This is one of those 24-hour news cycle, pop-culture scandals in which you hope you don’t know anyone involved. People are getting fired. Reputations are being tarnished. Dubious labels have been ascribed to those implicated, and it’s all trending on Google.

Meanwhile—ho hum here in Baltimore. Despite our circumstantial connections to the ordeal, we’re just sitting back and watching it all happen.

The news broke in the sports world Monday and started to go mainstream, because since when has the public not enjoyed a juicy scandal? The Houston Astros—a team we’ve become familiar with given that the Orioles poached ex-Astros executives Mike Elias and Sig Mejdal to run the O’s front-office at the end of 2018—used an elaborate, technology-driven, and illegal sign-stealing scheme to gain an advantage during their 2017 World Series-winning season.

In a nine-page report released to the public, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred outlined the circumstances and shared the details. After interviewing 68 witnesses and 23 current and former Astros players, as well as chasing down team email, text, and Slack communications, Manfred said the league determined that the scheme—which involved a dugout television, team video employees, and hitting a garbage can with a bat—was “player-driven.” And yet, he handed out punishment to everyone but those who take the field because they knew, but did nothing to stop it.

The Astros were fined $5 million and will lose multiple draft picks over the next two years. Jeffrey Luhnow, the team’s general manager (aka the guy who picks the players), and manager A.J. Hinch were suspended for one season each. The team’s owner went another step further and fired both later on Monday.

We read the details of the MLB report closely since Elias, hired as Orioles general manager in November 2018, and his top aide, former NASA engineer Mejdal, worked closely with Luhnow and Hinch for years with the Astros – before arriving in Baltimore with plans to turn around our dear franchise with their analytics-driven approach.

From the “no news is good news” department, neither Elias or Mejdal’s names—nor those of the several other ex-Astros employees now with the Orioles—were mentioned in the ominous, single-spaced, Times New Roman, size- 12 “Statement from the Commissioner” report, which you can read in its entirety here.

It makes sense. Elias and Mejdal with the Astros were primarily focused on scouting, player selection (the draft), and development. They weren’t necessarily involved in the everyday pitches and strikes operations of the team during the season, though they could have seen trends in on-field performance and had been wondering what was going on.

But they certainly weren’t in the Astros dugout at Minute Maid Park during games, where and when this all went down. In fact, Mejdal was on the bench of the Astros minor league teams during the 2017 season. But the ex-Astros closeness to the situation does have some O’s fans on edge. They’re wondering, in the words of those talking-head lawyers on TV: Who knew what and when?

Manfred reportedly has told teams not to discuss the story publicly. But in November, after the allegations of cheating were levied by former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers in a story for sports website The Athletic, Elias defended the Astros organization in comments made at the league’s winter meetings.

“I hate to see those accomplishments and those people disparaged just by association with a couple of weird episodes,” Elias told the Baltimore Sun in November. (He declined comment to the paper on Monday.) “We’ll see how it all shakes out, but there are a lot of positives—the people who run that place and the operation as a whole that just unfortunately is being overshadowed by some negativity right now…We’ll see where the league takes it. But I hope for the best.”

So do we. Since then, everyone named by the commissioners’ office in its public report is now unemployed, even those who had left to go to other teams, like former Astros bench coach and Red Sox manager Alex Cora and former Astros player Carlos Beltrán—allegedly the player brain behind the operation. He was hired as the New York Mets manager in November for his first pro coaching job, but was let go on Thursday before even managing one game.

Luhnow, Elias, and Mejdal go way back. The now former Astros GM gave Elias his start in pro baseball, hiring the 24-year-old former Yale pitcher to be a scout with the St. Louis Cardinals in 2007. Luhnow had also hired Mejdal for his first job in 2005.

In any case, the fallout hasn’t reached the Orioles, an organization that’s put its faith in a potentially long rebuild and organizational overhaul just starting with a few former Astro minds at the control. In addition to Elias and Mejdal, there’s Orioles director of pitching Chris Holt and director of baseball development Eve Rosenbaum, hired in mid-November as the highest-ranking female front-office official in baseball, who were also with the Astros in 2017.

As for the saucy details of “sign-stealing,” much of what we do know is what Major League Baseball has shared — and the operation is almost comical as it is illegal. Also, importantly and lost in the headlines of the story, it resembles a centerfield-camera involved process commonly thought to be used by as many as six teams as late as the 2018 season, according to veteran baseball writer and broadcaster Tom Verducci.

During home games throughout the 2017 season, Astros players observed the game live using a television monitor in the hallway of their dugout. Specifically, they used a centerfield camera view from behind the pitcher, which is used primarily for player development (legal then, not now), to figure out an opposing catcher’s signs—the gestures made with his hands indicating fastball, slider, curve, whatever. Certain players, and Astros video employees, then matched up the catcher signal they saw on TV with the pitch that was ultimately thrown on the field.

Once their opponents’ signs were “decoded,” according to MLB findings, one or more players watched the live view of the catcher during the game. And in the dugout, “a player would bang a nearby trash can with a bat to communicate the upcoming pitch type to the batter…Generally, one or two bangs corresponded to certain offspeed pitches, while no bang corresponded to a fastball.”

Manfred’s report said witnesses presumed that anyone near the dugout could hear the banging of a trash can—and that Astros video employees were also running a similar cheating scheme that relayed pitch information to a runner on second base, who could then share it to their teammate standing in the batter’s box so he knew what type of pitch was coming. There’s also a conspiracy theory involving a “buzzer” system.

The funny thing is, sign-stealing is within the rules in pro baseball. But using electronic equipment during games to do so, isn’t. We can easily imagine Beltrán, the former Astro and now fired-before-coaching-a-game Mets manager said to have conceived the idea of using the live TV feed, rationalizing that the technology is available to every team, and that people have always stolen signs. And indeed, during the same 2017 season, the Red Sox and Yankees were fined for similar methods.

(Related, Beltrán’s ability to similarly use video—between games, totally legal—to pick up on opposing pitch-selection tendencies were actually previously revealed in detail in Ben Reiter’s book Astroball, which chronicled the rise of the franchise’s analytics-driven approach and the 2017 World Series winning season. It’s very interesting reading now, in hindsight.)

The truth is, when reporting on this situation, words need to be chosen carefully. Saying anyone was “spared” or “avoided” punishment from the ongoing scandal, as we first considered, implies that there was guilt along the line and people got away with it. That’s not what we want to suggest.

We’re just thankful all’s quiet on the Birdland front.

The Orioles hired 35-year-old Mike Elias as the team’s next general manager, and reportedly as the highest-paid first-year GM in Major League Baseball history. The Houston Chronicle, the newspaper that covers the city where Elias has worked for the last six years with major league baseball’s Astros, first let us know about the announcement, as did a few other reports citing Elias as the front-runner for the job.

Elias, who has been Houston’s assistant general manager and was key in that franchise’s rebuild, is the person who will replace Dan Duquette as the O’s top front office official—and be the one who will hire a manager, shape the future, and be tasked with shifting the philosophy of an organization that’s coming off an embarrassing 115-loss season.

With that, here’s an introduction to Mr. Elias:

He was nine months old the last time the Orioles were in a World Series and is somewhat of a local.
Elias will turn 36 in December, meaning he was less than a year old when the O’s last appeared in (and won) the World Series in 1983. If hired, Elias would be part of a trend of younger front office officials across baseball, particularly those with a background heavy in statistics and analytics.

He’s also from Northern Virginia. Elias attended the prestigious Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a public magnet school in Alexandria, so he’s not a stranger to the Mid-Atlantic area. It’s also possible he was an O’s fan growing up, though he’s worked in other parts of his country for his adult life. He graduated in 2006 from Yale, where he was a pitcher on the baseball team, after which the St. Louis Cardinals hired him as a scout.

He’s all about the numbers.
Think Moneyball. Elias represents John and Louis Angelos’ desire to replicate what other small-market franchises around baseball have done, using international scouting, drafting, and talent cultivated within its own minor-league system, and a deep understanding of data and analytics to field teams that can compete for championships no matter the budget.

Sports is so often a copycat business, and the Astros were one of the many teams that have made this approach work, culminating with a World Series title two years ago, a few seasons after losing an average of 108 games from 2011 to 2013. (See, there is hope!) And Elias was there for the entire transition. No doubt that was a big talking point that landed him the job. He’s also credited with being the driving force behind Houston selecting shortstop and future American League rookie of the year Carlos Correa No. 1 overall in the 2012 draft.

His right-hand man is a former NASA engineer, who could join him in Baltimore.
This is where things start getting exciting. What do the O’s start to look like with new front office leadership? It’s likely that Sig Mejdal, a former NASA engineer and blackjack dealer who worked with Elias in previous stops, joins him in the front office. Mejdal recently left the Astros organization after six years as the team’s top analytics mind.

His career route is fascinating. While working a biomathematician at NASA, where he was studying sleep patterns of astronauts on the international space station, Mejdal became a fantasy baseball expert and eventually a key figure in the Cardinals and Astros organizations.

In 2012, Houston hired him as “Director of Decision Sciences,” and he’s been at the cutting-edge of analytics throughout his career. Can’t we all use a Director of Decision Sciences?

Elias has no current ties to the O’s organization.
This, overall, is probably a good thing. But what does that mean for current employees in the organization like Brady Anderson, who is still in the front office? We shall see.

It’s within reason that Elias hires current Houston bench coach Joe Espada as manager to replace Buck Showalter. (Related: Buck’s home is now on the market for $1.5 million.) If that’s the case, we might be calling this team “the AstrOs.” Though we might anyway as it seems they’ll take on their rags-to-riches philosophy. So what? There are worse names to be called.

He’s got a lot of work ahead of him.
The Yankees and Red Sox are perennial powers in the division, and the Orioles are coming off their worst season, based on wins and losses, in franchise history. The O’s are the longest shot to win the 2019 World Series. This is also Elias’ first job as the big boss. There’s always a learning curve there. Bright side? He’s got the No. 1 overall pick to work with and a fanbase more than ready for a sustainable winner.

History to be made at Poly-City game.
On Saturday at M&T Bank Stadium, Jacey Lee, 16, a junior at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, will become the first girl to take the field in the school’s 129-year football rivalry with Baltimore City College. She initially joined Poly’s JV team after her stepbrother invited her to come practice with him, and Lee is the first girl to ever make varsity. Lee is 5-foot-4 and plays defensive tackle. “I like hitting,” she told The Sun. “As soon as I get off, somebody is in my face. I either got to push them, or they push me.”

Joe’s back—again.
It’s hard to believe, but a little over a week since he took a violent hit to the head that left him concussed, Joe Flacco says he’s ready to play Sunday when the Ravens face the Tennessee Titans in Nashville. Flacco went through the NFL’s concussion protocol and was cleared to practice fully on Wednesday, albeit with stitches covered with tape on his left ear, where his helmet was ripped off by Miami Dolphins linebacker Kiko Alonso last Thursday night. Offensive coordinator Marty Mornhinweg joked with reporters yesterday that Flacco should have used his stitches to scare kids on Halloween. Joe Cool predictably didn’t, but he did post a throwback photo from 1995 in which a Frankenstein did appear.

WWE rolls through Royal Farms.
It’s not really a sport, though maybe there’s still some out there that think pro wrestling is real and not scripted. Anyway, WWE Raw made a stop at Royal Farms Arena on Monday Night. The highlight in wrestling circles was Samoa Joe’s return to the ring, and it seems like everyone had a good time.

Maryland women’s basketball picked second in Big Ten.
What?! The Big Ten coaches and media picked the defending conference champion Terps to finish second in the league, behind Ohio State. Though they might be in a rebuild mode, after losing two All-Americans and seeing a National Freshman of the Year transfer, consider it motivation for one of the area’s top programs in any sport. Maryland begins the season next Friday against Albany.

The Astros give us hope . . .
The smaller-market team formerly known as the Houston “Lastros” (for obvious reasons) won the World Series on Wednesday night in Game 7 against the Los Angeles Dodgers. Three years ago, in a prophetic cover, Sports Illustrated featured eventual World Series MVP George Springer alongside the headline “Your 2017 World Series Champs,” referencing the idea that the Astros were building the game’s “next big thing,” with a blend of old-fashioned scouting and new-age statistical analytics. It might be a bit of a stretch to see our Orioles in the same light, but the Astros should at least give us some inspiration that a championship-caliber team can be built in short time. You heard it here first: O’s in 2020.

And if we needed more optimism and feel good-vibes going into the weekend, Astros shortstop Carlos Correa proposed to his girlfriend Daniella Rodriguez right after his team took the national title. Good luck topping that, every other guy on the planet.