Binghamton grad examines the Houston Astros cheating scandal

As a Binghamton senior, Evan Drellich ’09 interviewed one of the University’s most famous alumni — sports columnist and ESPN TV host Tony Kornheiser ’70, LittD ’17 — in the offices of the Pipe Dream student newspaper.

Fast forward nearly 15 years to June 2023. The roles are reversed, as Kornheiser is talking on his podcast with Drellich — now a senior writer for The Athletic sports website — about Major League Baseball and bankrupt regional sports networks (along with Binghamton-area favorites such as spiedies and the Dick’s Sporting Goods Open golf tournament).

“Do you mind if we call you back at some point and have you back on [the podcast]?” Kornheiser asks at the end of the interview. “I like you!”

“When you’re doing journalism — particularly sports journalism — at Binghamton University, Tony Kornheiser is someone who is going to loom large,” Drellich says. “He is the representation of, ‘you can make it out of SUNY-B and go very far.’ To this day, I look at him with reverence. He is a sports-media fixture.”

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Go ahead and officially add Drellich to the list of sports-media figures who have thrived since graduating from Binghamton University. His journalism career includes print, radio and TV positions with MLB.com, the Houston Chronicle, WEEI in Boston, the Boston Herald and NBC Sports Boston. Drellich has spent the last four years with The Athletic (now owned by The New York Times), covering baseball and breaking the news (with colleague Ken Rosenthal) of the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal in its 2017 World Series championship season.

That investigative-journalism work led Drellich to write one of the most acclaimed and best-selling baseball books of 2023: Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess. The book does more than detail how the Astros used sign stealing and audio cues (such as banging on a trash can) to help hitters learn what pitches were coming. It goes behind the scenes to examine the team’s evolution in the years leading up to success — and the front-office and on-field leaders who allowed that success to become a failure and an embarrassment to the sport.

Working for the Houston Chronicle from 2013–2016 gave Drellich an inside look at then General Manager Jeff Luhnow’s changes to the organization, such as high-tech player-development methods and relying less on longtime scouts.

“I was confident that I had a unique vantage because I was the beat writer during a period of transition and then was the one to break the scandal after I left,” Drellich says. “I felt like there was a book in that 10 years of my reporting career. It’s unlikely I’m ever going to break a story bigger than a World Series team cheating. I wanted to do it right, fairly, accurately and tell a much larger story.”

For Drellich, who calls himself “a reporter first who happens to write about sports,” the story became a “management culture” and baseball-business book.

“That wasn’t something I was going to shy away from,” he says. “It’s not an easy narrative: It’s not a green grass, hot-dog-smell-in-the-stands type of book. That’s not the reality of the Astros.”

Drellich agreed to a book deal with HarperCollins Publishers in February 2020, about three months after the scandal story appeared in The Athletic. The final edits were made in November 2022, and by the beginning of 2023, the still-unreleased book was already at the top of Amazon.com’s best-selling baseball books. Winning Fixes Everything received glowing reviews when it hit shelves in February 2023.

“The reward for me was when the book was finally done,” Drellich says. “People could see and understand what I had seen and understood. It took longer than I wanted, but it was an intense project. It turned my life upside down for two and a half years.”

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Drellich’s early life was split between Manhattan and Queens. He discovered a love for Major League Baseball in a year that saw Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa battle for the single-season home run record, the New York Mets acquire Hall of Fame catcher Mike Piazza, and the New York Yankees win 114 games and another World Series title: 1998.

“I started out as both a Mets and Yankees fan,” he recalls. “I quickly learned that didn’t fly. All of my friends were Yankees fans, so I gravitated toward the Mets. I took the underdog — the team that everyone around me was not being very nice to.”

As a high school student, Drellich began writing a blog about the Mets. He considered attending Syracuse University for journalism or sports management before deciding that the first school he visited was his best choice.

“The money difference between Syracuse and Binghamton made it clear that Binghamton was the right move,” he says.

Eager to put his baseball-writing skills to use, he approached the Pipe Dream sports editor and asked if he could write about the Mets.

“I was told: ‘We don’t really do that here. We’re a student newspaper. But if you want to cover the lacrosse team or soccer team, we’d be happy to have you.’”

Drellich accepted the offer and eventually become Pipe Dream editor in chief. He also worked at The Press & Sun-Bulletin daily newspaper, where he was able to get a feel for the newsroom and cover the Binghamton Mets (now Rumble Ponies), New York’s AA affiliate.

Drellich says it was a positive experience to leave New York City and receive opportunities that would benefit a future sports journalist.

“Because the pond was a little smaller, I got some chances that I may not have gotten at a larger journalism school,” he says. “I had room to learn and grow at Binghamton.”

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Drellich has remained influential in his “day job” while writing and promoting the book. His work at The Athletic focuses on “labor-heavy” and business-side baseball issues, such as TV deals, expansion, the Minor League Baseball union, and the (usually) adversarial relationship between the commissioner’s office and the players’ union.

“I don’t want to be the on-field news breaker, the transaction clearinghouse guy,” he says. “It doesn’t appeal to me.”

He isn’t sure if another book is in his future (he has sold the Winning Fixes Everything TV/movie rights), but hopes that readers — especially sports fans — will reflect on the title.

“Does winning fix everything”? he asks. “It’s the question I hope readers walk away from the book wrestling with. Do you care as a fan how a team gets somewhere? Do the means matter? Or only the ends? Is it about who holds the trophy, or is it about the path you take to get there? This book is a deep dive into what that path is, or was.”