Detroit Tigers manager AJ Hinch is still friends with Alex Cora.
Together, they challenged baseball's integrity: Hinch was the manager and Cora was his bench coach with the 2017 Houston Astros, a team encompassed by a detailed sign-stealing plot and World Series championship. The players, along with Cora, devised a scheme to decode signs with replay monitors and bang on a trash can to signal incoming pitches to batters.
Simply put, they cheated.
"I would imagine there aren't too many people who know how he and I feel more than he and I," Hinch told a small group of reporters Thursday.