HOUSTON — You couldn’t help but be touched by what you saw.
There stood Lance McLean, a high school football player turned cancer patient, sharing the story of his battle — his mom seated up front, friends in the back, everyone inspired Wednesday morning at Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Centers as Major League Baseball and the Astros used the platform of the World Series to announce the plans for a dedicated waiting space for teenagers undergoing treatment. It served as the textbook example for how professional sports and their teams should leverage their brands.
Alas, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you couldn’t help but be struck by the irony, either. By the reality.
And hours later, after watching the Astros take a 12-3 thumping at the hands of the Nationals in Game 2 at Minute Maid Park that left manager A.J. Hinch looking a little dazed in his postgame news conference, maybe even by the karma?
For all the good the Astros can do in their community, for all the brilliance they regularly display on the field, a chain pulls only as strong as its weakest link. And the Astros have inflicted serious damage on themselves and on MLB altogether with their conduct of the past week regarding the Brandon Taubman matter. Suffice it to say that few people, either in baseball or among the general population, will weep over this series’ statistical favorite finding itself in a 2-0 hole heading on the road.
“I think what’s interesting is when you have an organization, like any major league team, you really have 250 players. You’ve got hundreds of staffers,” Reid Ryan, Houston’s president of business operations, told The Post at the hospital. “You have thousands of part-time employees. And it only takes one instance for somebody to do something that folks see negatively, and that can wash away lots of positives.”
To be clear, folks saw Taubman’s actions negatively for a mighty good reason, and he faces serious discipline, if not unemployment, for what transpired at the ballpark last Saturday night. The Astros, too, should be fined heavily for their utter lack of accountability — for their failed attempt at smearing a Sports Illustrated journalist, to boot — in the wake of SI’s reporting on Taubman’s perceived targeting of a female reporter last Saturday.
Asked whether he thought his team’s focus or energy has been disrupted by the Taubman incident, Game 2 losing pitcher Justin Verlander said, “No. I don’t think so. Not in here.”
Nevertheless, MLB officials are livid that their jewel event has been upstaged by this terrible episode and the Astros’ utter failure at managing it, with no end in sight. On Wednesday, Houston president of baseball operations and general manager Jeff Luhnow spoke with SportsTalk790, a local radio station, and equivocated, “What we really don’t know is the intent behind the inappropriate comments [Taubman] made. We may never know that, because the person who said them and the people who heard them, at least up to this point, have different perspectives.”
Ay yi yi. The Astros’ defiance can work very well when, say, signing an off-the-radar free agent. Far less so when discussing an important social issue. If not for Hinch’s admirable smackdown of Taubman on Tuesday, the franchise would be in even worse shape.
Astros owner Jim Crane, who has stayed silent besides boasting emptily in a statement about the team’s commitment to stopping domestic violence, must grasp the holistic view of it all. As fantastic as it is that the Astros help teens with cancer, will they turn on such a patient, particularly a young woman, who grows up to be a sports journalist and gets verbally targeted by a team executive?
Ryan, not directly involved with the Taubman incident, smiled widely Wednesday morning, taking joy in the hospital initiative and engaging enthusiastically with a number of youngsters there getting treatment, asking them about their interests and arranging for some complimentary tickets to Game 2. He couldn’t have represented his team, his sport, any better at that moment.
“I think it’s going to bring some good karma tonight,” Ryan said.
In a vacuum, the visit probably did score some points, yes. It proved no match, however, for the Astros’ weakest link.