Is MLB right to let the cheating Houston Astros keep their title?
Say one of your city’s baseball teams loses in the World Series two years in a row. That’s a tough pill to swallow, right? Wait, it gets worse. What if it turns out the two teams they lost to were cheats? What would your response be?
Well, if you’re the city of Los Angeles, you respond by petitioning Major League Baseball to vacate the results of both the 2017 and 2018 World Series. Unfortunately for them, it looks like the MLB commissioner, Rob Manfred, has no interest in changing the record books despite the sign-stealing scandal that has engulfed the Houston Astros and the Boston Red Sox.
Related: Is cheating the rotten heart of American sports?
What exactly did the City of Los Angeles do?
The Los Angeles City Council unanimously agreed to approve a resolution requesting MLB strip the 2017 Astros and the 2018 Red Sox of their World Series wins, retroactively handing them to the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team that was on the losing end of both series.
Do they have a case?
Absolutely. An MLB investigation determined that the 2017 Astros relied on videotape to help capture opponents’ signals, including those made by the Dodgers during the World Series. While stealing signs that pitchers and catchers use to determine what pitches they throw is part of the game, the rules stipulate that it’s illegal to rely on electronic devices to do so.
The league was quick to deliver punishments to the Astros. They suspended Houston general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch – both of whom were immediately fired by the organization – and fined the team $5m while taking away 2020 and 2021 draft picks. The league, however, didn’t single out any players.
The scandal doesn’t end there. It is believed that Alex Cora, a bench coach on the 2017 Astros, brought the sign-stealing system with him to Boston when he was hired to replace John Farrell as manager. The league has yet to announce its findings on the Red Sox, and the team is pleading with the public to “reserve judgment.” Still, the fact that the team parted ways with Cora suggests that there will be similar punishments levied against them.
Related: How the Houston Astros went from champions to a shamed shambles
What was MLB’s reaction to the resolution?
To nobody’s surprise, they have made it clear they are not going to open that particular Pandora’s Box. In an interview with Fox Business Network, Manfred announced that he would continue in baseball’s long tradition of not changing history. “I think the answer from our perspective is to be transparent about what the investigation showed and let our fans make their own decision about what happened,” Manfred said on Wednesday while adding that the league’s investigation into the 2018 Red Sox is ongoing.
Would there have been any precedent for stripping teams of their titles?
Not in MLB. The NCAA has vacated individual wins and championships from teams that have been caught violating its rules but it’s not something that has caught on with professional sports in the US.
What’s preventing MLB from doing so?
As Manfred noted in his interview, it is “absolutely unclear that the Dodgers would have been the World Series champion” had the Astros not cheated. There’s a long history of cheating and corruption in MLB history and the general trend has been not to retroactively alter the record books. It is impossible to say what the results would have been had the series been played fairly.
We know now, for instance, that the New York Giants had a sign-stealing system in place when they defeated (who else but) the Brooklyn Dodgers in the immortal “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” game to win the National League pennant in 1951. They remain listed as the official pennant-winners for that year. The Cincinnati Reds are still listed as the winners of the 1919 World Series, even though the Chicago White Sox threw the entire series. It’s almost impossible to know how many MLB teams have won championships with players who were taking banned substances. Once one begins trying to correct the sins of the past, there’s never an end to it.
Couldn’t they at least add asterisks to the World Series in question?
This was a compromise that many writers proposed in the aftermath of the Steroids Era, when players who were found to have been using PEDs ended up rewriting the record books: keep the records intact but add an asterisk indicating that the record was illegitimate. The idea of the asterisk comes as the result of a myth surrounding the circumstances of Roger Maris setting the regular-season home run record in 1961. The story was that the league put an asterisk next to his name because he had more games to beat out Babe Ruth’s previous record. In truth, there never was an official asterisk on Maris’s name. It was proposed by Commissioner Fred Frick, but it was never really implemented except in the public imagination.
In other words, asterisks in baseball aren’t really a thing. At least not yet. It’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that, once the investigation into the Red Sox has completed, Manfred could bring up the idea, but there’s no suggestion that this is on the table.
Is there any sort of way that the league can make this right?
No, not really. There isn’t a perfect solution here beyond making sure that the league is as transparent as possible going forward. The Dodgers will be listed as the losers of the 2017 (and 2018) World Series, but everyone will remember that the Astros essentially cheated. It’s quite possible that the 2018 World Series will end up being a question mark as well. This probably won’t satisfy the Los Angeles City Council, but it’s probably what they will have to settle for unless Congress gets involved.
To put it bluntly, there are no winners here.
