Did Cardinals hitting coach know the Astros were cheating during his time in Houston?
St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach Jeff Albert, who joined the club after serving as the assistant hitting coach for the Houston Astros in 2018, said on Wednesday that he “(doesn’t) feel like (he) was watching or witnessing anything that was not normal.”
This comes, of course, in the wake of a cheating scandal which continues to unfold across Major League Baseball.
Albert, asked if he would have done anything differently during his time on the Astros’ Major League staff, said, “I don’t think I would’ve done anything differently in my role. The signs even, just in general, especially at that time for me were not really high on my radar personally.
“There are enough other things and enough responsibilities that I have to get guys ready for in the game and kind of understanding what’s going on, adjusting to the big leagues, that kind of thing.”
Houston General Manager Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch were suspended by MLB for one year on Jan. 13 and fired by Astros owner Jim Crane that same day. A further investigation of the Boston Red Sox, who hired former Astros bench coach Alex Cora as their manager, is pending a resolution.
The report on Houston’s sign stealing scheme, published by the office of Commissioner Rob Manfred, said that, “the Astros’ replay review room staff continued, at least for part of the 2018 season, to decode signs using the live center-field camera feed, and to transmit the signs to the dugout through in-person communication.”
Albert acknowledged Wednesday that his role with the Astros required him to be in the dugout and in the vicinity of the video room during that season, but that the presence of MLB staffers sent to prevent violations of the rules was noticeable.
“One of the things that happened a lot in 2018, there’s an MLB representative basically in the video room outside of where the dugout is,” Albert said. “I’m there a lot. Like, I’m sitting in that part of the dugout and there’s a video right behind. I do that in St. Louis too. You’re checking at bats, where was this pitch, where was that pitch.”
“Between that and having representatives there and that kind of thing, I don’t feel like there was anything that I was seeing that was out of the ordinary.”
The Cardinals have been consistent in their support of Albert, who spent five years as a minor league coach with the Cardinals before leaving for the Houston organization at the start of the 2013 season. At January’s Winter Warm-Up, general manager Michael Girsch said, “obviously his success with Houston was part of what was intriguing, but we were looking at his success in the minor leagues.”
“Most of our impression of Jeff was our past experience with him — Shildty had worked with him, Ollie had worked with him, we had guys who had been around him as a coach on a day to day basis and a front office who had seen what he did and the program he implemented on the minor league side,” Girsch said. “All the noise that’s come up now, I don’t think that changes the evaluation we had on Jeff, the process we used to evaluate him.”
Albert, too, spoke to that success in defending a track record which now comes with inevitable questions about the ways in which hitters in Houston found success.
“In my career time in Houston that goes back to 2013 in the minor leagues, I think there’s a lot of positive things that are totally separate as far as the development of the minor league system,” Albert said. “I know a lot of good, smart people put a lot of effort into that, and I think a lot of us are going to always feel good about what that is.”
When asked if he should have known that the Astros were violating the rules with their sign stealing scheme, Albert said, “probably yeah.”
“I don’t feel like I had, looking back to that time, reason to go around asking about, hey, you know?” he said. “You’re not walking around the clubhouse like this or that. I don’t feel like I was looking back skeptical of, this guy was doing whatever. The character of the group and the things that were going on were not something that would make me question what was happening.”
Albert said that he was interviewed once by the commissioner’s office, by phone, and that he subsequently spoke to Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak and manager Mike Shildt to reassure them of his innocence.
He has not spoken to Hinch or Luhnow since the release of the report.
The question of Albert’s knowledge of the scheme necessarily inspires questions around his confidence, at the time, to prevent it from happening.
Albert acknowledged Wednesday that, even if he had felt that inappropriate actions were being taken, he may not have been in a position to prevent them.
“I’ve tried to go back to that time, and I do think that would’ve been a tough position to be in,” he conceded.
Albert said that his role in the Houston organization “hasn’t really been too much of a topic” among Cardinals players who are instead focused on the coming season. He said he would “be surprised” if his name was raised in future news stories which continue to be written about the scandal, while simultaneously conceding that his place in Houston’s clubhouse could ultimately tie him to the scandal.
“You’re part of the team in 2018 and you’re in the clubhouse,” Albert said. “But if something...that part would be news to me. I don’t feel like I was participating or doing or even asked to do something that was unethical or had issues with integrity in the game.”
