A12| Friday, February 21, 2020 ***** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Trout Brand has some thoughts!
Since spring training opened a
week ago, a few items have become
glaringly obvious. The first is that
this scandal isn’t going away. Base-
ball wanted a quick resolution to
the Astros mess—it’s why they
made the contentious decision to
award immunity to players in re-
turn for testimony; it’s why they
moved quickly to finish their inves-
tigation and suspend Houston’s GM
Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J.
Hinch. There was even a dutiful
round of coverage praising baseball
for moving decisively.
But then it was like:wait a min-
ute.When the smoke cleared on
Luhnow and Hinch’s ousters—and
the collateral cannings of Alex Corain Boston and Carlos Beltrán in New
York—it started to look as if the As-
tros got away with something. In-
stead of players holding back, fol-
lowing the twisted tradition of
sports omertà, they began to let it
rip. Cincinnati pitcher Trevor Bauer
went scorched earth: “What’s going
on in baseball now is up there with
the Black Sox scandal, and it will be
talked about forever—more so than
steroids,” Bauer wrote in The Play-
ers Tribune. He’d later call the As-
tros “cheaters” and “hypocrites.”
What really set the sport off was
Houston’s Feb. 13 news conference,
when a franchise that had weeks to
prepare a contrite gesture appeared
to have composed a half-bakedMy
badin the parking lot five minutesA ‘Luka’ Into the NBA’s Future
The Americans on his European team knew that Doncic was a star. Now they have something else to say: We told you so.
The Scandal That
Baseball Can’t Shake
Remember when
baseball was boring?
This was a grave con-
cern, not long ago. If
one wanted to bash
Major League Base-
ball, the easiest but-
ton to push was its alleged boring-
ness: How the game’s analytic and
strategic evolutions had conspired
to make nine innings an increas-
ingly unwatchable endeavor. If you
wished to be fancy, you could layer
a cultural point on top, arguing that
baseball’s languid pace was out of
sync with need-it-now modern life,
and, because of this, it was losing
younger eyeballs. MLB was intro-
ducing new wrinkles, but it was
probably too late. Nobody was talk-
ing about baseball. It was dull, dull,
dull—a sports dodo, puttering to-
ward extinction.
How times have quickly changed.
Everybody is talking about base-
ball—even LeBron James, not a
baseball player—and they’re not
even playing real games yet. A
scandal involving the sign-stealing
2017 World Series champion Hous-
ton Astros, and MLB’s scattershot
approach to punishment, has roiled
a sport accustomed to little scrutiny
before autumn.Baseball is burning,
ESPN baseball writer Jeff Passan
wrote the other week. Burning! For
years, baseball could barely nudge
itself to roll over and tap the
snooze bar. League commissioner
Rob Manfred, a low-profile exec
suddenly on the hottest seat in
sports, is taking shots from ag-
grieved players and comically apol-
ogizing to the World Series trophy
for calling it a “piece of metal.”
Manfred must lie awake at night
and say:Sheesh. I wish someonewould complain to me about how
boring baseball was. Those really
were the days.
Let me be the 10,000th person to
tell you how unusual this develop-
ment is. Baseball, with its powerful
players union, isn’t a sport accus-
tomed to internecine finger-point-
ing. Now it is a free-for-all. The
Dodgers, who lost to the Astros in
the World Series in 2017, are furi-
ous: furious that the Astros kinda-
sorta-didn’t-apologize for what they
did; furious that MLB didn’t punish
any of the players; furious that
there are a bunch of dudes in Hous-
ton walking around with what they
believe are their rings. The Yankees,
also 2017 Astros roadkill, are mad
as well, and they also have some
questions about the 2019 playoffs.
It’s hard to imagine a worse pair of
cities to alienate than the country’s
two frothiest media markets, but
the anger isn’t contained to the
coasts. Everyone’s mad. Even the
Astros are mad, because they’re
mad that everyone’s mad at them,
which, well,boo-hoo-hooand a tiny
violin to that.
Perhaps the surest signal this
controversy had jumped the tracks
was when Mike Trout—the most in-
offensive superstar in sports,
Mickey Mantle reincarnated as a va-
nilla ice cream cone—jumped in to
voice his displeasure at MLB’s han-
dling of the Astros’ cheating. A cou-
ple of seasons ago, Manfred had
tweaked the historically talented
Trout for his low profile, saying the
recalcitrant star needed to decide if
he wanted to put himself out there,
and engage more. Manfred even
suggested the league could help
Trout improve his brand.
Well, he’s engaging now! The MikeSPORTS
116.
The number of points
the Mavericks score per
100 possessions. It’s the
highest offensive rating
in NBA history.BYBENCOHENbeforehand. Worse, the Astros
seemed to imply that their sign-
stealing—electronic monitoring,
garbage can banging—may not have
really impacted anything, which
was a spurious position to take
about an operation they used all the
way through winning a champion-
ship, and beyond.
It was a real whiff. And it’s quite
apparent baseball underestimated
the fury of its players, that they be-
lieved Major Leaguers would be re-
luctant to go after their own be-
cause of A) of loyalty, or B) because
the Astros may not be the only
team out there to engage in tech-
driven sign-stealing, or C) some
combination of both.
Instead, here we are, a week into
spring training, and it’s all Astros, all
the time, with players ticked, Man-
fred hosting a pair of defensive news
conferences, and voices like LeBron
James—an avatar for the empow-
ered modern athlete—piling on:
“Listen I know I don’t play base-
ball, but I am in sports, and I know
if someone cheated me out of win-
ning the title and I found out about
it, I would be [expletive] irate,”
James tweeted. “Listen here base-
ball commissioner listen to your
players speaking today about how
disgusted, mad, hurt, broken [they
are] about this.”
In a way, it’s refreshing.
Throughout society, we’ve become
so accustomed to wanton rule-
breaking, that seeing anyone held
accountable for their actions has to
be a positive. But baseball still can’t
figure out the next step. With MLB
dead set against dramatically sanc-
tioning Houston—stripping tro-
phies, etc.—it appears we are head-
ing into a tense season of credibility
damage and fan blowback, not to
mention the sport’s own brand of
frontier justice. (That isn’t any kind
of answer, either. It isn’t great to
hear people openly lusting for
brushback pitches.) All this agita-
tion must make baseball nostalgic
for the simpler days, when it was
merely too boring to watch. Boring
sounds great right about now.The Astros and José Altuve have received a lot of attention in spring training.T
he NBA team with
the greatest offense
in the history of the
game is not the War-
riors when they had
Stephen Curry, Kevin
Durant and Klay Thompson. It’s
not the Rockets teams built
around James Harden and math.
It’s not Magic Johnson’s Lakers or
Larry Bird’s Celtics, and it’s not a
team with Michael Jordan or Le-
Bron James.
The team with the most power-
ful offensive machine the league
has ever seen is this year’s Dallas
Mavericks. They don’t have Steph,
Michael or LeBron. They have Luka.
Luka Doncic is already one of
the best players on the planet,
and the only thing more im-
pressive than his 28.9 points,
9.5 rebounds and 8.7 assists per
game is his age: He is 20 years old.
There has never been anyone so
young with such outrageous num-
bers. The last time a player had
comparable statistics was Oscar
Robertson—before Doncic’sparents
were born.
It has been a stunning ascent by
any measure for someone in his sec-
ond NBA season. But it’s not surpris-
ing to the handful of Americans who
knew the name of Luka Doncic be-
fore almost everyone in the U.S. They
had to. They were his teammates.
The former college and NBA
players who moved to Spain to play
for Real Madrid between 2015 and
2018 had the odd feeling of sensing
that something was about to hap-
pen years before it really did. They
were among the first people to look
at a shy teen with a baby face and
see the future of basketball. But
when they told people back home
about Doncic, every one of them
encountered resistance. They had to
convince the Americans in their
lives that a Slovenian teen was as
sensational as they claimed.
“They were skeptical,” said Jay-
cee Carroll.
“None of my friends in the States
believed me,” said Trey Thompkins.
“Of course the first response
was: Aw, no European can be that
good,” said Anthony Randolph.
The first time that Randolph real-
ized that his precocious teammate
really was that good was in a prac-
tice scrimmage a few years ago. It
was hard for him to ignore the kid
who was attempting to throw down
a tomahawk dunk on him. Randolph
looked around in disbelief. Who is
this guy, he asked, and how old is
he? That’s when he found out Doncic
was only 17.
“He told me his age,” Randolph
said. “I was in shock.”Anthony Randolph is no longer
in the NBA. But in that way the
NBA has become a league full of
Anthony Randolphs.
There was nothing that Doncic
hadn’t accomplished by the time he
came to the U.S. He won the EuroLe-
ague with Real Madrid. He won Eu-
roBasket with Slovenia. He won the
MVP of the EuroLeague and he even
won the MVP of the EuroLeague Fi-
nal Four—which means he was the
best player in the biggest games in
the top league outside the NBA.
But he was still the No. 3 pick in
the 2018 draft.
The Suns passed on him after
hiring Slovenia’s national coach, the
Kings passed on him despite having
a European general manager, and
the Hawks passed on him by trad-
ing back and drafting another point
guard. His fans in Europe couldn’twrap their minds around these de-
cisions. They had never seen any-
one at that age better than Doncic.
“No one else comes close,” said
Dan Peterson, a legendary American
coach who has worked in Italy since
the 1970s. “Everyone knew. Every-
one in Europe, that is. If the NBAhad doubts, that’s their problem.”
The question of how so many
people could have been so wrong
about Doncic will haunt the fran-
chises that passed on him for a
very long time.
It’s tempting to blame the be-
havior of NBA snobs on a distrust
of international basketball even
at a time when the game has
never been so cosmopolitan. The
U.S. no longer has a monopoly on
talent. The league’s Most Valu-
able Player is Greek. The centers
on last year’s All-NBA teams were
Serbian, Cameroonian and
French. The face of the Mavericks
used to be Dirk Nowitzki (Ger-
man), and now it’s Doncic (Slo-
venian) and Kristaps Porzingis
(Latvian). Mavericks owner Mark
Cuban has another theory.
“The NBA doubts every playercoming in until they prove they can
play,” he said.
Some of the only people who
weren’t saddled by this bias hap-
pened to be the ones who had
watched him play basketball more
than anybody in the world. They
were Americans in Europe who re-
member telling anyone who would
listen that he was the real deal.
They also remember what they
heard in response. That he would
be good, but notthatgood. That
he’ll play against bigger, stronger
and faster guys and he wasn’t big,
strong or fast enough. That he’s
not athletic. That he’s not in
shape. That he’s too...Slovenian.
“Wait and see—just watch,”
Randolph said. “Because I knew
that Luka was a once-in-a-gener-
ation talent.”
“You’ll see,” Thompkins said.
“You’ll see.”
“He did everything in Europe al-
ready,” Marcus Slaughter said. “It’s
just that Americans now see it.”
They saw it for themselves on
the practice court. In the European
system of basketball, Real Madrid’s
players mingled with the players on
Real Madrid’s youth team, which
would be like Bronny James prac-
ticing with LeBron James. But when
the stars of Spain’s best team stud-
ied the younger guys coming for
their jobs, there was always one
who stood out. Doncic was 15 and
making players his own age look
like toddlers. “What he’s doing now
is what he was doing at that age,”
Slaughter said. “He was completely
dominating.”
But he was also holding his own
on the senior Real Madrid team. His
teammates noticed a complete lack
of fear in someone who could have
easily been terrified. When the Bos-
ton Celtics visited Spain in 2015, for
example, Doncic played 16 minutes
off the bench. He was 16 years old.
By the time he was 17, he was
the best young player in Europe. By
the time he was 18, he was the best
player in Europe.
“This guy is a cross between
Magic Johnson and Larry Bird,”
thought Bill Duffy, his agent, as he
watched him.
But his last few months in Ma-
drid were a bit of a Rorschach test.
Cuban and Mavericks executives
were among the people who saw a
team of grown men deferring to Don-
cic with games on the line, but others
saw a pudgy body and signs of incon-
sistency as Doncic fell into a slump
toward the end of a long season.
His teammates knew which ones
would be proven right.JEROME MIRON/REUTERSJEFF ROBERSON/ASSOCIATED PRESSMavericks star Luka Doncic is
averaging 28.9 points, 9.5 rebounds
and 8.7 assists per game this season.JASON GAY