Major League Baseball Blew It at a Time When Its Credibility is at a 100-Year Low

Players want to win so badly they apparently devise a scheme to cheat.  At least one coach, educated at an elite school, is a ringleader.  The project gains momentum.  The team installs surveillance cameras to steal signs from the catcher to the pitcher and then relays them to the hitters.  The hitters, sometimes moody fellows, are very happy.  They know what pitches they will be facing -- like having the questions to the exam before the date of the test.  Whoopie! 

The manager, educated at an even more elite school than the coach, tried to stopped it a few times but failed to report these serious integrity violations up the reporting chain -- in this case, to his general manager, a very well-educated fellow himself.  The team already had a reputation for being difficult; it had to fire an assistant general manager for insensitive comments to women reporters after a relief pitcher with a history of domestic abuse helped the team win a key game.  Got all that?  And the general manager had an inkling himself that something strange was going on.

The evidence was pretty cut and dried.  Some team leader -- presumably a veteran who oddly enough is now the manager of another team or the coach in question (who just got fired as the manager of a team that won the World Series a year after this team did) instructed personnel to put up surveillance cameras to steal the signs of their opponents.  And then the players figured out ingenious ways to relay to their teammates in the batter's box what pitch was coming, including banging on a trash can in the dugout.  Perhaps the hardest thing to do in all of sports is to hit Major League pitching -- it comes at the batter very quickly and the player has no idea -- in a perfect world -- how the pitch might move or how fast it will be.  (Teams use neuroscience tests to evaluate the reaction times of prospects when they evaluate them for their draft of amateur players).    But the batter can do much better when his teammates let him know what is coming.  The splits that this team -- the Houston Astros -- had in the World Series in 2017 were pronounced -- it hit much better at home, where it had the cameras and relayed signals to hitters, than on the road. 

Scandal?  You bet.  Integrity of the game damaged?  Definitely.  Character of the game in major question after this?  Of course.  Especially after the league has endured -- in the past three decades -- the steroids scandal, a pretty much covered up scandal about the widespread use of amphetamines, and a scandal about the signing of international players that cost one general manager his job (the Braves' GM at the time).  Major League Baseball is a listing ship in so many ways, and over the past three decades it has struggled mightily to counter the notion that it does not pay to cheat.

Because it has paid for players and teams to cheat, especially while the players and teams were cheating.  Records were broken, contracts were awarded with huge dollar amounts, championships were won.  Oh, sure, now some of the perpetrators cannot get voted into the Hall of Fame and have been publicly shamed, but it does not seem that anyone has learned any lessons from what happened even thirty years ago, let alone in 1919 with the Black Sox scandal.  Cheating seems to be ingrained in the culture of the game, and it reappears in different forms seemingly every five years in some way and every quarter-century in a major way.

So, presented with all of the evidence, what did Major League Baseball do?  Its commissioner, Rob Manfred, cut a sweetheart deal with the Astros (even if it included fines and a forfeiture of draft picks) after you get past the fact that he ultimately compelled the termination of employment of their heralded general manager/manager duo of Jeffrey Luhnow (for overseeing a bad culture and knowing some of what was going on) and A.J. Hinch (for overseeing a bad culture, knowing about what was going on and failing to stop it).  Atop that, the commissioner muzzled every other team from talking about this scandal.  Right now, the Astros are a disgrace, and the Red Sox are about to be labeled as one.  And the Los Angeles Dodgers, who lost to both teams in the 2017 and 2018 World Series, respectively, should be silent?  Seriously?

Even more importantly, the commissioner failed to take any action against the players.  The reasoning he offered was that the GM and manager are responsible for the behavior of the players.  My guess is that the commissioner did one of three things.  He acted like the big-law firm lawyer he once was and got the players to cooperate in exchange for leniency -- so that he could land bigger fish in the general manager and manager.  That's a typical tactic of prosecutors in a white-collar crime investigation -- go after upper management, not the workers.  Sometimes it is in the right thing to do, but on other occasions it is not (and Crane was exonerated because there was no evidence that he knew what was going on).  The second theory is that he cut a deal with Jim Crane, the Astros' owner, so that in exchange for ultimately having the Astros fire Luhnow and Hinch, Crane got to save his players, the team's competitiveness and his revenues.  Because if MLB went after players and suspended a good part of the Astros' roster, no one would go see them play and they might set an all-time record for losses in a season.  The third theory is that Manfred was fearful of a prolonged battle with the players' union that might last into the negotiations of a new collective bargaining agreement, which is bound to be hotly negotiated.  So, he pulled his punches.

None of the above is acceptable if Major League Baseball wants to maintain its integrity.  If he went after upper management so as to send a message that they are responsible for the entire team's behavior, that's fine, but it does not go far enough.  I have no problem with the termination of Luhnow and Hinch; they should have been fired.  But Manfred failed to go far enough.  And, in white-collar criminal prosecutions that result in charges against higher ups, that does not mean that the company does not terminate or take disciplinary action against those who were involved in the bad behavior, even if no criminal charges were brought.  But what owner will take a stand for integrity that will cost it some very good players and its revenue?  Apparently, all owners are okay with what Manfred did.

If Manfred cut a deal with Crane to save Crane's team's 2017 World Series title, his revenues and future seasons (this one, which had Manfred pursued players might have been played with a makeshift roster), he failed to protect the game.  Fans will call the Astros cheaters in perpetuity and, worse, be forever skeptical that MLB will ever do the right thing when it comes to matters of character and integrity.  Imagine the booing -- both against the Astros and targeted at current and former Astros.  It will be fierce.  Strip the Astros of their title, hurt them at the gate and punish players -- then everyone gets closure.  But right now, there is none and does not look like there is going to be any.

If Manfred avoided a fight with the players' union because, well, in his mind there were just too many players to discipline, he whiffed big time.  So what if the union were to grieve punishments and prolong the process?  Fight them every step of the way.  The institution of Major League Baseball should have the high ground here.  But by not taking disciplinary action against players, it surrendered it.

So where are we now?  This is a sport that once was the national pastime.  Now, it is a shadow of its former self and in crisis.  By failing to address this cheating scandal with complete measures, it sends a message to players that they still can cheat and win titles and to fans that they cannot trust the people who run the game or who play it.  Baseball not only should take the steps I outlined above, they also should create an Office of the Commissioner that has enough independence to do what is right in the eyes of all of the game's constituents, and not just the owners.

Just when you thought Major League Baseball could not go any lower than the steroids scandal . . . this.

And it stinks.