Another day, another Houston Astros related article being released. Pedro Moura of The Athletic sat down with Dodgers’ first baseman Max Muncy this week to discuss his opinion on the Astros response to their scandal. And to put it lightly, Max was not satisfied with the responses.
A one-on-one with Max Muncy, a player who has been thinking about why everybody's so angry about the Astros — and holding his tongue. But he’s mad they’re playing the victim.
“The fact that they’re making absolute mockery of it is what pisses me off.” https://t.co/iesR0avmxl
— Pedro Moura (@pedromoura) February 18, 2020
Moura did an excellent job throughout the interview of giving Muncy time to think about his answers and process his thoughts. Rather than reaching for an emotional quote to create a headline, Moura let Muncy decide the pace of the interview. And Muncy took his time to pick apart the Astros’ responses to being caught cheating, but some parts were surprising.
In fact, Muncy surprisingly praised Carlos Correa for his dedication to his teammates.
I actually applaud him for that: He was standing up for his guy. He was standing up for his teammates. That’s all we can ask out of any of our teammates, is to want to stand up for one another.
This is of course in response to Correa’s reaction to the Dodgers going off on the Astros for cheating. Correa had an emotional outburst with reporters where he seemed to get himself caught up in a series of lies this week.
Yeah, but he contradicted himself. Everything he said in that interview, you can go back through these videos and you can prove him wrong on everything that he said- Max Muncy in response to Carlos Correa’s criticism of Cody Bellinger
Muncy actually catches himself in that statement and goes back to correct that not every single thing he says was wrong. He points out in the interview that while he was not a part of the 2017 World Series run, that their cheating goes much deeper than a championship: it hurt people’s lives.
Say you’re in high school taking a test. You cheat on that test; you get a 100. Whatever your grading scale is, you get the top grade. You get called into the principal’s office the next week, right: “Hey, you cheated on the test. We caight you. But we’re gonna fire a teacher instead of firing you.” So now you’re reaping all the benefits of that and noew you’re applying for college.
And to his point, this is essentially the route that Rob Manfred chose to take in punishment. Rather than have the players who reaped the rewards suffer the consequences, they chose to go after the management who allowed it to happen.
And to be fair, Max himself could not even give an estimate of what a fair punishment should be. But he does know that players will not stand for this.
There’s just a lot of anger being built up in players that is starting to come out now.
If things don’t change soon, 2020 is shaping up to be a rough season for the Astros and for baseball.
