ESPN MLB insider Author of “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports”
HOUSTON — HERE, JOSE ALTUVE is safe. From the boos and hisses, the anger and loathing, the emotion his mere existence conjures. This man, baseball’s smallest player and yet one of its biggest stars, lives a binary existence. He is a villain in 29 stadiums. And then he comes home.
Here, in this proud and protective city, Altuve is not a hero. He is the hero, the face of the Houston Astros, the reigning World Series winners intent on becoming the first back-to-back champions in Major League Baseball this century. When Altuve steps to the plate in the bottom of the first inning tonight in the sixth game of the American League Championship Series against the Texas Rangers, the sold-out crowd at Minute Maid Park will rise and fete him — and with good reason. The Astros are one win shy of the World Series because of Altuve’s latest opus, a go-ahead three-run home run in the ninth inning of Game 5 that should burnish his legacy.
Altuve’s, though, is a legacy already written. In Houston, he can’t be touched; outside of it — fair or not — he is defined by the Astros’ actions in 2017, when they implemented a sign-stealing scheme en route to the franchise’s first World Series title. It matters not that several of his 2017 teammates say Altuve declined to use the system in which Astros employees banged on a trash can to inform hitters when an off-speed pitch was coming, nor that an analysis of regular-season games that year validated such claims.
How MLB handled the franchise’s scandal — the league validated the championship and opted not to punish the players despite commissioner Rob Manfred’s report twice referring to the scheme as “player-driven” — did Altuve no favors. He receives justice by voice box. The criticism never abates, except along the I-10 corridor from San Antonio into Louisiana and especially in Houston, where orange clothing connotes membership in a group that treats Altuve with a particular sort of veneration. Outside of it, the general public believes what it wants to believe.
Nearly four years after the breadth of the Astros’ cheating was exposed, the stain on Altuve is indelible. He lives with it — with the public perception about his involvement with the trash can bangs, with the charges that his knowledge of the system amounted to complicity no matter his level of involvement.
“I just don’t really have a lot to say about it,” Altuve told ESPN earlier this month. “I play for these guys, for my team. We have a big opportunity to win again. I want to put all my energy toward winning for my team versus getting distracted by paying attention to other things.”
Altuve’s ability to channel negative to positive reveals itself every October, when he is the undisputed king of active players. Following an atypical 2022 postseason in which he didn’t drive in a run, Altuve has whacked three home runs in these playoffs, all helping lead to wins. Among his current peers, he is the leader in almost every counting statistic: games played (101), plate appearances (466), total bases (211), hits (113), runs (86), singles (67), doubles (20) and home runs (26, three shy of Manny Ramirez’s all-time mark). The Astros’ current streak of LCS appearances stands at seven, one fewer than Atlanta’s major league record set in the 1990s. Another championship would further cement the Astros’ place as a dynasty.
Altuve is no small part in that. Since 2017, the Astros are 19-5 when Altuve goes deep in a playoff game. This is not mere correlation; he is the cause, and yet Altuve’s present accomplishments only further the vitriol toward him. The better he is today, the more it serves to remind of the past.
And so home games are Altuve’s respite, the salve on wounds that have not healed and might never. For 13 years Altuve has been a part of these fans’ lives. When October rolls around, the city coalesces around another march toward a championship, and everything is right again.
“Never gets old,” Altuve said. “As a team, a player, I enjoy every playoff game more. It’s about winning. Nothing else.”
IN THE WEEKS after the revelation of the sign-stealing scheme, Tony Adams sequestered himself in a room and went to work. A web developer and designer, Adams, born and raised about a half-hour outside Houston, culled footage of 58 Astros home games in 2017 and ran the audio through an app he created. Of the 8,274 pitches he listened to, he logged 1,143 pre-pitch noises. Some players were tipped on more than half the off-speed pitches they saw. Most of the Astros’ regulars were around 30%. Altuve was at 4.2%.
To Adams, now 57, the data did not definitively suggest that Altuve was innocent. Manfred’s report alluded to other methods of sign-stealing used by the team. But it was enough to convince Adams that on the continuum of Astros players cheating, Altuve was far from the most egregious offender.
That belief underpins the defense of Altuve by Astros fans like Adams. He understands the aspersions cast on the 2017 team. Like many others, though, he also sees the contempt toward Altuve as disproportionate to what the publicly available data suggests. Altuve’s refusal to separate himself from those with whom he wore a uniform — “I always say this is a team,” Altuve said in 2020, “and if we are something, we all are something” — only ingratiates him to his fans more.
“He’s the face of the franchise, and he’s so good, and he’s not going to defend himself,” Adams said. “That’s the way he is. I think he’s the ultimate teammate. I can’t imagine anybody not wanting him on the team. He’s taken all of this for the team. Never broke. Never got mad. Never wavered. It’s admirable.”
In another world, Adams’ brother likes to tell him, Altuve is the most popular player in the sport: a 5-foot-6 marvel, barely scouted and signed for just $15,000 out of Venezuela, who turned into a Hall of Fame-caliber second baseman. Since Altuve’s debut in 2011, he leads MLB with a .310 batting average and 1,819 hits, has whacked 200 home runs and stolen 293 bases, and ranks third in offensive wins above replacement behind Mike Trout and Freddie Freeman.
Because of this, his reverence in the Astros organization is unparalleled — though perhaps the same could be said about the rancor outside of it. Only three players on the Astros’ active roster remain from 2017: Altuve, third baseman Alex Bregman and right-hander Justin Verlander. As Astros players went elsewhere in free agency, the wrath concentrated toward those still around. George Springer, now with Toronto, receives the occasional sprinkling of heckles, and Carlos Correa, a Minnesota Twin, hears them slightly more frequently, but neither they nor Bregman faces anything close to the derision reserved for Altuve.
The booing of Altuve knows no bounds. Regardless of the crowd size, the score, his performance that day, he wears the aural disdain of those outside of Houston. And yet Altuve, still elite, bore the brunt and learned to play in this new paradigm.
“He does good when he gets booed,” Astros center fielder Mauricio Dubon said. “He doesn’t care. I think it’s funny. He seems to enjoy it, and [it seems like] he hits a home run every time they boo him. I really hope they boo him.”
“I hate it, because he’s a great human being,” Astros reliever Ryne Stanek said. “One of the nicest people that I’ve ever met. Humble, kind, obviously supremely talented and a very good baseball player, but a good human being. You never know walking into a clubhouse what a superstar is going to be like, especially in their prime. The crazy thing is he’s 33, and he’s got the second-most pumps in postseason history. You’ve got to be good for a long time to do that, but also you have to be on a team that gets there. And he’s a huge reason why this team gets there and has gotten there for seven years.”
That’s the rub, of course. Had Altuve’s play faded, had the Astros’ success dwindled, had there been some sort of penance for misdeeds real or imagined, perhaps that would have been karmic retribution enough — the comeuppance Manfred forwent when he traded immunity for players’ testimony during the league’s investigation. But Altuve has only thrived. Among players with at least 1,000 plate appearances since 2021, his adjusted OPS ranks 11th in baseball.
“He’s been the one that’s kept the window open,” Astros outfielder Chas McCormick said. “We’ve lost some great players when I was in the minor leagues and by the time I got up to the big leagues. But when you have Jose Altuve and you have Alex Bregman and Yordan Alvarez — I mean, you’re going to always be in great shape because those guys are great hitters.”
EVERY YEAR THE ASTROS make another October run, Altuve’s postseason résumé grows more impressive. Should Houston win tonight or in a potential Game 7, he will pass Yadier Molina during the World Series for the sixth-most playoff games in baseball history. Considering playoff expansion, Derek Jeter’s record of 158 postseason games is well within reach, especially if Altuve remains in Houston after the expiration of his seven-year, $163.5 million contract at the end of next season.
And for all the single-team stars who have landed elsewhere in free agency, Altuve in another city, another uniform, doesn’t seem right. His bond with Houston runs too deep. Together, they have weathered the lows and celebrated so many highs, from his three-homer game to kick off the division series in 2017 to the home runs in the final two games of the 2017 ALCS that ousted the New York Yankees to the pennant-winning shot off Aroldis Chapman in 2019. And yet even that pantheon moment for Altuve comes with a caveat: suspicion from those who believe the unproven theory that Altuve refused to let teammates rip his shirt off because he was wearing a buzzer to electronically transmit forthcoming pitch types, which Altuve has denied.
Manfred’s report said MLB’s “investigation revealed no violation of the [league’s sign-stealing] policy by the Astros in the 2019 season or 2019 postseason,” but skepticism toward the league’s efforts at accounting for the entirety of cheating across the sport keeps the buzzer theory alive. Nothing Altuve can do will quell the theories. His jersey will forever be like the briefcase in “Pulp Fiction,” hiding something mystical and important and impossible to truly know.
Altuve learned quickly not to rage against a narrative he cannot change. He prefers to write an alternative one at-bat by at-bat, like the one he had Friday night against Rangers closer Jose Leclerc. Less than 30 minutes after Astros reliever Bryan Abreu plunked Rangers outfielder Adolis Garcia with a 99 mph fastball that prompted the benches to clear, Altuve came to bat with two runners on and the Rangers ahead 4-2. On the second pitch, Leclerc unfurled a 90 mph changeup that tumbled low and inside. Altuve took that familiar hack — his left leg striding toward the plate, his back knee bending, his bat whipping through the strike zone — and sent the ball just over the outstretched glove of Rangers left fielder Evan Carter at the outfield fence.
“No. 1, he wants to be up there,” Astros manager Dusty Baker said. “No. 2, he’s got a high concentration level, because that’s what it takes in big moments like that: concentration, desire and relaxation all encompassed into one. And everybody can’t do all three of those things.
“And so, I mean, this dude is one of the baddest dudes I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some greats.”
Altuve stuck his tongue out as the ball left his bat, a reflexive move that was as Jordan-like as a baseball player can get. Rangers fans, stunned at the prospect of a third straight loss at home after carrying a decided advantage following a pair of road wins to kick off the series, were too shocked to boo. All they could do was shake their heads, lament their misfortune, add themselves to the list of teams that had been Altuve’d in October. He ran the bases with pure stoicism — no bat flip, no Eurostep, not even a smile, lest he invite animus beyond the regular dosage.
“This team deserves the best version of me, and that’s being focused,” Altuve said in early October. “I think that’s something you learn through the years. Like you said, I’m 33 now. You learn, you get older, you get better at some things and you still have to learn other things.
“My team makes everything easier for me because they play hard, they love the game, they love winning.”
His team, his support system, erupted in the dugout and poured onto the field to revel with him, and 250 miles away in Houston, his city exulted, saved again by the player whose career they’d helped save by believing the story they wanted to believe. And for the 26th time in the postseason, the time of year that always seems to bring out the best in him, Jose Altuve rounded the bases toward the plate and touched home, safe.
Henderson has been sidelined with a right intercostal strain and missed the first seven games of the big league campaign.
The 23-year-old Henderson will lead off and play shortstop against the host Royals.
Henderson was injured during a spring training game Feb. 27. He was fourth in American League MVP voting last season when he batted .281 and racked up career bests of 37 homers and 92 RBIs.
Henderson completed a five-game rehab stint at Triple-A Norfolk on Wednesday. He batted .263 (5-for-19) with two homers and four RBIs and played four games at shortstop and one as the designated hitter. He did commit three errors.
“I think everybody’s looking forward to having Gunnar back on the team,” Baltimore manager Brandon Hyde said Thursday. “The rehab went really, really well. I talked to him a couple days ago, he feels great swinging the bat. The timing came, especially the last few days. He just had to get out there and get some reps defensively and get some games in, and it all went well.”
Baltimore optioned outfielder Dylan Carlson to Triple-A Norfolk to open up a roster spot. The 26-year-old was 0-for-4 with a run and RBI in two games this season.
ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the Washington Wizards from 2014 to 2016 and the Washington Nationals from 2016 to 2018 for The Washington Post before covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and MLB for the Los Angeles Times from 2018 to 2024.
When New York Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns attempted to assemble the best possible roster for the 2025 season this winter, the top priority was signing outfielder Juan Soto. Next was the need to replenish the starting rotation and bolster the bullpen. Then, days before pitchers and catchers reported for spring training, the lineup received one final significant reinforcement when first baseman Pete Alonso re-signed.
Acquiring a player with a singing career on the side didn’t make the cut.
“No, that is not on the list,” Stearns said with a smile.
Stearns’ decision not to re-sign Jose Iglesias, the infielder behind the mic for the viral 2024 Mets anthem “OMG,” was attributed to creating more roster flexibility. But it also hammered home a reality: The scrappy 2024 Mets, authors of a magical summer in Queens, are a thing of the past. The 2025 Mets, who will report to Citi Field for their home opener Friday, have much of the same core but also some prominent new faces — and the new, outsized expectations that come with falling two wins short of the World Series, then signing Soto to the richest contract in professional sports history.
But there’s a question surrounding this year’s team that you can’t put a price tag on: Can these Mets rekindle the magic — the vibes, the memes, the feel-good underdog story — that seemed to come out of nowhere to help carry them to Game 6 of the National League Championship Series last season?
“Last year the culture was created,” Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor said. “It’s a matter of continuing it.”
For all the success Stearns has engineered — his small-market Milwaukee Brewers teams reached the postseason five times in eight seasons after he became the youngest general manager in history in 2015 — the 40-year-old Harvard grad, like the rest of his front office peers knows there’s no precise recipe for clubhouse chemistry. There is no culture projection system. No Vibes Above Replacement.
“Culture is very important,” Stearns said last weekend in the visiting dugout at Daikin Park before his club completed an opening-weekend series against the Houston Astros. “Culture is also very difficult to predict.”
Still, it seems the Mets’ 2024 season will be all but impossible to recreate.
There was Grimace, the purple McDonald’s blob who spontaneously became the franchise’s unofficial mascot after throwing out a first pitch in June. “OMG,” performed under Iglesias’ stage name, Candelita, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Latin Digital Songs chart, before a remix featuring Pitbull was released in October. Citi Field became a karaoke bar whenever Lindor stepped into the batter’s box with The Temptations’ “My Girl” as his walk-up song. Alonso unveiled a lucky pumpkin in October. They were gimmicks that might have felt forced if they hadn’t felt so right.
“I don’t know if what we did last year could be replicated because it was such a chaos-filled group,” Mets reliever Ryne Stanek said. “I don’t know if that’s replicable because there’s just too many things going on. I don’t know if that’s a sustainable model. But I think the expectation of winning is really important. I think establishing what we did last year and coming into this year where people are like, ‘Oh, no, that’s what we’re expecting to do,’ makes it different. It’s always a different vibe whenever you feel like you’re the hunter versus being the hunted.”
For the first two months last season, the Mets were terrible hunters. Lindor was relentlessly booed at Citi Field during another slow start. The bullpen got crushed. The losses piled up. The Mets began the season 0-5 and sunk to rock bottom on May 29 when reliever Jorge Lopez threw his glove into the stands during a 10-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers that dropped the team to 22-33.
That night, the Mets held a players-only meeting. From there, perhaps coincidentally, everything changed. The Mets won the next day, and 67 of their final 107 games.
This year, to avoid an early malaise and to better incorporate new faces like Soto and Opening Day starter Clay Holmes, players made it a point to hold meetings during spring training to lay a strong foundation.
“At the end of the day, we know who we are and that’s the beauty of our club,” Alonso said. “Not just who we are talent-wise, but who each individual is as a man and a personality. For us, our major, major strength is our collective identity as a unit.”
Organizationally, the Mets are attempting a dual-track makeover: Becoming perennial World Series contenders while not taking themselves too seriously.
The commemorative purple Grimace seat installed at Citi Field in September — Section 302, Row 6, Seat 12 in right field — remains there as part of a two-year contract. Last week, the franchise announced it will feature a New York-city themed “Five Borough” race at every home game — with a different mascot competing to represent each borough. For a third straight season, USA Today readers voted Citi Field — home of the rainbow cookie egg roll, among many other innovative treats — as having the best ballpark food in baseball.
In the clubhouse, their identity is evolving.
“I’m very much in the camp that you can’t force things,” Mets starter Sean Manaea said. “I mean, you can, but you don’t really end up with good results. And if you wait for things to happen organically, then sometimes it can take too long. So, there’s like a nudging of sorts. It’s like, ‘Let’s kind of come up with something, but not force it.’ So there’s a fine balance there and you just got to wait and see what happens.”
Stearns believes it starts with what the Mets can control: bringing positive energy every day and fostering a family atmosphere. It’s hard to quantify, but vibes undoubtedly helped fuel the Mets’ 2024 success. It’ll be a tough act to follow.
“It’s fluid,” manager Carlos Mendoza said. “I like where guys are at as far as the team chemistry goes and things like that and the connections and the relationships. But it’ll continue to take some time. And winning helps, clearly.”
Jeff Legwold covers the Denver Broncos at ESPN. He has covered the Broncos for more than 20 years and also assists with NFL draft coverage, joining ESPN in 2013. He has been a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Board of Selectors since 1999, too. Jeff previously covered the Pittsburgh Steelers, Buffalo Bills and Houston Oilers/Tennessee Titans at previous stops prior to ESPN.
BOULDER, Colo. — A horde of NFL talent evaluators headed for the mountains Friday for the Colorado Showcase, where Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter was one of the big draws.
However, it was going to be a limited look at best as Hunter was not seen when players’ heights and weights were taken or for the jumps and 40-yard dash.
Hunter, who is expected to be a top-five selection in this year’s draft and is the No. 1 player on Mel Kiper Jr.’s Big Board, was initially not expected to participate in any on-field work, but Friday morning some scouts in attendance said they expected the two-way star to run routes as a receiver for quarterback Shedeur Sanders‘ throwing session.
Hunter did not work out at the scouting combine or Big 12 pro day but did meet with teams in Indianapolis. Sanders, one of the top quarterbacks on the board and Kiper’s No. 5 player overall, also did not work out at the combine.
Sanders’ brother, Colorado safety Shilo Sanders, measured in at 5-foot-11⅞, 196 pounds, but he did not participate in the jumps or bench press that opened the workout, citing a right shoulder injury.
The highly attended event — by scouts, coaches and personnel executives as well as fans packing small bleachers — had a festive atmosphere. Colorado coach Deion Sanders named it the “We Ain’t Hard 2 Find Showcase,” completed with a large lighted “showcase” sign next to the drills.
Hunter, who has said he wants to play offense and defense in the NFL, won the Chuck Bednarik (top defensive player) and Biletnikoff (top receiver) awards, in addition to the Heisman. He said whether he would primarily be a wide receiver or cornerback in the NFL “depended on the team that picks me.”
He had 96 catches for 1,258 yards and 15 touchdowns as a receiver last season to go with 35 tackles, 11 pass breakups and four interceptions at cornerback. In the Buffaloes’ regular-season finale against Oklahoma State, he became the only FBS player in the past 25 years with three scrimmage touchdowns on offense and an interception in the same game, according to ESPN Research.
Hunter played 1,380 total snaps in Colorado’s 12 regular-season games: 670 on offense, 686 on defense and 24 on special teams. He played 1,007 total snaps in 2023.
With all NFL eyes on the Colorado campus to see Sanders throw, one player who made the most of it was wide receiver Will Sheppard, who was not invited to the combine. Sheppard, who measured in at 6-2¼, 196 pounds, ran his 40s in 4.56 and 4.54 to go with a 40½-inch vertical jump and a 10-foot-11 in the broad jump.