Astros' Carlos Correa fights fire with fire on sign-stealing, fails to lower temperature

Tom Gatto

Astros' Carlos Correa fights fire with fire on sign-stealing, fails to lower temperature image

Carlos Correa took on everyone Saturday.

Cody Bellinger. Mike Fiers. The Yankees. The Nationals. Anyone else who believes the Astros kept cheating after 2017. The Houston shortstop had something for all of them.

Will his rebuttal help to lower the fire that's engulfing the sport early in spring training? No, not when Correa came in hot himself.

FAGAN: Players must speak out loudly, publicly and in real time about cheating

The short version of his counterattack, in order of high to low intensity:

For Bellinger: Shut the f— up. You're clueless as to what actually happened with our sign-stealing scheme.

For Fiers: You weren't worried about cheating when you put on that World Series ring, were you, whistleblower?

For the Yankees: Maybe score more runs next time and stop crying about hearing whistles.

For the Nats: You're all as clueless as Bellinger. Just be happy with beating us in last year's World Series. You earned it.

It was mostly defiance and deflection and defending in Correa's sessions with national and local reporters at the Astros' spring training facility. To listen and watch from a distance, Correa seemed to be speaking not just for himself (he admitted accepting stolen signs in 2017), but also for an organization that served up a word salad of an apology Thursday.

His most vigorous deflection was the claim that the Astros couldn't have possibly stolen signs in the 2017 Series against the Dodgers, because catchers put down super-duper-complicated Morse code in the postseason.

MORE: Altuve denies Beltran pressured Astros players in '17

Correa also tried to point out that many of Houston's runs in that series were scored with runners on second base, where signs are impossible to read. (If Codebreaker could talk, might it have a different story?)

Further, he said, the Astros never stole signs on the road, where they won Game 7. That ignores MLB's finding in its investigation of the cheating that Houston was pilfering signs away from Minute Maid Park, too.

His most vigorous defending, meanwhile, was of teammate Jose Altuve, who helped to dish out that word salad earlier in the week.

MORE: Astros owner Crane bungles apology

According to Correa, Altuve didn't want to know what pitches were coming during his 2017 MVP season and would get angry if anyone tried to tell him, but he's just too humble to say so now.

"He played the game clean," Correa told Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic and MLB Network, part of a preamble to cursing out Bellinger for saying Altuve "stole" the MVP from the Yankees' Aaron Judge. Correa deflected there, too, bringing up Bellinger's run-scoring error in Game 7 of the '17 Series. 

MORE: Players rip Astros for sign-stealing scheme

To hear Correa tell it, Altuve didn't wear a buzzer under his jersey in 2019, nor did any other Astro. (MLB said it found no evidence of buzzers.) That thing about Altuve not wanting his jersey torn off his body after his clinching Game 6 walk-off against Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman? Correa's take is that Altuve was bashful not because he was a hiding a buzzer, but because he was hiding a bad partial tattoo on his collarbone.

(OK, so that's more deflection. Someone tell Gary Sanchez that cool story.)

Correa tried to fight fire with fire with his comments Saturday. It's difficult to say he won that fight. What he said will keep the tempers around baseball burning hot.

Tom Gatto

Tom Gatto Photo

Tom Gatto joined The Sporting News as a senior editor in 2000 after 12 years at The Herald-News in Passaic, N.J., where he served in a variety of roles including sports editor, and a brief spell at APBNews.com in New York, where he worked as a syndication editor. He is a 1986 graduate of the University of South Carolina.