Ben Reiter called the Astros' title, but says he couldn't have seen the signs of cheating in advance

“Astro-damus” is what they called Ben Reiter in 2017, after he had foretold the Astros’ World Series title with a Sports Illustrated cover story three years earlier. That sparked a rush of interest in his work and a New York Times bestseller, “Astroball” that promised a revealing account of the forward thinking, risk-taking organization’s worst-to-first reversal.

Now, imagine Reiter’s conundrum: The Astros laureate couldn’t hear the resounding gong of the trash can. After Evan Drellich and Ken Rosenthal’s The Athletic expose on Houston’s sign-stealing scheme, Reiter announced “The Edge,” a six-part podcast examining the Astros’ unscrupulous pursuit of winning at any cost while examining his own role in inadvertently burying the lede.

Reiter spoke with the Daily News about his relationship with the Stros, revising his perspective on their culture, and why he doesn’t believe he missed the story.

(This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length)

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— New York Daily News: Even after the Astros’ myriad scandals, is there anything you still find to be compelling and worthwhile about the Astros’ approach?

— Ben Reiter: They struck me as an operating more like a Silicon Valley startup or a Wall Street private equity shop than a baseball team. They were committed to finding an edge everywhere possible. They’re not at all beholden to baseball orthodoxy or baseball tradition. They pushed the use of algorithms and technology as far as it can go while folding in human observation — combining man and machine to make their decisions. They invested in a whole lot of technology that we now see around the game, like high-speed edgertronic cameras to help pitchers figure out exactly how their fingers behaved when they threw. They were committed to optimizing everything in order to win.

— DN: I’m glad you made that comparison between the Astros and the tech and finance industry. When you started reporting in 2014 and 2015, there was an implied trust in Wall Street and especially Silicon Valley innovating towards something good and beneficial. Did you question if the team should be run like a private equity firm or startup?

— BR: It does seem like a lot of startups begin with optimism. “We’re gonna do something good!” But then, as they mature, they reveal a darker side to them, like Facebook or Amazon. I started to wonder if this team would go farther than I imagined to win in July of 2018 when the Astros traded for Roberto Osuna, a closer who was in the middle of a 75-game suspension for alleged domestic abuse and was still awaiting trial in Toronto. That was when I was like, “Wait a second. Is there a darker side to this than I’d imagined?”

— DN: So the Osuna trade was when you started to be somewhat disabused of the Astros’ good nature?

— BR: Yeah. I mean, look, the Astros had already done things before that people didn’t like, like extreme infield shifts. People hated it, but they were the first to do it to that extent. They fired a ton of kind of baseball lifers. They hadn’t signed the number one overall pick from the 2014 draft, Brady Aiken, because they detected something was wrong with his elbow. People said, “Look at this billion-dollar team taking advantage of a teenager.”

To me, those can all be kind of explained. They were within the rules and didn’t seem immoral to me. I thought, “This is just them being smart and it’s rubbing people the wrong way.” But the Osuna trade, for me, was the moment.

— DN: In your second episode of “The Edge,” you spoke to one of those fired baseball lifers, Dave Trembley, who shared that he was frustrated that you never reached out to him because he could have offered a more grounded perspective on the Astros culture. Why didn’t you?

— BR: By my count, I spoke to 46 members of the organization, past and present. Trembley was just not on my list. I couldn’t talk to everybody. Baseball’s an insular world and it’s extremely hard to get people speaking critically about their opponents on the record. There weren’t many people at the time, pre-sign-stealing scandal, willing to say anything specific about a rival. In retrospect, I wish I had spoken with Trembley, which is why I included him in the podcast.

— DN: Why do you think (then-Astros general manager Jeff) Luhnow was willing to give you such privileged access? (Luhnow was also interviewed extensively for The Edge.)

— BR: Luhnow says it’s because he knew my work. At the time, they’ve been taking so much heat for two and a half years, because they were the Dis-Astros, the Laugh-stros. People thought these guys were, you know, tanking and embarrassing the game. I think that they were ready to open up a little bit and show the world what they were doing and the best way to do that was through me and SI.

— DN: Did you ever sense the Astros being evasive or hostile while you reported on them?

— BR: I wouldn’t say hostile. As I prepared this podcast, I went back through hundreds of pages of notes, transcripts and interview recordings to see if there was any string I could have pulled to unravel (sign stealing) ahead of time. But, most of my reporting for the book was between 2014-2016, before they were banging the trash can.

However, there are certain things I noticed the players would say, like, “We really have strategies and technologies put us apart from everybody else and what we think is a real advantage.” Would I have known at the time what they were referring to? No. The black box between players and journalists will always be there. The only reason we know about it now is because one of their former teammates (Athletics pitcher Mike Fiers) did something really unusual and told everyone.

— DN: How did the incident between former Astros assistant GM Brandon Taubman and your Sports Illustrated colleague Stephanie Apstein change your outlook?

— BR: The Taubman incident resulted from the fact that the organization was not interested in facts that dissented with their plan. They weren’t interested in finding out the truth of what had happened. In fact, they were trying to crush it. And in so doing, they turned it into an uproar. It overshadowed the World Series (when) they wanted to be so focused on.

(Ed. note: The since-fired Taubman harassed Apstein and two other women with a drunken, aggressive boast about acquiring an alleged abuser.)

— DN: As a journalist, what have you learned about being presented opportunities with access and how to avoid missing the story?

— BR: I don’t feel that I missed the sign-stealing scandal. Despite the level of access I had, I don’t think I was ever in any position to have seen it or to have been told about it. What I think I might have interrogated more a certain side of their culture and operations that I didn’t see. That’s what I’m interrogating through this podcast.

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