When public figures so unabashedly follow a PR checklist, regular people can be seduced into judging mainly the quality of the checklist, and viewing these things purely as PR successes or failures. Let’s dispense with that, quickly: Luhnow’s PR advisors should be fired. They’re real bad at their jobs.

But as a series of human actions, this is all hideous. The Astros have a culture where a person could even develop the specific anger behind Taubman’s taunts, to say nothing of shouting those taunts at someone in public; where the kind of person who would both feel that specific shit-hearted triumph and then weaponize it is otherwise considered a good guy with high character; where the organization’s inclination is to take the word of internal “witnesses” who would have obvious professional incentives for obscuring the truth over a first-person report from a journalist; where the action that flows from that misguided trust involves publicly accusing the journalist of fabrication; where a group of adults would need whole days in order to determine that even a general apology is appropriate; where orchestrating a happy ending to this disastrous sequence in a press conference is more urgent than personally apologizing to the only person who was actually wronged; and where you’d even need a PR playbook to sort this out in the first place.