Welcome back to the bottom of the fourth here at Mid and May Park. Pretty quiet evening here in Houston with a sparse crowd scattered around the stands on this muggy night. The weather might be keeping some fans away, but the action certainly isn't lacking. Carlos Beltran stepping up to the plate for the Astros, the first pitch. Just outside for ball one, Beltran now 1-0 count coming up to the play to get ready to the next pitch. A high fly ball deep to left center field. That ball is going. Go out. It's gone. A home run for Carlos

Beltran. Tony Adams stretched back into his office chair and rubbed his palms into his eyes.

He reround the clip to confirm what he heard. There it was.

Undeniable.

Two bangs back to back before each pitch to Beltran.

Adams, who was a web developer and a diehard Astros fan,

was in denial when he read the bombshell New York Times report.

A former MLB player had blown the whistle on the Houston Astros. The player alleged that the team had engineered a blatant sign-stealing cheating scheme,

in which an off-field player would use on-field video cameras, a trash can, and a baseball bat,

to signal to the batter which pitch was on its way. Adam's inclination was to side with management.

They were the data-oriented visionaries who turned the formerly flop team into

World Series champions in 2017. The Astros were the target of an unfair allegation, the front

office said. Their success was attributable only to their

cutting-edge proprietary technology and their forward-thinking operations. They were just like

really smart. But Adams was smarter. Locked in his office, Adams reviewed and analyzed hundreds

of hours of gameplay. He created software that tagged the unusual sounds. Often they were

masked by the roar of the stadium, but sometimes they were embarrassingly conspicuous with a scant

crowd. He compiled the evidence. 8,700 pitches, 1,100 banks. He bought a domain name,

sign stealing scandal.com, and publish his verdict.

You can draw your own conclusions, he wrote, but it was clear.

Astros management was lying.

What Adams didn't know at the time was that the Astros cheating program was the symptom

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