TAMPA, Fla. _ Like his owner last week and many of his players this week, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman expressed a desire to "move on" from the Astros' illegal sign-stealing scandal and focus on the 2020 season.
But Cashman, like Hal Steinbrenner and the players who have addressed it, didn't equivocate on the ramifications of what the Astros did and the impact it might have had on the 2017 ALCS, which the Yankees lost to the Astros in seven games.
"I definitely think it had an effect on things, without question," Cashman said Friday afternoon. "Certainly, the Houston Astros were dealing with a distinct advantage more so than their opponents. That's a fact. I don't think anyone can disagree with that, even though they may try."
The last comment obviously was a reference to the Astros' much-criticized news conference Thursday, particularly the assertion by owner Jim Crane that sign-stealing "didn't impact the game," a comment almost universally panned across the sport.
"It's best for us now to start focusing on moving forward," Cashman said. "What has happened in the past, obviously we're upset, our ownership is upset, our front office is upset, our players that were with us in '17 especially were upset, and understandably so. There's nothing we can do about that at this stage."
While MLB's investigation concluded that the Astros' illegal actions took place mostly in 2017 and partly in 2018, almost no one outside of Houston believes the organization quit cold turkey.
Cashman declined to say outright that he believes the Astros didn't engage in any of those schemes during last year's ALCS, won by Houston in six games. The Yankees, in fact, filed a complaint with Major League Baseball after Game 1 of the series because of suspicions that something was amiss, something they had done regarding the Astros previously.
"That was a very public story and we had our conversations (with MLB after Game 1), but I'll just keep it private," Cashman said. "I'll acknowledge that we had many conversations with Major League Baseball over the last number of years about suspicions. But having suspicions and being able to prove them are two different things."
As for Carlos Beltran being portrayed in one report as the ringleader of the illegal sign-stealing who forced other players to go along with it _ a report emphatically shot down by several Astros players Thursday _ Cashman took issue with that characterization.
"I'm not saying he didn't do anything wrong," Cashman said of Beltran, who played with the Yankees in 2015 and '16 and was a special adviser to Cashman last season. "Clearly, obviously, the commissioner's report speaks for itself. But in terms of somebody that was forcing people to do this, that and the other thing, I have a hard time buying that because that's not the person that I knew as a player and it wasn't the person that I knew as our special adviser."
Cashman all but praised Mike Fiers, whose public comments to The Athletic in November forced MLB to investigate, and also seemed to push back on the chorus, mostly emanating from Houston, that "everyone's doing it."
"If it wasn't for Mike Fiers, no one maybe ever would have known, but I do believe over the course of time ... this is a warning to anybody that's doing anything in any arena that's wrong, that the truth usually always comes out," Cashman said. "And if people are doing stuff that's wrong or against the rules or whatever, there are no secrets, it usually comes out eventually. That story does get told. And that's a warning sign for people when they make those choices going into it. There's big prices to be paid for it."
