Manfred mulled expunging ’17 title
Players would be punished in ‘perfect world’ for MLB
NORTH PORT, Fla. — In a perfect world, Astros players from the team’s 2017 World Series championship season would have been punished by Major League Baseball.
Astros haters have been screaming that ever since commissioner Rob Manfred issued his franchiseand sport-changing report on Jan. 13.
Three hours away from the Astros’ spring-training complex, Manfred said the words himself Sunday. They were passionate. Clearly thought out. And the strongest symbol to date showing just how much Manfred and MLB struggled with the final decision in a sign
stealing investigation that continues to dominate baseball’s national headlines.
Manfred opened his annual Grapefruit League media interview by immediately acknowledging that pretty much his entire 28-minute press conference would be devoted to the endless debate surrounding Houston’s professional baseball club.
Hands were raised. A microphone was passed around. And except for a much-needed update on MLB’s ongoing investigation of the Boston Red Sox and the controversial status of the Atlanta Braves’ famous tomahawk chop, it was almost all Astros for the man who basically gave the sport’s 2017 champion a permanent asterisk.
“The long offseason is about to come to an end, and we’re going to be playing baseball again soon,” Manfred said at the Braves’ sparkling new complex. “I’m particularly looking forward to it this year. In case any of you have been away, it has been a long offseason this year.”
“Long” received extra empha
sis from the beleaguered commish.
So did this: “I’m going to answer, I’m sure, a lot of questions about the Houston situation.”
Before it was over, Manfred sarcastically zinged a reporter for discovering a private email that highlighted the dark-arts codebreaking origins of the Astros’ sign-stealing actions and said that MLB seriously considered stripping the franchise of its only World Series trophy.
“We thought about it,” Manfred said. “It was actually one of the — if you talk about minutes of discussion during the process, it was high, in terms of the minutes that we spent talking about it.”
No matter how you feel about everything that has happened thus far and the fallout that refuses to end, that honest public statement from the commissioner of MLB has to hit you like a million bricks.
Major League Baseball thought long and hard about stripping the Astros of the world championship they won during the year of Hurricane Harvey.
“It had never happened in baseball,” Manfred said. “I’m a precedent guy. I’m not saying you always follow precedent, but
I think you ought to start by looking back at the way things have been done. You have to have a really good reason to depart from that precedent.”
The commissioner then stressed that baseball’s primary objective during the investigation was to obtain as much factual information as possible, present the discovered facts to the public and allow the public to form its own opinion about what actually happened during the 2017 regular season and playoffs.
“If nothing else, I think we can all agree that we’ve gotten enough facts out there that plenty of people have made their judgments as to what went on,” Manfred said. “Once you have a situation in which the 2017 World Series will always be looked at as something different, whether or not you put an asterisk or ask for the trophy back, I don’t think it makes that much difference.”
No wonder #FireManfred was trending on Twitter — before Manfred answered his first Q inside a facility decorated by oversized images of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Dale Murphy.
Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees and Astros fans are in perfect agreement about this:
A team possessing or being forced to give up a World Series trophy is life-altering.
Manfred saying anything else completely trivializes a sport that is supposed to be founded upon the sacredness of its history.
In an earlier interview with ESPN, Manfred said he ranked the severity of the Astros’ signstealing system only below the 1919 Chicago Black Sox. Which means that, according to the commish, the 2017-18 Astros topped MLB’s era-altering steroid scandal.
Sunday afternoon, Manfred revealed the dark, conflicting inner core of a decision that will affect the Astros and MLB for as long as baseball is played.
To obtain as much information as possible, Manfred decided to grant players immunity when they revealed all. That led to season-long suspensions for former manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow, who were immediately fired by Astros owner Jim Crane.
But in Manfred’s self-described perfect world?
The commissioner of MLB would have punished the Astros’ players, since they were the ones directly involved in cheating that
impacted the outcomes of games.
“Look, it is impossible, given the facts that we found — and frankly, the statements of the Astros’ players since the decision came out — to escape the fact that, independent of what the GM did, the manager did, (the players) had an obligation to play by the rules, and they didn’t do it,” Manfred said. “I understand when people say, ‘The players should have been punished.’ I understand why people feel that way, because they did not do the right thing. And my reference to a perfect world was, if I was in a world where I could have found all the facts, without granting immunity, I would have done that.”
Manfred raised his voice while speaking those last five words.
The commissioner who seriously considered taking back the Astros’ 2017 World Series trophy told baseball fans across the globe what he personally wanted to do but was unable to officially make happen.
On the fourth day of spring training for a new season, that was all that needed to be said.
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