Reckoning With Altuve
Boos, Buzzers, and A Restorative Justice Framework for How to Move Forward
I.
“One thing I know for sure is that this is not a vicarious pleasure,” Nick Hornby wrote in his 1992 memoir Fever Pitch, about his rabid lifelong fandom for Arsenal FC. “The joy we feel is not a celebration of others’ good fortune but a celebration of our own… The players are merely our representatives, and if you look hard you can see the little poles that join them together and the handles on the side that enable us to move them.”
At Yankee Stadium, fans in the right-field bleachers demonstrate their identification with the team, and assert their control over the handles on the poles, at the start of every game with the ritual of roll call. They chant the names of each of their pinstriped representatives in order (always the same order: center fielder, then left, then right, then the first-baseman, then counter-clockwise around the infield), until each one responds, turns to right field, and acknowledges the crowd. If the pitch is imminent, players may wait until it is thrown, so they can be prepared in case a 100 mph line-drive is hit their way. But as soon as there’s a lull between pitches, they must turn and acknowledge the fans, or else the fans simply will not stop chanting until they do. Some players just turn and wave, while others have specific gestures of acknowledgement: Brett Gardner would always grit his teeth and make a big beach-ball flex with his arms, Aaron Judge always pounds his fists together, on Opening Day, rookie Anthony Volpe kissed the Yankees logo on his jersey. However they choose to do so, all Yankees must participate in this ritual, admit the existence of the invisible metaphysical poles, and respond to the manipulation of their handles. Without fail, they all do.
But on Friday, August 3rd, fans were thrown into a moment of crisis, as this ritual violently collided with another. The second ritual is newer, but inspires equally devout adhering from the Bronx faithful. Unlike roll-call, which begins with a signal from fans within the bleachers, this one is initiated by a certain incendiary announcement from the stadium’s PA system: “Now batting for the Astros, the second baseman, Jose Altuve.”
Though some tried on Friday night, there’s really nothing you can do to get the bleacher fans organized for roll-call when 45,000 people all boo, furiously, insistently, at the top of their lungs, all at once. As is custom, the booing then transformed into a cacophony of unsynchronized chants. “Fuck Altuve! [clap] [clap] [clap-clap-clap]!” every single section chanted, all starting at different times, such that the chant formed into a kind of crude melodic canon. This chant is a crowd-pleaser; in the past three years, I’ve been to dozens of games that don’t feature Altuve or the Astros, and this chant has echoed through the Stadium at least once in all of them. “CHEEATERRR!! CHEEATERRR!!,” shrieked another cohort of fans a few rows down from me.
Of course, as all home Yankee games must start with roll-call, and yet roll-call could not occur with fans as enraged as they were, this collision of rituals posed an existential threat to the entire fabric of the team. Would the game be allowed to go on? Would the players simply wave at the right-field bleachers anyway, out of habit? Or without the crucial reminder from the fans, would the players all have a spontaneous identity crisis and completely forget who they were or what team they were on? Altuve did not let me consider these hypotheticals for long, swatting the first pitch of the game down the left-field line for a stand-up double.
II.
“This isn’t working,” one fan posted on the Yankees subreddit last June, after the first home Yankees/Astros clash of that year. “We need to try something different.” I was at that game, and it was awesome: up 6-3 in the bottom of the ninth, Astros reliever Ryan Pressly dramatically imploded, surrendering back-to-back walks, followed by a game-tying moonshot into the second deck in right field from disgruntled, chronically underperforming outfielder Aaron Hicks, and then a few batters later, a walk-off Aaron Judge RBI single. Still, despite my delirium, I recognized that the fan was correct. During that game, Jose Altuve had five plate appearances, and fans rained down a certifiable monsoon of boos during each one. I heard chants about the ugliness of Altuve’s face, the dispersion of his body odor, the shortness of his stature (at 5-6, Altuve is the shortest player in the league) and what that implied about other aspects of his anatomy. I even heard chants about the (to my knowledge, completely baseless) conviction of one group of fans that Altuve harbored an embarrassing devotion to a certain late-nineties Canadian pop rock group. He went three for four that night, with a single and two screaming line drive doubles, and he scored two of the Astros’ six runs. We needed to try something different. This wasn’t working.
And the two games I’ve described were not isolated incidents. In November of 2019, Evan Drelich and Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic broke the news that Altuve and the Astros had been brazenly cheating throughout their 2017 championship-winning season. Due to the pandemic, fans were not allowed in stadiums for the 2020 season, and were therefore unable to express their displeasure with the Astros in person.
Since 2021, in road games not at Yankee Stadium, Jose Altuve is slashing 264/.344/.455. This is a respectable, above-average statline, typically not good enough to make the all-star team, but enough to make you a solid contributor on a decent team. During that time, when he plays the Yankees in Houston, Altuve is slashing .091/.152/.194, an abysmal showing, far worse than “replacement-level,” or the level you’d expect from a minor-leaguer making the minimum allowed salary. And in the thirteen games he’s played against the Yankees at Yankee Stadium since 2021, he’s slashing .302/.393/.604. Those are MVP-contender stats, and in fact, they are better than Altuve’s 2017 season stats, when he actually was the MVP. He has four home runs in those games, or one every 11.5 at bats, which would put him on pace for 50 in a full season. He’s never hit more than 31 home runs in a season. He also has five stolen bases, or one every 2.6 games, which would put him on pace for 58 in a full season. In 2022, Jorge Mateo led the league in steals, and he only got 35.
To recap, since 2021, Altuve has been a decent hitter on the road, except when he’s at Yankee Stadium, where he’s been hitting at the pace of a record-breaking MVP-level supernova. When he plays the Yankees in Houston, and faces Gerrit Cole, Nestor Cortes Jr, and the fearsome Yankees bullpen, he’s dreadful. When he faces the exact same pitching staff in the Bronx, with all of us chanting and screaming and booing, he’s a god.
The straightforward explanation for this outrageous discrepancy is that Altuve is a total sicko, a masochistic sociopath who gets off on being a heel, and who is fueled by the hatred the crowd rains down upon him to such an extent that he can no longer perform without it. This may be true. But it’s also true that the Yankees are once again being tortured by unresolved traumas, which keep bubbling up and sabotaging their present through repeated, uncanny incidents. To quote James Joyce, their history is a nightmare from which they are trying to awake. To quote me, they are haunted by the specter of the past. I’m sorry, but this is the work of a ghost.
III.
It helps to understand that Yankee fans take special exception to Altuve specifically. For example, Alex Bregman, their longtime cleanup hitter who was just as involved in the illegal sign-stealing, does not get booed like Altuve. This is for two reasons:
Firstly, there is the issue of the buzzer. In Game 6 of the 2019 ALCS, tied at four with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Altuve waited on a slider from heretofore unhittable Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman, and sent it over the left field wall. Immediately afterwards, Yankees fans, still numb from the shock of being eliminated from the playoffs in an instant after such a promising season and playoff run, noticed something odd. As Altuve rounded third and prepared to be mobbed by his ecstatic teammates, he gestured at his shirt, shook his finger twice, and then tugged at his shirt again. The message was clear: Altuve did not want his teammates to take off his shirt during the celebration. When asked about this during an on-field post-game interview, Altuve told reporters that he had recently gotten a bad tattoo, and didn’t want it to be shown on national television. This struck everyone as rather odd; in one of the biggest moments of his career, after heroically sending his team to the World Series on a walk-off home run, with adrenaline and euphoria coursing through his veins, could Altuve have been thinking about how a very small tattoo on the side of his collarbone would look on television? After the initial Athletic report exposed the Astros’ cheating scandal, The New York Post’s Joel Sherman reported that scouts and executives harbored the same alternate theory as Yankee fans for Altuve’s bout of modesty; that he must have been wearing a buzzer that communicated stolen signs in real time, and that it would have been visible if he had taken off his shirt. Altuve denied this, of course, but the Astros denied all sorts of things that turned out to be true. Yankees fans do not believe this denial, and frankly, why would they?
Secondly, and perhaps even more painfully, in 2017, at the peak of the Astros’ nefarious operation, Altuve won the American League Most Valuable Player award. He had the league’s highest batting average that year, but only the second highest Wins Above Replacement, with 7.5. According to the advanced analytics, there was a certain rookie, a large 25-year old right-fielder, worth 8.8 Wins Above Replacement, with a lower batting average than Altuve, but a much higher slugging average, buoyed by a league-leading 52 home runs. At the time, Altuve beating out Aaron Judge for MVP was exasperating for Yankee fans, a sign of how the elderly sportswriters who vote on the award were out of touch with the modern, analytics-oriented iteration of the sport. Today, with the knowledge that Altuve’s season was completely fraudulent, it’s a moral outrage. That’s Judge’s MVP, and it was stolen from him. In Major League Baseball history, only two players have ever won MVP as rookies. That’s a sacred honor, and it’s one that Judge earned, but will never receive. The sting from this injustice still burns in the Yankee Stadium bleachers, and I don’t know when or if it will ever fade.
IV.
“I believe when we hurt someone, we incur an obligation”, Danielle Sered writes in her 2019 book Until We Reckon, on her pioneering work with restorative justice as an alternative to incarceration in Brooklyn. Four years later, Altuve has caused harm to the sport of baseball, to Aaron Judge, and most importantly, to us Yankees fans. But aside from a 25-second statement about how “the team feels bad about what happened in 2017,” he has done nothing to fulfill the obligation to us that he has incurred. And he received no external punishment. He and his cheating teammates never faced a suspension, fine, or any other form of discipline from the league. Their ill-begotten awards, playoff wins, and 2017 World Series ring have not been vacated, their bonus checks remain cashed in their bank accounts.
Of course, a lengthy suspension and a hefty fine from the league would have appeased our base desire for vengeance, for retributive justice. But Sered believes that in the long run, victims, offenders, and communities alike are best served by restorative justice, where the offender takes true accountability for the specific harm caused, shows genuine remorse, and makes focused efforts to partially restore those harmed. If Altuve were interested in this kind of accountability, and wanted to atone in a community-oriented, restorative way, he could take the following steps:
Immediately, publicly renounce his 2017 MVP award, and mail the physical trophy to Aaron Judge.
Donate $500,000, roughly the amount he made from his share of the 2017 postseason bonus pool, to a mutual aid fund in the South Bronx.
Let Aroldis Chapman, the pitcher he homered off of in the ALCS while wearing the buzzer, give him a tattoo. Then, show off the tattoo, on national television, no matter how ugly it is.
Play right field, rather than second base, for a day at Yankee Stadium, so the fans in the right field bleachers tell him the pain he has caused them without having to yell so much.
Stop hitting home runs at Yankee Stadium.
Unless and until Altuve is brave enough to fulfill this obligation, Yankees fans will have one more unresolved neurosis to work through. And they will cling to the one coping mechanism they have, even though it messes up roll call, and even though, like most coping mechanisms, it just seems to make everything worse: They will boo the shit out of Jose Altuve every chance they get. And so will I. Fuck Altuve.