In the 2008 Batman film “The Dark Knight”, Aaron Eckhart’s character Harvey Dent, sitting across the table from Bruce Wayne in an upscale restaurant — all the while unaware that Batman himself is in his midst — speaks of attempting to use his position of power to save Gotham so that a day may come in which the city no longer needs Batman. During the exchange, Dent proclaims, “You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain.”

The cruel irony, of course, was that Dent’s own psyche became fractured by the end of the film, leaving him to become the iconic villain Two-Face.

Much like in the movie, although there may be a final event that pushes one to become a villain, it’s almost never any one event that leads to the rise of a villain. In this, you can frame the way in which the Houston Astros have become the villain of the baseball world.

The Beginning

In May of 2011, it was announced that longtime Astros owner Drayton McClane had arrived at an agreement for Jim Crane to purchase the franchise from him for $680 million. At the time the deal was announced, the Astros — then in the National League — held a 15-26 record by day’s end and were among the worst teams in baseball. While the deal was expected to close within four to six weeks, the deal wasn’t approved by Major League Baseball until the end of the 2011 season and for a price of $615 million. Among the concerns that caused the approval process to drag out were a requirement to move to the Houston Astros to the American League as well as previous attempts by Crane to purchase an MLB franchise.

In 2008, Crane and McClane were close enough to an agreement for the sale of the Houston Astros that a public announcement was expected to be on the horizon. Crane backed out at the last minute. Two years later as the Texas Rangers were for sale and Tom Hicks reached an agreement for the Chuck Greenberg/Nolan Ryan group, Hicks continued negotiating under the table with Crane in an attempt to obtain a higher sale price. This drew the ire of then-commissioner of Major League Baseball Bud Selig.

Alas, the agreement for the Houston Astros was finally completed in November of 2011, with the understanding that the team would move to the American League West beginning with the 2013 season.

During the time between the agreement being announced in May of 2011 and the approval by MLB in November of 2011, Drayton McClane consistently expressed confidence that the deal would eventually be consummated. Additionally, the team began the process of what appeared to be the stripping of high-priced players and those that could fetch the most assets in a trade.

The matter of which party was principally responsible for making the moves is up for debate depending on what you believe, but there’s a case to be made that during the dead period between the agreement and its final approval, Jim Crane was already providing the direction of the organization.

On July 29, 2011, the Astros sent Hunter Pence to the Phillies for Jarred Cosart, Jon Singleton, Josh Zeid, and a player to be named later that ended up being Domingo Santana.

On July 31, 2011, Michael Bourn was sent to Atlanta for Juan Abreu, Paul Clemens, Brett Oberholtzer, and Jordan Schafer.

Additionally, in the June 2011 draft, the Astros selected outfielder George Springer with the 11th overall pick.

With a new television contract in hand, it appears to have been the first case of a Major League Baseball team intentionally tanking to push success to future years with no appearance of being financially strapped for cash. The Florida/Miami Marlins have often been an organization that ships away players before having to pay them significant money — even going as far as getting rid of high-priced players after using their contracts as leverage to convince season-ticket holders that the team would be competitive — but the Astros strategy was something new.

The Dead Years

The 2011 Houston Astros finished the season posting 106 losses, followed by 107 losses in the 2012 campaign. 2013 saw the Astros drop even further as they posted 111 losses.

Despite the on-field failures — mostly intentional as the organization positioned itself to compete within a few years and SI even going as far as proclaiming at the time that the Astros would win the World Series in 2017 — the 2013 Houston Astros were the most profitable MLB franchise in history. Their highest-paid player, Eric Bedard, was making $1.15 million, pennies compared most contracts seen throughout baseball, and allowing the franchise to eventually cut the active payroll to under $13 million during the 2013 season.

Even factoring in reported losses of $23 million from the organization’s ownership stake in CSN Houston, the Astros were estimated to have earned an operating income of $71 million, which at the time was the highest of any baseball team in history.

Whether this method of team-building is frowned upon or not is a matter of opinion, but as a general rule, intentionally fielding a bad product is bad for fans, and at the very least operates within a gray area in Major League Baseball rule 21(a) that requires organizations to give their best effort to be competitive. The Astros used this strategy to acquire three number-one overall picks in the MLB draft between 2012-2014 that ended up netting the team Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman.

The Jon Singleton Contract

In June of 2013, word leaked out that the Houston Astros had agreed to a contract with Jon Singleton — one of the players previously acquired in exchange for Hunter Pence — that would guarantee him $10 million before he had even played in a Major League game, and could potentially net him $30 million over eight years.

The deal was unprecedented at the time, and was highly-criticized as Singleton, who had yet to play in a Major League game, was outside the purview of the MLB Players Association. A concern expressed by many at the time was that in so doing, the Astros were undermining the entire system of salary arbitration that leads into free agency, thus forcing veterans to take less money, lest they be replaced by cheaper, younger alternatives.

For Singleton, the deal provided him financial security in a sport with many uncertainties, although had his career panned out, he would have stood to make much more by playing things out and hitting free agency earlier. As it turned out, Singleton came out better for it, as after two stints with the big club in 2014 and 2015, he’s been a free agent since 2017.

Nonetheless, the shrewd way in which the Houston Astros circumvented the MLB Players Association in order to maintain financial control over a young player caused more than a few eyebrows to be raised around the baseball world.

Drafting Alex Bregman

Alex Bregman wasn’t actually drafted until the 2015 MLB draft, at which time he was selected with the 2nd-overall pick by the Houston Astros. Despite having posted an improved record of 70-92 in 2014, the Astros were able to not only have the 5th-overall selection in the 2015 MLB draft, but also the 2nd-overall selection as compensation for not being able to sign top-overall pick from 2014 Brady Aiken. The matter of whether or not the Astros were “unable” or “unwilling” to sign Aiken based on good faith is curious, at best, and it’s more likely than not that the Astros screwed over not one, but two players in an effort to draft a better player a year later.

To tell the story of Brady Aiken, you also have to tell the story of Jacob Nix. Nix was the Astros fifth-round selection in the same draft that saw Aiken go #1 overall. Nix had slipped to the fifth round due to concerns about his signability. Namely, that he would command a larger financial commitment than most teams would be willing to outlay at the current time, especially as Nix had a scholarship offer in hand to pitch at UCLA.

Enter the Houston Astros. The Astros saw first-round talent in Nix, and despite Nix being drafted in a slot that had a salary value assigned by the collective bargaining agreement of $370,500, the organization had a plan. Rules allow for a team to pay a player above their drafted slot value, provided they offset the difference by paying another player under their drafted slot value. As such, the Astros convinced Brady Aiken to take $6.5 million rather than his slotted value of $7.9 million.

When Nix arrived in Houston for the announcement, he was met with confusion and eventually told the deal was off. The Astros had expressed concerns with Aiken’s elbow, indicating that his pitching elbow exhibited a “significant abnormality”.

Despite this being a qualifier that could be said about virtually any MRI on a pitching elbow, the Astros suddenly elected to use this as a reason to reduce their offer to Aiken to $3.1 million, the lowest offer that would allow the Astros to receive the 2nd-overall pick in the following year’s draft should Aiken fail to sign. As expected, Aiken declined the insulting offer, with the Astros seeing a strong draft class ahead in 2015, and leaving Jacob Nix without his big payday and no way to enroll at UCLA as he’d already lost his eligibility in the process. But in the end, the Houston Astros got their man in Alex Bregman.

The Aftermath of Hurricane Harvey

In August of 2017, Hurricane Harvey unleashed its fury on Houston and the southern Texas coast, leaving behind some of the worst flood damage in American history. This coincided with a scheduled series between the Astros and the Rangers that was to begin on August 29 in Houston. Due to the flooding and widespread damage, it was apparent that the series would not be able to take place at Minute Maid Park.

While the Astros wanted to switch that series with the Rangers for one that was scheduled September 25-27, that scenario would have left the Rangers notifying ticket holders of the change on short notice. Their response was to offer to make the Astros the “home team” for the first series, even offering up all revenues.

Enter then-president of the Astros Reid Ryan: “You’ve got a major storm that’s disrupted everything. We went to the Rangers and said hey let’s switch series. You guys have our home series. We’ll take your home series. They rejected that and didn’t want to do that. The Rangers wanted us to play the next 3 days at their place, but they did not want to trade series with us. They wanted all 6 of our games at their park. The fact that the Rangers refused to go home and home with us, we had to look at all of the options that were out there. We had to look at our players’ best interest and we had to look at the integrity of the schedule.”

Of course, Ryan’s statement spoke nothing of the fact that the Rangers had offered up all revenues for the series. It absolutely ignored that whether the Astros played a series in Arlington, Iceland, or Africa, the location wasn’t going to take away the pain that had been inflicted on the city of Houston by Hurricane Harvey.

Perhaps the most glaring flaw in Ryan’s reasoning is that, under his own proposal, the only party that stood to gain was Astros ownership, whereas the Rangers, under their own proposal, would have still been helping out their in-state neighbors while also not giving into the pocketbooks of Jim Crane. Instead, Reid Ryan played on the grief of millions to try to make the Texas Rangers look like the “bad guy”, completely ignoring that he had an option in front of him that didn’t involve flying Astros players away from their families all the way to Tampa just to “stick it to the Rangers”.

The Roberto Osuna Trade

To frame the context of the Roberto Osuna trade and the ensuing backlash, it’s important to look back to August 17, 2016. On that date, the Astros released prospect Danry Vasquez after he was suspended by the league for striking his girlfriend at the stadium of the Double-A affiliate for the Astros, the Corpus Christi Hooks.

The Astros, at the time, made clear that they held a zero-tolerance policy in regards to domestic violence allegations. When video of the incident surfaced in March of 2018, several Astros players were very vocal in being against domestic violence and that its offenders have no place inside baseball.

In July of 2018 when the Astros acquired Roberto Osuna from the Toronto Blue Jays, the message from the Astros was loud and clear: Zero-tolerance, unless you’re really good at baseball.

Osuna was in the midst of serving up a 75-game suspension for domestic violence, the third-longest suspension for such an offense. And while the league had enough evidence to levy the suspension, the incident happened in Canada, where the details were never made public due to his accuser refusing to testify against him. The end result was that Osuna, despite likely having enough evidence for a conviction, faced a suspension from baseball, no legal ramifications other than having no contact with the victim for a year, and he suddenly found himself on one of the best teams in the American League.

For the Houston Astros, it was poor optics. While zero-tolerance quite obviously didn’t mean zero-tolerance, the organization attempted to quell public disquiet by quickly pledging money to various domestic violence organizations. For the Astros, they felt that once the initial wave of backlash passed, everyone needed to move along and “forget” that the man they now had closing games for them was credibly accused of something so serious.

They never understood that “forgive and forget” doesn’t necessarily mean that the public feels a person deserves another chance at making big money throwing a baseball.

Assistant GM Brandon Taubman’s Tirade

All of this, of course, leads into a tirade after the Astros won the ALCS in which assistant GM Brandon Taubman turned to a group of female reporters and proclaimed numerous times, “Thank God we got Osuna! I’m so fucking glad we got Osuna!”

As it turned out, his tirade was directed at a female reporter who had, in the past, made a point to tweet out domestic violence information when the Astros would bring Osuna into a game, something Taubman had complained about in the past.

SI’s Stephanie Apstein was the first to report on Taubman’s clubhouse tirade, a report that the Houston Astros initially accused her of “fabricating” — nothing short of an attempt to end Apstein’s journalistic career — while later backing off of that accusation without ever fully apologizing for it.

Although Taubman was eventually fired over the incident, it was the front office culture within the organization that allowed such an incident to occur in the first place. That it took the Astros so long to publicly apologize at every turn was proof of that.

Keeping in mind that this wasn’t the only incident the Astros had with reporters during the 2019 season — as Justin Verlander and the PR staff for the Astros denied a BBWAA reporter access to the clubhouse after a game in August — and it’s fairly obvious that the mantra for the Astros has been that they’ll do what they want, damned the consequences.

Stealing Signs

And of course, this all leads up to today’s revelation that, yes, the Houston Astros were likely using a sophisticated technological system with which to steal opponents signs at Minute Maid Park. While I know nothing drastic like vacating a World Series title will ever happen, it seems as if a fine and loss of draft picks could be in order. And should the organization attempt to save itself from mounting criticism, throwing A.J. Hinch under the bus to absolve themselves of any culpability absolutely remains a possibility.

There will be a significant majority — especially among the Astros fan base — who will claim that “everyone steals signs, so what?” It’s a fair question, and yet I can’t help but think that coming up with such a sophisticated and accurate system that goes beyond simply figuring out a pitcher or looking in as the runner from 2nd crosses a very serious line. In football, defenses are constantly trying to figure out a quarterbacks signals. Yet, if the public found out that one team had hacked the audio feed for the opposing sideline, would there not be accusations of cheating?

When you consider that only a year ago, there were already rumblings that this sort of scheme was and had been going on in Houston for years, it’s hard to believe the situation was isolated only to the 2017 championship team. Maybe it really was. I just don’t buy that. After all, where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

In this case, it’s a fire the Astros set themselves, but for as long as the consequences don’t affect their ability to continue running the organization as-is, it’s likely they’ll just find new ways to accomplish their goals. Move over, Evil Empire. The Houston Astros have taken your mantle as the villains of baseball.