THE NEW YORK TIMES SPORTSFRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2020 N B11BASEBALL
It wasn’t exactly the 2020 debut
Mike Fiers had spent an inter-
rupted spring training and abbre-
viated summer camp envisioning.
When he finally got on the mound
for a real game on Major League
Baseball’s opening weekend,
Fiers, an Oakland right-hander,
allowed seven hits and four runs
— three of them on a mighty home
run by Mike Trout. Despite his or-
dinary performance, the Athletics
beat the Los Angeles Angels, 6-4.
Fiers will take it.
Before the coronavirus pan-
demic begot a shortened, crowd-
less M.L.B. season, Fiers stood as
one of the most polarizing figures
in the modern era of America’s
pastime.
Depending on your point of
view, Fiers was the courageous
truthteller who exposed a cheat-
ing scheme that his former team,
the Houston Astros, used en route
to a now-tarnished World Series
title in 2017 — or, as Phil Garner,
who managed Houston from 2004
to 2007, declared, he was a “rat”
who broke the clubhouse code and
brought shame to the sport. In
February, Fiers told The San
Francisco Chronicle that he had
received death threats after he de-
tailed the cheating in an article by
The Athletic.
Opinions aside, the fallout was
immediate and disruptive. After
an M.L.B. investigation bore out
Fiers’s allegations, Houston’s
manager, A. J. Hinch, and general
manager, Jeff Luhnow, were sus-
pended and then fired. Boston’s
manager, Alex Cora, a former As-
tros bench coach, also lost his job.
Carlos Beltran, who played on
Houston’s 2017 team, was ousted
from his job as Mets manager be-
fore ever coaching a game.
In the months since, Fiers has
fiercely tried to avoid attention,
repeatedly declining to elaborate
on why he revealed Houston had
been stealing signs from opposing
catchers via an illegal video feed.
He also claims that Oakland’s
American League West rival is —
and will remain — far from his
mind.
“We’re not worried about that,”
Fiers, 35, told reporters before the
season opened. “We’re focused on
us as the A’s — there are a lot more
teams than Houston.”
Still, Fiers and the A’s will face
Houston on Friday for the first
time since he called out the Astros
for cheating and ensured that a
cloud would hang over the fran-
chise’s only World Series champi-
onship. He is not scheduled to
pitch in the three-game series, but
his actions are certain to be back
under scrutiny as he sits across
the diamond from many of his for-
mer teammates.
What originally brought Fiers’s
turn in the spotlight, however, did
not surprise his family, team-
mates or former coaches.
“He has had to overcome a lot to
get where he is,” said his father,
Bruce Fiers. “He wants the game
to be straightaway. As good as he
was doing, I’m sure he thought
about the consequences, and still
did what he did.”
Indeed, Mike Fiers was coming
off a strong 2019 season, posting a
15-4 record with a 3.90 E.R.A. over
33 starts and 184⅔ innings, the
most in his career since his debut
in 2011. On May 7 last year, at
home against the Cincinnati Reds,
Fiers threw his second no-hitter.
He had grown into a team
leader since being acquired in a
trade from Detroit in 2018, helping
the A’s win 97 games each of the
past two seasons — both times fin-
ishing second to Houston, and
both times losing the wild-card
game in the postseason. All the
while, he knew the division rivals
had a secret, unfair advantage
over opposing pitchers.
“You can obviously tell he cares
about others,” said A’s outfielder
Stephen Piscotty, who recognized
a sense of justice in Fiers. “He was
kind of frustrated to see young
rookies get called up, get put in
that situation and get sent down
the next day. It’s just not right. I
think we all applaud him for
standing up for what is right. He’s
a great teammate, we love him
here and we’re very grateful for
what he did.”
For most of his baseball career,
Fiers has had to escape uncom-
fortable spots. As a high schooler
in talent-rich South Florida, he
won a lot of games but was over-
looked by major league and col-
lege scouts alike.
“He was a winner, but not a
dominating pitcher,” his father
said. “He could never get past
those guys with the radar guns.
He didn’t throw hard enough.”
After graduating from Deer-
field Beach High School, Fiers
stayed close to home and played a
season of junior-college ball at
Broward College before transfer-
ring to the University of the Cum-
berlands in Williamsburg, Ky. In
2007, he was 7-2 with a 3.68 E.R.A.for the Patriots.
In January 2008, while return-
ing to school after winter break,
Fiers fell asleep at the wheel on
the Florida Turnpike, crashed into
a guard rail and was launched
through the windshield. He broke
four vertebrae in his back and was
restricted to a bed in a body cast.
“It was a miracle he lived,”
Bruce Fiers said. “But he told me
that he was going to play again,
and nine months later he was
pitching.”
Mike Fiers transferred to Nova
Southeastern University in Fort
Lauderdale, Fla., again seeking to
stay close to home. The Sharks’
head coach at the time, Mike
Mominey, knew him as a peripher-
al recruit out of high school and
had kept tabs on his progress, first
at Broward, then at Cumberlands.
He was open to Fiers playing for
Nova, but did not believe he get
could get up to speed physically,
and academically, in time for the
following season.
He was wrong.
“Broken backs aren’t usually
recoverable,” said Mominey, now
the athletic director at Nova
Southeastern. “But he showed up
with his transcripts and body inshape, and it was clear that he was
a true leader the moment he
walked on campus. Mike is the
best competitor I’ve ever been
around.”
He posted a 10-3 record with 145
strikeouts and a 2.65 E.R.A. and
led the Sharks — alongside the fu-ture major leaguers J. D. Martinez
of the Red Sox and Miles Mikolas
of the St. Louis Cardinals — to a
37-win season, a school record at
the time.
“Mike was über focused on
making the most of his opportuni-
ties,” Mominey said. “He always
told me he was going to pitch in
major leagues. A lot of people say
that; he made you believe it.”
The Milwaukee Brewers
drafted Fiers in the 22nd round of
the 2009 draft, and after three sea-sons spent mostly in the minors,
he went 9-10 in 22 starts during
the 2012 season. But his spot in the
Brewers’ rotation was short-lived
— he struggled in three starts the
following season and was sent to
Class AAA Nashville.
His mother, Linda, was gravely
ill with lupus at the time and was
hospitalized in Fort Lauderdale.
Linda and Bruce were divorced
early, but were both devoted to
Mike. So Fiers asked the Brewers
to reassign him to its Class A
team, Brevard County, so he could
spend more time with her.
While there, he went to the hos-
pital every day. In August 2013,
Linda Korman died at 54.
“He loved her immensely,” said
Bruce Fiers.
After being traded to the Astros
in 2015, Fiers seemed to find his
confidence, as well as a place on a
fast-rising team. He threw his first
no-hitter in his third start as an
Astro. It was his first complete
game as a major leaguer. The fol-
lowing year, Fiers won a career-
high 11 games.
In 2017, Houston’s champi-
onship season, he went 8-10 in 28
starts. While he was on the Astros’
40-man roster for their postsea-
son run, he was not activated for
any games. Whatever Fiers saw
of Houston’s sign-stealing scheme
apparently bothered him, and af-ter the Astros’ 2019 World Series
appearance, he came forward.
“From all my experience with
Mike, I’ve seen nothing but a gen-
uine guy, nothing but a good dude
ever since he came here,” said A’s
third baseman Matt Chapman.
“He works hard, he wants to win
and he has nothing but his team-
mates’ best interest in mind.
“It’s not an easy thing to do, to
put yourself out there like that, es-
pecially in a world where people
can message you on social media
and bully him and say death
threats and things like that.”
Bob Melvin, the A’s manager,
said he did not know what moti-
vated Fiers to speak up, but is
grateful he did. No matter how
thorough the investigation by
M.L.B. was, he said, it took some-
one speaking up on the record to
pull back the curtain on the cheat-
ing in the first place.
It turns out that someone was a
late-blooming but determined
journeyman pitcher who has man-
aged to post a 69-59 career record
and pitch two no-hitters with a
fastball that barely reaches 90
miles per hour.
“He’s a guy that’s not afraid to
speak his mind,” Melvin said.
“Even sometimes when I take him
out of a game, it’s difficult, be-
cause he’s pretty passionate about
what he does.”Shunning the Limelight After Exposing a Scandal
By JOE DRAPESCOTT HALLERAN/GETTY IMAGESJames Wagner and Tyler Kepner
contributed reporting.
DARRON CUMMINGS/ASSOCIATED PRESSMike Fiers, pitching for Houston in 2015, top, later revealed the
team’s cheating scheme. Fiers, now with Oakland, left and above,
is not scheduled to play when the A’s face the Astros this weekend.BEN MARGOT/ASSOCIATED PRESSAn ex-Astro is used
to moving on from
uncomfortable spots.
The equestrian world’s biggest
kingmaker, George Morris, an
Olympian who was barred for life
from the sport one year ago, is
now facing lawsuits by two people
who said he raped them as teen-
agers.
The suits were filed Wednesday
in New York, one year to the day
after Morris, a former United
States Olympic team coach who
remained even into his 80s one of
show jumping’s biggest lumi-
naries, was barred by the United
States Equestrian Federation.
The ban followed an investigation
by the United States Center for
SafeSport, an independent body
that investigates sexual miscon-
duct in Olympic sports, into alle-
gations that he sexually abused
minors decades ago.
Jimmy Williams, a California
riding coach who minted Olympi-
ans and died in 1993, was also part
of a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles.
The equestrian federation and the
riding club where he was em-
ployed for decades were sued by a
woman who said Williams had
sexually assaulted her from the
ages of 12 to 17. In a symbolic
move, Williams was recorded as
barred from the federation in 2018
after an investigation by The New
York Times revealed accusations
by nearly a doz-
en women, in-
cluding the
Olympian Anne
Kursinski, that
he had preyed
upon them as
girls.
The plaintiffs
in the Morris
lawsuits, filed
in Manhattan Supreme Court, are
two of the men who initially came
forward to SafeSport, prompting
its investigation that led to the
barring of Morris, who won a sil-
ver medal as a show jumper in the
1960 Summer Olympics in Rome
and went on to coach the United
States Olympic team and most re-
cently the Brazilian team.
Bill Moroney, the chief execu-
tive of the United States Equestri-
an Federation, issued a statementdeclining to comment directly on
the suits but making some of the
strongest comments to date on
Morris.
“The actions of George Morris
are reprehensible and those he
abused should never have had to
endure his unconscionable and
despicable behavior,’’ he said. “We
stand with and support the brave
victims and survivors who have
come forward to share their expe-
riences. USEF has zero tolerance
for sexual abuse — past, present,
or future — and has prevention
policies in place to protect eques-
trians from sexual abuse and mis-
conduct.’’
Morris did not answer a mes-
sage seeking comment.
In one of the lawsuits, Jonathan
Soresi, a New Jersey horse trainer
who said he was in a sexual rela-
tionship with Morris when he was
17 and Morris was in his 30s, said
that Morris assaulted him as his
student in a midtown Manhattan
hotel after a show jumping compe-
tition at Madison Square Garden.
Soresi first reported Morris to the
federation in 2012, but recanted; aformer drug user, and himself a
registered sex offender for pos-
sessing child pornography, Soresi
said in an interview that he was
high at the time and afraid he
would not be believed.
The other plaintiff is not named,
listed only in the lawsuit as A.G.1
Doe. He is a prominent trainer and
show jumper in his 50s who said
that Morris brutally raped him in
1978 in a hotel in the Hamptons
when he was 17 years old after an
exhibition at the prestigious Top-
ping Riding Club in Sagaponack,
on Long Island. Topping is also
named in his lawsuit and did not
answer a request for comment.
In an interview, the man, who
has never before publicly spoken
about the accusation, said that
part of his decision to come for-
ward was the result of a backlash
to Morris’s ban: Some supporters
claimed the boys sought Morris’s
sexual attentions to get ahead in
the sport — favorite students
were lavished with better horses
and his training. A number of the
sport’s most revered champions
furiously defended Morris, ragingat SafeSport’s purposeful lack of
transparency: To protect victims,
it does not divulge any details of
its investigations beyond the out-
come, according to Dan Hill, a
spokesman for the nonprofit orga-
nization. (Morris appealed the
punishment, but the ban was up-
held by an independent arbiter.)
The man said that after his iden-
tity as one of Morris’s accusers
had emerged last year, some peo-
ple in the sport shunned him at
horse shows. “That is revictimiza-
tion,” he said. “They look away
from me because I am one of the
people responsible for the icon of
their industry being held account-
able for the things he’s done.”
The man continued: “If people
would just pause for a moment
and think, how they would want
this handled if they had been a vic-
tim? If it was a sibling of theirs
that had been abused? Or a child
of theirs that had been abused?”
All of the lawsuits target the
equestrian federation for what the
plaintiffs claim was a culture of
turning a blind eye to the abuse by
Morris and Williams — both ofwhose behavior was long an open
secret in their decades of promi-
nence in the tight-knit sport.
“These institutions should
question these totalitarian men, to
protect kids from the predator,”
Gigi Gaston, a film director who is
suing Flintridge Riding Club, in
La Cañada Flintridge outside Los
Angeles, for the abuse by
Williams she said she endured.
The club employed Williams for 42
years — even after at least one
teenage rider told the club he had
sexually assaulted her. The club
did not answer a request for com-
ment.
“But they protected them; their
image was more important than
protecting us,” Gaston said. “Im-
age shouldn’t be more important
than the safety of a child.”
The lawsuits, which seek finan-
cial damages, were able to go for-
ward because of two newly en-
acted laws in New York and Cali-
fornia that temporarily suspend
the time limits for adults to bring
claims for abuse they suffered as
children.Lawsuits Accuse Sport’s Longtime Kingmaker, Now Barred, of Sexual Abuse
By SARAH MASLIN NIRGeorge MorrisEQUESTRIAN