Yankees' resentment toward Astros simmers just below surface

To get an idea of the Yankees’ true feelings regarding the Astros and the sign-stealing scandal that rocked the sport, best not to listen to or read various players’ comments from recent days.

No, for a far more accurate representation of their feelings, it’s a far better exercise to go back to the days of pre-COVID-19, when reporters were allowed in clubhouses and player comments were far less likely to have gone through the Zoom spin cycle.

(Yankees fans, as expected, let the Astros have it throughout pregame Tuesday. After getting let in the door, the fans greeted their batting practice and stretch sessions with loud, drawn-out boos).

"I just don't think it holds any value," Aaron Judge said Feb. 18, 2020 of the title won by the 2017 Astros, who beat the Yankees in seven games that October in the ALCS en route to the World Series crown. "You cheated, and you didn't earn it. That's how I feel is it wasn't earned."

Judge was one of a slew of high-profile players across the sport taking aim that spring training at the Astros, whose punishment, announced by MLB in January 2020, fell far short in many of those players’ eyes of what it should have been. Most vexing to them, that Astros players were not penalized.

"I don’t think the penalties were harsh enough player-wise," Giancarlo Stanton said. "I think that at the end of the day, it gives more incentive to do that [cheat] if you’re not going to punish the players who took part in it."

Stanton made his comments Feb. 19, 2020, marking the third straight day the topic was front and center in the Yankees clubhouse, with few, if any, players dodging a chance to fire away. Indeed, this was not a case of players, prodded by incessant questioning, reluctantly commenting on a controversial topic. It is not a stretch to say some players were at their clubhouse lockers waiting, and wanting, to be asked.

"If you cheat in 2017 and you won, why wouldn’t you do it the next year and the next year, too?" Gleyber Torres said Feb. 17, 2020.

Torres was responding to the assertion made in commissioner Rob Manfred’s report from MLB’s investigation — a report widely ridiculed by just about everyone in the sport not associated with the Astros — that the Astros ceased cheating in 2019.

"I’ll use an example," Torres continued, voice practically dripping with sarcasm. "If I play video games with you and we face the TV and I see your controller and I know what is coming and I hit really well and I win, if you tell me we play again, I’ll do the same thing because I win. It’s true. So they [the Astros] did [cheat] in ’17 for sure, they did in ’18 and they did in ’19. It’s really easy."

While plenty of players elsewhere unloaded on Manfred specifically, the Yankees’ anger almost exclusively focused on the Astros.

The Astros, of course, beat the Yankees in 2017 — one of the seasons, along with 2018, covered in Manfred’s report — and in six games in the 2019 ALCS.

"I don’t think you really stop until you get caught or something like that," Stanton said of the chances the Astros quit the scheme cold turkey in 2019. "So, my personal view would be no."

Over the weekend, the Yankees put most of that color away in discussing the Astros and their past sins.

"We all have a memory so we can all remember what happened," Brett Gardner said. "I think for us, the main thing is to play well against them and to beat them. That’s the ultimate form of trying to get back at them or whatever you want to say is to come out here and continue to play good baseball and beat them and continue to look forward."