Will lack of crowds benefit the Houston Astros?
Yahoo Fantasy’s Scott Pianowski and Dalton Del Don discuss if the possible lack of crowds if/when baseball restarts might benefit the Houston Astros. Subscribe to the Yahoo Fantasy Baseball Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Video Transcript
SCOTT PIANOWSKI: It feels like three years ago. But at the beginning of 2020 in the baseball world, it was the Astros, the cheating scandal. Carlos Beltran was the Manager for the Mets for like 10 minutes, and then he lost his job. Alex Cora lost his job in Boston. Obviously, a bunch of people lost their job in Houston, including the manager, and the general manager, and the players.
You know, some people didn't like their reaction. Maybe some of their initial statements were kind of tone deaf. The idea was going to be that Houston would be the bad guy in baseball this year to go on the road that would get booed by everybody. Well, going on the road may be totally different now, because there may not be any fans. I don't know.
Is the other team going to boo them, you know? Is the umpire going to boo them? I mean, I just don't get the sound of silence. Have you thought about-- I know this to be some kind of awkward to even say this. But I mean, is a strange season without fans, does that make the Houston Astros a winner in all that?
DALTON DEL DON: It does. Absolutely, it benefits them for sure. I personally wasn't letting it bother me at draft tables too much. In fact, I found the Astros slipping, and I was grabbing them.
But I didn't see this coming. Yeah, the whole big concern was the crowd, and that's gone. And frankly, some players are going to be upset, but there are bigger things in the world to worry about.
So on so many levels, I just feel like that Astros thing-- maybe I'm wrong. And then they'll get beaned like crazy. But my guess is-- my original instinct is, yeah, this situation helps the villains suddenly are forgotten.
SCOTT PIANOWSKI: I mean, let's not lose sight of the fact that the outcry filtered into the players. A lot of non-Houston players were really upset about this, and we saw a tenseness to the non-Houston reaction to this. That was actually surprising to me and maybe even a little bit refreshing to me.
I mean, I always felt like one of the frustrating things to me about the steroid era as it went on is that the innocent players didn't jump up and down sooner and say, look, the players association should represent me. I'm the guy who's not cheating, you know? I mean, we shouldn't protect the players who are using enhancements.
We should make it so that somebody can stay in the game without having to do this to keep up. I thought the player reaction outside of Houston was very interesting. And again, whether it's extra chin music or some of that stuff got policed on the field, I don't know if the tone of that has come down. Because there's just so many more important things going on in the world right now that maybe people are going to give the Astros a pass, or if maybe-- I don't know.
Maybe Trevor Power gets the Astros on the schedule, and he wants to hit three guys in the first inning. I really don't know. I'm not even sure there's a question here, but I just wonder if just the time has allowed that to diffuse a little bit.
DALTON DEL DON: No, you absolutely could be right about that, and the players reaction was different. It was palpable, and part of it, I think, was the Astros response to it, you know? It was just kind of arrogant. There was no even faith and contrite is this really. But yeah, we'll see.
Maybe I am understating that. And the players, maybe they have not forgotten. Just because I have doesn't mean the players that it directly affected have.