Members of the 2017 World Series Champion Houston Astros held a press conference to open Spring Training this week. The purpose was to apologize for a cheating scandal that rocked baseball in the offseason, as the Astros were discovered to have undertaken an elaborate scheme involving high-powered cameras in the center field stands at Minute Maid Park and monitors in the Astros clubhouse to relay upcoming pitch to batters.

Truth is the cornerstone to handling any scandal, and the Astros have provided a textbook example of how NOT to manage a crisis.

"Tell the truth, tell the whole truth, and tell it quickly" is the textbook advice of crisis managers.

The Astros, like most involved in a scandal, allowed the story to slowly leak out over time and never attempted to get ahead of it by telling the truth.

After truth, the next important step in rebuilding trust is a genuine apology.

A meaningful apology involves acknowledging what happened and explaining your role in it.  This is important because the next critical component is explaining "why" it happened.

Explaining why something happened is not to be mistaken as an opportunity to make excuses, rather it is part of the most critical aspect of rebuilding trust-providing assurance it won't happen again.

Heavy on canned remarks and short on contrition, the apologies of the Astros players, management and ownership whiffed on all three counts.

In fact, owner Jim Crane even said, "I don't think I should be held accountable."

Incredibly, Crane also claimed the cheating didn't provide any advantage to the Astros and "didn't impact the game." This is demonstrably false based on home and away batting average splits for Astros players, and would indicate that the organization engaged in a yearslong, high-tech scheme to steal signs despite it yielding no benefits.

In the end, the Astros apology was that they got caught up in something they were powerless to stop, and that did not provide them any benefit anyways, but they want to ask for your forgiveness anyways.

Of course, this is utterly unbelievable and the public and media backlash resulted in the apology press conference counterproductive.

Dealing with crisis is part of the human condition, whether you are a business leader, lawyer, public relations professional, politician, teacher or deal with fellow humans, and the mishandling of this cheating scandal by the Astros provides an opportunity to learn from their failure, which can often be as important as learning from success.

"Tell the truth, tell the whole truth, and tell it quickly," is good advice for crisis managers, because we are all crisis managers every day.

David Winker is a business lawyer in South Florida and regular attendee of Astros spring training games at Ballpark of the Palm Beaches.