Stain will be hard for Astros to remove

To many, the Astros will always be the team that wore bright, darn-near day-glo striped uniforms in the 1970s.

Those were ugly to most Boomers, cool as all get-out to people with style, but forever burned into the memory banks. Some stains do not come out. The cheating stain the Astros are about to have splashed on them like a bucket of ink will never go away.

As magical as that 2017 World Series run was to most Houstonians, there will be an asterisk attached to it for a significant number of baseball fans and, even worse, a host of people who don’t care about the game at all.

Sign-stealing by using a video camera, which the Astros are accused of doing, is something anyone who plays by the rules would not do. This isn’t about whether the Astros deserved to

win the World Series — they did. It is about the organization’s showing a serious lack of class in a way that does not deserve forgiveness.

When the story broke this week that the Patriots were being investigated for persons associated with the team recording the Bengals’ sidelines a week before the teams were scheduled to meet, it didn’t matter whether New England was guilty of trying to cheat.

The Patriots don’t get the benefit of the doubt because the franchise is on lifetime probation.

When I Googled “Patriots cheating” Wednesday afternoon, the first result was a column titled: “Cheating Patriots should be banned from NFL playoffs.”

As absurd as that sounds, the Patriots brought this on themselves by being repeat cheaters.

The Astros are on the cusp of become baseball’s Patriots, without the championships.

With one lone World Series title — one about to be tarnished with a cheating scandal — the Astros will have an even more difficult time shaking the rap than New England, which won three Super Bowls before Spygate and three after.

Spygate, the name placed on the controversy surrounding the Patriots’ use of video cameras to tape opponents’ signals — almost the exact crime the

Astros are charged with — cost the Patriots a firstround draft pick, coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000, and the franchise was tagged for $250,000.

There was a good argument that the Patriots didn’t break an actual rule, just the spirit of it, yet the team’s reputation took a permanent hit.

Then there was Deflategate, a situation in which the Patriots were accused of letting the air out of footballs in the 2014 playoffs because that is how quarterback Tom Brady preferred them.

The Patriots were fined $1 million and had firstand fourth-round draft picks taken away. Brady served a four-game suspension, then led the team to 14 wins in 15 games,

rallied it to a Super Bowl win over Atlanta at NRG Stadium, and was named the game’s MVP.

Two years later, New England won another Super Bowl.

And still, as good as they are, the Patriots are called cheaters.

At the NFL winter meetings, commissioner Roger Goodell said the Patriots’ history of cheating will of course be a factor in how the league weighs this latest infraction.

The Patriots aren’t stupid enough to cheat the way everyone says they did in this case, but it matters not to many. Once a cheater, always a cheater.

That is almost certainly going to be the Astros’ fate.

MLB is taking this issue

so seriously that commissioner Rob Manfred described it as “probably the most thorough” inquiry the league has ever done.

That is incredible considering the Mitchell Report looked at steroid use in all of baseball.

Perhaps Manfred was making a distinction between the commissioner’s office conducting this investigation as opposed to the look into juicing being done by an independent party.

Regardless, with already 60-plus interviews and the review of nearly 80,000 emails, MLB will find a smoking gun if there is one.

Every person I have talked to who is associated with MLB — former players, managers and scouts — says what the Astros are

accused of crosses the line in terms of “fair cheating.” Seriously, that’s what one said.

“If you’re gonna cheat, you gotta cheat right,” he said.

As hilarious as that sounds, there is honor among those thieves, and apparently the Astros showed none.

It’s a shame too, because the 2017 championship squad earned that victory with tremendous talent, superb play, and outstanding clutch moments.

The team didn’t cheat to win.

It won. And it cheated (allegedly).

Sadly, in the end, that won’t matter.