Lack of baseball takes heat off Houston Astros but cheating is not new

MLB has a long way to go to achieve a level playing field
Former Houston Astros manager AJ Hinch who was fired by the team after the sign-stealing scandal broke.Former Houston Astros manager AJ Hinch who was fired by the team after the sign-stealing scandal broke.
Former Houston Astros manager AJ Hinch who was fired by the team after the sign-stealing scandal broke.

We are four days away from what would have been the opening day of the 2020 Major League Baseball Season, a new term

that, even before current events, would have been overshadowed by close-season events.

In November an article in The

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Athletic led the League Commissioners down a disciplinary path against the Houston Astros, a team who are in a purple patch of success after, in the past three seasons, two World Series appearances and a championship game. The Astros had been using a camera in centre field to film the catcher’s signals to the pitcher, then relaying this information to the batter, giving them an advantage.

Commissioner Rob Manfred met the revelations with harsh punishments as major league baseball had previously sent out communications stating that anyone caught cheating would receive unprecedented punishment.

Manfred followed through taking four draft picks from the Astros organisation, adding a $5million fine and suspending Houston general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch for a year. Both Luhnow and Hinch were fired from the organisation, while former bench coach Alex Cora was sacked by the Red Sox where he had

taken up the manager’s position.

Sign stealing isn’t new in baseball with plenty of documented incidents from the past, so why is it so important?

When a pitcher steps up to the mound he doesn’t just throw the ball as hard as he can, he’ll look at his arsenal of pitches ranging from fastball – does what it says on the tin – to curves, slider, knuckleballs, with many other variations. The pitcher tries to trick the batter into lousy contact or swinging at a ball too early or too late. The catcher advises the pitcher on what to throw as they usually have detailed notes on each batter and their hitting.

So if a batter knows to expect a curveball then, he knows what movement the ball will have, what speed it will be coming at and he can decide before the pitch whether he is swinging or not – advantage gained.

The Astros used their system and were caught and while Spring Training was on – effectively friendly games – other players were venting their frustration. A common way to show annoyance in baseball is to throw pitches directly at the batter, and this was happening in Spring Training – remember these are friendlies – with seven players hit before the season was suspended.

But sign stealing isn’t new, in fact as long as it’s a player on the field it’s an integral part of the game. The Astros aren’t even the first team to use TV to do it, with both the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees having been reprimanded for using it to cheat in 1969 when NBC first put a camera in the outfield.

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If you go back further into the baseball annals you’ll find stories of dodgy weather vanes, rented apartments overlooking fields, and holes drilled in scoreboards; it isn’t that new.

I can understand that fans and players alike were frustrated by the actions of the Astros and the fact that they won their first World Series doing so, but if it’s fairness, the masses want then MLB has a long way to go.

Yankees fans were some of the more vociferous when the Astros allegations were made, feeling they were slighted the most, having lost to Houston in the ALCS (the World Series “semi-final”) in 2017. The Yankees as an organisation has surpassed the “luxury tax” barrier each year since 2003, that’s 17 years in a row.

The Luxury Tax is an amount payable if a team exceeds the league’s salary cap and in those 17 years, the Bronx Bombers have paid nearly $320million in “taxes”, a staggering $120million more than all the other opposing teams combined.

So for baseball fans to truly experience a fair and balanced game, would it not make sense for teams to agree on a hard salary cap and a more equitable distribution of wealth?

And while fans out there throw “shade” at the Astros let’s remember that a team that has made the play-offs 14 times since 2002 don’t really want fairness in the league, they simply want to be able to buy championships.