Thoughts On Astros Sign Stealing

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Strip title. All players and anyone else involved should be banned from baseball or at least suspended for a year or two.
Applies to Red Sox too.
 
Strip title. All players and anyone else involved should be banned from baseball or at least suspended for a year or two.
Applies to Red Sox too.
I agree on bans. If you are going to ban the black sox, and continue to ban Pete Rose, these players not being punished is a great injustice.
 
Strip the title from the 2017 Astros and leave the title vacant. If I was a member of the 2017 Dodgers I wouldn't want a title with an asterisk next to it. Rob Manfred's opportunity to suspend players who were involved came and went. He hasn't acquitted himself well in this whole mess. The MLB players union will fight any suspensions. It will be an ugly public spectacle.
 
Since I have long held the position that all major sporting events are "predetermined", I'm surprised that anyone is surprised. Too much money changes hands to leave things to skill or chance.

In the old NASCAR days, the saying was "If you an't cheating a little, you ain't trying". Things have moved to a whole new level since then.
 
Although I too feel that the punishment seemed too light, I appreciate the difficulty MLB found itself in when it comes to potential harsher penalties.

Forfeiture of the title would be a huge step and a departure from the norm in major professional sports. Since such a punishment is unprecedented, you would in effect be saying that this infraction is the most serious one ever perpetrated in major professional sports—at least, the punishment would be the most serious ever imposed. I don't like the way the Astros cheated, but I'm not sure it was quite that bad. Perhaps a future postseason ban would be a more proportional consequence.

Punishment of players runs into the problem of how to identify everyone involved and how to determine how serious their involvement was. Do you only punish the ringleaders who set up the system? Or do you also punish those who relayed signals? What about batters who received signals while at the plate but may not have actively asked for the illegal help and did not participate otherwise? Do you punish players who merely knew about the scheme and failed to report their teammates? It gets awfully dicey, and if players had been punished we might be talking about how unfairly or unevenly those punishments were doled out. So I can see why it made some sense just to hold the team's leaders responsible for a teamwide cheating scheme.

Still, it feels like some players surely got away with something that should have league-imposed consequences. The extent of player- or public-imposed consequences remains to be seen.
 
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