Yankees' Aaron Judge believes Astros should be stripped of 2017 World Series crown
TAMPA, Fla. — Take it away.
Players across baseball have railed against the Astros and what they believe was inadequate punishment meted out by Major League Baseball as a result of the sign-stealing scandal that grows legs by the day.
Few of those players, however, have publicly declared that the Astros should be stripped of their 2017 World Series title outright.
But Yu Darvish said it Monday and Aaron Judge, in taking a blowtorch to the Astros on Tuesday, went there as well.
“Yeah, I just don't think it holds any value,” Judge said. “You cheated, and you didn't earn it. That's how I feel is it wasn't earned.”
A few minutes earlier, one of Judge’s clubhouse mentors and close friends, veteran Brett Gardner, said he had some “pretty strong” opinions on the Astros, but the majority of them “I’ll just keep to myself.”
The 27-year-old Judge, in a nearly 19-minute session with reporters, kept little to himself as he followed in the footsteps of prominent players such as Trevor Bauer, Cody Bellinger, Mike Trout, Kris Bryant, Nick Markakis and plenty of others, in crushing the Astros and, tangentially, commissioner Rob Manfred.
“When it comes down to a player-driven scheme, I feel like the players involved need to be punished,” Judge said, also using the word “weak” to describe the discipline spelled out in Manfred’s January report on the investigation. “If I go out there and cheat the game . . . I think Darvish was the one that said if you're playing in the Olympics, you win a gold medal and they find out you cheated, you don't get to keep that medal.”
Judge fell in line with teammates from the 2017 Yankees, who lost a seven-game battle in the ALCS to the Astros, in saying he felt cheated out of a World Series berth and maybe more.
“Once it came out, I was pretty mad, pretty upset to know that we were probably cheated out of the possibility of making it to the World Series,” Judge said. “Because as a kid . . . forget the individual awards, forget how many games you win, how many homers you hit, it's about winning the World Series, winning the World Series with your team and fighting to the very end, the blood, sweat and tears you put in the game, to be that last team standing. And to hear that you got cheated out of that opportunity, that's tough to kind of let go. But that's why I'm glad we can talk about this now, so we can let it go and move on to 2020 — 'cause we got a pretty good team and a lot of important things we want to do, but, yeah, the cheating thing was tough. I wasn’t a fan of the punishment.”
Among Bellinger’s recent comments was the statement that the Astros' Jose Altuve “stole” the AL MVP award from Judge in 2017 (Judge finished a distant second in the voting).
“I agree with a lot of the things he said, he went out there and spoke his mind,” Judge said. “I really don't want to get into the whole if-Altuve-stole-the-MVP or not [discussion] because that really doesn’t matter, that’s over with.”
When the November story came out in The Athletic that forced MLB to finally investigate after years of receiving complaints from multiple teams about the Astros doing something illegal with sign-stealing, Judge took down his 2017 Instagram post congratulating Altuve on the MVP win.
“Just sick to my stomach,” Judge said of his reaction to the initial story featuring Mike Fiers, a former Astros pitcher who was a whistleblower. “I had a lot of respect for those guys and what they did. And then to find out that it wasn't earned, they cheated, that didn't sit well with me, and I just didn't feel like the post that I did really meant the same anymore.”
The rightfielder all but ridiculed the notion the Astros cheated in 2017 and for part of 2018, then immediately quit, an assertion in Manfred’s report.
“It's tough to think that it didn't continue,” said Judge, who later said much of the players’ anger MLB-wide is the overall lack of “remorse” expressed by Houston players. “I don't know all the facts, nobody knows all the facts, to be honest. So to think they cheated and won it all in '17, to think that they just clear-cut stopped [in] ’19, it's tough for me to say that.”
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
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