Astros owner Jim Crane has announced that the team has fired Manager A.J. Hinch and General Manager Jeff Luhnow. He said the team will begin a search for a new manager. In the short term Crane said he will be overseeing the baseball operations department.
This is the first immediate fallout of this afternoon’s handing down of one-year suspensions for both Hinch and Luhnow arising out of the Astros’ sign-stealing scandal from 2017.
In the wake of the allegations, and in light of the likelihood that this was a league-wide problem, Major League Baseball initially said that it did not plan to limit its investigation to the Astros. Then MLB reversed course and said that he would only be investigating Houston. Once the allegations regarding the Red Sox came out, that position became untenable for Major League Baseball, suggesting that this punishment is just the end of the beginning of the story as opposed to the true end.
In the meantime, the Astros need a new manager. And a new general manager. And we will now begin a major, major reckoning about cheating in Major League Baseball.