Roughly two months into the 2017 Major League Baseball season, Antonio Padilla says he received an unusual request from Alex Cora, then the Houston Astros bench coach.

“I get asked to put a TV monitor down below the dugouts,” Padilla, then a video and advance information manager for the Astros, exclusively recounts in the above excerpt from the FRONTLINE documentary The Astros Edge: Triumph and Scandal in Major League Baseball. “And at the time we didn’t have any TVs down there.”

Padilla says he initially thought the monitor would be used to see when innings were over or who was batting. But in truth, the monitor was a critical component of an illegal sign-stealing scheme that would become one of the most explosive scandals in modern baseball history.

“They would look at the TV monitor and then be able to see the signs of the catcher and then have some type of audible sound, or a bang on something, to relay that to the hitter — what type of pitch was coming,” Padilla says in the documentary. “I mean, instantly I knew it wasn’t right, but what was I gonna do? I was the lowest guy on the totem pole there. You know, if the coaches knew and the other players knew, then — you know, I’m just rolling with it.”

Padilla spoke publicly for the first time about his experience with the Astros in The Astros Edge, which premiered on PBS and streaming platforms on Oct. 3, 2023, the same date the MLB postseason began.

The 90-minute special on the Astros, who have now made the playoffs for the seventh year in a row, is narrated by producer and reporter Ben Reiter. Reiter has covered the team extensively for Sports Illustrated, in the book Astroball, and in the podcast, The Edge: Houston Astros. In the documentary, Reiter traces the Astros’ journey from the worst team in baseball to the most dominant club of the era, chronicling how their innovative approach — data-driven and drawn from Wall Street and Silicon Valley — took shape and changed the game.

“Obviously, the bad stuff is going to get more clicks and more headlines, but I think the good stuff needs to be talked about a lot more,” Padilla tells Reiter in the documentary. “Just because they’re doing things that teams are still trying to catch up with today, that they were doing years ago.”

But the Astros’ hypercompetitive approach would have a shadow side. In the documentary, Reiter pieces together how a “win-at-all-costs” culture inside the Astros led to a cheating scheme that would taint the team’s 2017 World Series win — its first-ever — and reverberate across the sports world.

“It was definitely something that’s kind of on your conscience, and then, you know, you’re thinking that, like, okay, maybe this has a part of our success, so you start to feel more guilty about that,” Padilla says of the scheme, which was publicly revealed by The Athletic in 2019. “And then obviously it’s kind of in the back of your mind over the years before it gets out to the public.”

Drawing on new interviews and reporting, the documentary examines MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s own investigation into the scandal, which would ultimately find that the scheme was largely “player-driven and player-executed.” But at the outset, Manfred had granted players immunity — a move he later said was “maybe not my best decision ever” — so there were few consequences for those at the center of the cheating.

The documentary finds that as the scheme was taking place, there was an incentive for people in positions like Padilla’s not to rock the boat: Speaking out or defying requests could jeopardize what’s known as their playoff share — their portion, as voted by players, of the money a team wins if it reaches the playoffs. It’s a pot that’s even sweeter for a World Series victor. In Padilla’s case, the team voted to give him a “full” share when they won in 2017 — ten times his annual salary of $45,000 and an equivalent for him, he says, to winning the lottery.

In the documentary, Reiter probes the implications of the players’ impact within the playoff share system: “If an influential player asks you to do something, you’re probably not gonna say no, right?” Reiter asks Padilla.

“I don’t think I’ve ever said no unless it was just something that couldn’t be done,” says Padilla. “But yeah, I always tried my best, I guess, to appease whatever, you know, they needed me to do.”

Padilla left the Astros after the 2021 season. Cora was eventually suspended for a season stemming from the Astros’ cheating, which Cora apologized for. He and many of the other people involved in the 2017 cheating scandal are still involved in Major League Baseball. Learn more in The Astros Edge, which examines how the scandal played out, who was punished – and who wasn’t – and what it all means for the future of the game

For the full story, watch The Astros Edge: Triumph and Scandal in Major League Baseball:

The Astros Edge: Triumph and Scandal in Major League Baseball premiered on Oct. 3, 2023. It is available to watch on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, the PBS App and the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. The documentary is 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-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.

This story has been updated.

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