Premieres Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023 at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS App + Encore Thursday, Oct. 5 at 10 p.m. on KPBS TV
On Tuesday, October 3, a 90-minute FRONTLINE documentary sheds new light on one of the most explosive scandals in baseball history. Premiering on PBS and streaming platforms the same date the Major League Baseball postseason is scheduled to begin, "The Astros Edge: Triumph and Scandal in Major League Baseball" tells the inside story of the Houston Astros cheating scandal, the fallout, and what it says about baseball today.
Gripping and revealing, the documentary features new and exclusive interviews with former MLB insiders — including a former Astros video operations manager who speaks out for the first time and details the inner workings of the now-infamous sign-stealing scheme, and the most expansive on-camera interview yet with former Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, who continues to deny awareness of the cheating.
The film is narrated by producer and reporter Ben Reiter, who has covered the team extensively for Sports Illustrated, in the book "Astroball," and in the podcast, The Edge: Houston Astros. In the documentary, Reiter goes inside the Astros’ journey from the worst team in baseball to the most dominant club of the era, chronicling how their innovative and hypercompetitive approach — data-driven and drawn from Wall Street and Silicon Valley — took shape and changed the game.
Then, Reiter probes that approach’s shadow side, piecing together how a “win-at-allcosts” culture inside the Astros led to a cheating scheme that would taint the team’s 2017 World Series win and reverberate across the sports world. Drawing on new interviews and reporting, the documentary examines MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s own investigation into the scandal, which offered immunity to Astros players and resulted in few consequences for those who carried out the cheating scheme.
With the now-two-time World Series champion Astros in a position to make the playoffs for the seventh year in a row, many of the people implicated in the 2017 cheating scandal still involved in Major League Baseball, and the breakneck, datadriven pursuit of an “edge” now standard throughout the game, “The Astros Edge: Triumph and Scandal in Major League Baseball” unpacks the making of one of the best teams and worst scandals in modern MLB history, the limited accountability that followed, and what all means for the future of America’s pastime.
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Watch On Your Schedule:
A must-watch documentary for all baseball fans, "The Astros Edge: Triumph and Scandal in Major League Baseball" will be available to watch in full at https://video.kpbs.org/show/frontline/, pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS App starting Oct. 3, 2023, at 7/6c. It will premiere on KPBS TV and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel at 10/9c.
Credits:
A FRONTLINE production with Left/Right Docs. The director, producer and writer is Jonathan Clasberry. The producer is Quinton Boudwin. The producer and correspondent is Ben Reiter. The senior producer is Frank Koughan. The executive producers for Left/Right Docs are Ken Druckerman and Banks Tarver. The editor-inchief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath. The documentary is distributed internationally by PBS International.
