Time to trash ‘everyone did it’ cheating excuse
The “everyone else in Major League Baseball was cheating just like the Astros” idea that some have been desperately clinging to ever since the Astros’ 2017 World Series championship was tarnished?
That conspiracy theory received a major hit Wednesday. Thanks to MLB.
You’re going to believe whatever you want to believe. This is America. And Houston. Maybe you’re going to start wearing a mask in public because an elected official said you have to. Maybe you’ll proudly fly your personal freedom flag and insist heck no.
But if you still believe in the governing power of MLB, the grand ol’ game said this in another exhaustive sign-stealing report authored by commissioner Rob Manfred: Boston cheated while
playing baseball games in 2018. But the Red Sox’s cheating had nothing on the Astros’ team-wide cheating in 2017 and ’18.
Ex-Boston manager Alex Cora was suspended for the 2020 season — because of what he did when he was the Astros’ bench coach in 2017.
Someone named J.T. Watkins was named by MLB as a fall guy.
The Red Sox lost a 2020 second-round pick. And really, that was it. Cora had already lost his job, thanks to his topsecret work with the Astros. When you remember that Watkins wasn’t on Boston’s 25-man roster during the team’s recordsetting 108-win season in 2018 — when the Red Sox blasted the Astros out of the American League Championship Series 4-1 — you immediately realize MLB spent months investigating one of the sport’s legacy franchises, then ultimately docked Boston a second-round pick.
Swing. And miss. Astros owner Jim Crane coldly fired Jeff Luhnow, the general manager who constructed an annual 100-game winner, and A.J. Hinch, the manager who kept navigating his club through controversy after controversy on the way to two World Series appearances in three seasons. Houston’s MLB team also received a $5 million fine, the maximum allowed by the league, and lost its firstand second-round picks in back-to-back seasons.
From a national perspective?
From a historical baseball perspective?
The Red Sox won, and the Astros lost. Big time.
The Astros are mentioned five times in Manfred’s highly detailed 15page report. None of the references are complimentary.
“I find that unlike the Houston Astros’ 2017 conduct, in which players communicated to the batter from the dugout area in real time the precise type of pitch about to be thrown, Watkins’s conduct, by its very nature, was far more limited in scope and impact,” Manfred wrote.
Reading between all of the commissioner’s lines: The culture created by the Astros during their once-golden era set up their downfall and contributed to the heavy hammer they received.
“Everybody wants to be the best player in the (bleeping) world, man,” former Astro Evan Gattis recently told The Athletic on a podcast. “And we cheated that, for sure. And we obviously cheated baseball and cheated fans. Fans felt duped. I feel bad for fans.
“I’m not asking for sympathy or anything like that. If our punishment is being hated by everybody forever, just like, whatever. I don’t know what should be done, but something had to (bleeping) be done. I do agree with that, big time. I do think it’s good for baseball that we’re cleaning it up . ... And I understand that it’s not (bleeping) good enough to say sorry. I get it.”
Those brutally honest words say much more than a defiant Carlos Correa did at the start of spring training, when the shortstop oddly attempted to defend his World Series-winning team — while again acknowledging that the 2017 Astros cheated.
Some will now insist the Red Sox got off easy.
Get ready for local talk radio yapping about standard East Coast bias.
MLB did leave itself open to lingering criticism, though.
Manfred lightly punished Boston in 2017 after the Apple Watch controversy. A year later, the Red Sox regularly cheated during the regular season, according to Manfred’s report. Yet the team that won an MLB-best 108 games and received homefield advantage throughout the playoffs still possesses a sparkling 2018 world title?
Something about that last sentence doesn’t make complete sense.
Neither does the contemporary intrusion of video in a sport still played with a ball, bat and glove. MLB’s World Series winners from 2017 and ’18 were thoroughly investigated this offseason, while the ’19 World Series losers were constantly forced to defend themselves in public. If there is a MLB-related positive to the coronavirus, it’s the fact baseball has a ton of free time to fix its inability to police itself around video-replay monitors.
A crazy idea: Restrict video access to pre and postgame. Professional hitters are good enough to face pitchers in-game without having to watch intricate replays of their swings after every at-bat. They also batted .300 for a long time without instant video nearby.
Unless some new rulebreaker from 2017-18 is produced, the Astros’ latest chapter has been written.
MLB investigated the Red Sox but allowed Boston’s latest world title to remain on display. When MLB was finally done with the Red Sox, the Astros’ 2017 asterisk still looked the same.
There’s also a shot that Cora could get his old job back — with the 2018 World Series winners.