I was rooting for the Houston Astros to win the World Series in 2017. I liked their energy, their pluckiness, and the fact that the franchise had never won a world championship. I thought they played the game the right way and it was fun to watch.
With the revelations that the Astros were involved in a serious cheating scandal involving stealing other teams’ signs, that victory is forever tainted. And my view of the Astros organization, just like many other people’s, has been changed forever.
Alex Cora was a coach on that team. The next year he became the manager of the Boston Red Sox, who went on to win the 2018 World Series. Now the Red Sox have also been identified as using high tech devices to steal signs and aid their players in knowing what pitches are coming next. (I did not root for the Red Sox because, well, they’re the Red Sox.)
Cora has been fired. The Astros’ manager and general manager have been canned, all after Major League Baseball suspended them for a year to begin with. Teams are being fined millions of dollars and losing draft picks. And yet it doesn’t seem like enough.
When the Minnesota Golden Gophers went to the Final Four for men’s college basketball in 1997, there was a lot of excitement in the state. Even though that team lost in the semifinals, it was a great season. However, it later came out that many of the players had received too much help in writing papers and passing classes. As a result, people lost their jobs and the team wasn’t allowed as many scholarships for a while. But the biggest part of that punishment was that Minnesota was no longer recognized as having reached the Final Four. That season didn’t count. Every game was a loss as a result of their cheating. We might always remember watching those games, but they didn’t actually happen according to the powers that be.
Perhaps this is what MLB should have considered as the ultimate way to discourage this type of cheating: take away the World Series trophies from the Astros and the Red Sox. Would they have won those years if they hadn’t used surveillance equipment to steal signs and relay them to their own batters? Maybe. But it sure is an advantage when you know if it’s a fastball or a changeup on its way.
Have other teams been doing this? It seems quite possible. And look, teams have been stealing signs in baseball since the sport began. But that involved players on base looking in at the catcher or watching the third base coach and seeing patterns in his signs. There’s nothing wrong with that since both teams have an equal opportunity to try that, not dependant on whether you are playing in your home ballpark or not. That’s gamesmanship.
How about the New England Patriots in the National Football League? They’ve been caught cheating as many times as they’ve won the Super Bowl it seems like. They get fined or lose draft picks, but the organization keeps rolling on. Whether they’re illegally filming the opposing sideline or deflating footballs to make them easier to grip, it seems like scandal always hangs over the Bill Belicheck-coached team. Thus, it makes it that much easier to root against the Patriots because of the tomfoolery and skulduggery.
Understand, there is a difference between breaking the rules and cheating. In basketball, if you get called for a foul, you’re breaking the rules, not cheating. I would teach my post defenders to push and hold and do everything to keep the post player from getting position on the blocks and having a good chance to get the ball. Do it until the refs blow the whistle for a foul. Don’t do it blatantly, but try to see what you can get away with. That’s part of the game.
The same thing happens in football. If you’re a lineman, you see what you can get away with when it comes to holding the defender. As soon as the referee throws a flag on you, it stops. But you try to gain an advantage as long as you can.
But if you rub a foreign substance on a baseball before you throw it, that’s considered cheating. A player can be ejected for that because of that aura of it being beyond just breaking the rules. Again, there are plenty of players who try it, I’m sure, but not too many because of that potential penalty.
Now, one would think, the stealing of signs by baseball teams via illicit means will come to a halt. Nobody wants to face the repercussions MLB has set as a standard for that activity. Or do they? As long as millions of dollars and the prestige of a championship trophy are at stake, teams and players and coaches will try to blur the line of what is okay, all in the name of winning.
Will the fans of the Astors or Red Sox look back on their World Series victories with the brush of taint they deserve? Or maybe, like the New Orleans Saints, who won the Super Bowl in part because of their Bountygate scandal, they will face years of bad karma by losing in strange and bizarre ways in the playoffs.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is gaminesque, which means playfully mischievous, as in, “The kids were gaminesque in their kickball game until one player took things too seriously and yelled at others for not following the rules.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!