked up on that the Astros knew what he was throwing, and they changed their signs mid at-bat to throw Houston off.

Farquhar said in a press conference after the game that he thought the Astros knew what he was throwing but thought he might have been tipping his pitches with his glove. It was not even a conceivable thought that the Astros may be using technology to relay signs to their hitters.

A few days after Jomboy posted the video breaking down the Farquhar-Gattis at-bat from 2017, a YouTube channel called “CFBin30” posted a 25-minute video of clips from Astros games from their home ballpark in 2017 that show that there was a bang coming from the Astros dugout, or sometimes a whistling noise from the dugout when off-speed pitches were coming. The banging and whistling can be clearly heard over the audio of the broadcast. This video currently has 1.2 million views on YouTube and the video of the Farquhar-Gattis at-bat posted by Jomboy has 4.1 million views. Both videos were published in November 2019, just a few days apart.

Before these videos were published, the news that the Astros were stealing signs was not credible yet and many fans thought they were rumors or largely exaggerated. These YouTube videos created by FANS is what made people highly suspicious of the Astros and what led to Major League Baseball launching a full-on investigation on the franchise where they made discoveries of what really has been going down in H-Town for the past few years.

In this age of social media, we all can be paparazzi and whistle-blowers. A random person can be partying at a nightclub and see an athlete or celebrity at the club acting a fool, take a video and send it to TMZ and it can ruin that athletes or celebrity career, or at least how they are viewed in the public eye. With our phones and our social media accounts, we all have the power to be TMZ. So, I guess my message would be to a high-profile person is that you better not do anything that you wouldn’t want the entire world to know, because everybody is connected through social media, and it can be anybody that catches you slipping and busts your career up. There are plenty of examples I can think of where this has happened, but I will just stick to the Astros now. 

Eventually, everybody is going to find out what you’re doing, because social media travels too fast once a story breaks, and there goes your validity and respect out the door.