Sports Illustrated on Monday night published an account of a scene inside the celebratory Astros clubhouse Saturday after they clinched the American League pennant.
Per SI, most of it was normal. But a key part of most definitely was not: And in the center of the room, assistant general manager Brandon Taubman turned to a group of three female reporters, including one wearing a purple domestic-violence awareness bracelet, and yelled, half a dozen times, "Thank God we got Osuna!"
Osuna is Astros closer Roberto Osuna. As SI's Stephanie Apstein explains, the timing of the exclamations was odd considering Osuna had given up a game-tying, two-run homer in the ninth inning before Jose Altuve's blast in the bottom of the ninth gave Houston the win.
And the specific direction of Taubman's shouts were both meaningful and uncomfortable: Osuna had been acquired by the Astros in 2018 after MLB had handed him a 75-game suspension for his role in a domestic assault allegation.
SI's story is plausible and credible, requiring only a very basic connecting of the dots to understand.
That is, unless you're the Astros. After the piece was published (for which the Astros declined to comment and didn't make Taubman available for an interview, per SI), the team released a statement calling SI's story "misleading and completely irresponsible" and suggested a different version of what happened: "An Astros player was being asked questions about a difficult outing. Our executive was supporting the player during a difficult time. His comments had everything to do about the game situation … and nothing else."
There are plenty of things to criticize about that statement (and plenty of people jumped on it as soon as it was posted on Twitter), but the biggest problem for the Astros is that the SI story was almost immediately corroborated by multiple eyewitnesses.
Per a Houston Chronicle story that followed the SI report and the statement: