Rant #2,465: Liar, Liar

The term "whistleblower" has been around forever, but it has crept into our consciousness once again because of allegations related to the impeachment process revolving around President Donald Trump.

Whistleblowers are people who have supposedly pertinent information revolving around a person's indiscretions, put it on the table, and in doing so, are protected from any type of payback by those they are accusing of misdeeds.

Currently, we don't know whether our President will have to face his demons--it isn't clear yet what the whistleblowers have said is true or false, and whether the allegations are being used to thwart the President's 2020 reelection campaign, and I am not going to get into right now whether I personally believe any of this stuff.

But now we have another set of whistleblowers, who claim that one of Major League Baseball's top teams has cheated, and cheated again and again, to get to the top of our national pastime.

At the baseball meetings in Arizona, a major story has come out from The Athletic that the Houston Astros--World Series champions in 2017 and American League champions in 2019--cheated on at least the New York Yankees in the 2017 League Championship Series.

First off, how did they do it? According to the whistleblowers--who I will get to in a minute--they used cameras positioned to pick up the opposing catcher's signs--in this case, the Yankees' Gary Sanchez--and relayed the information to the dugout, where between video and the simple banging of garbage pails, batters were able to know what pitch was coming their way.

Now, just because a batter knows what pitch is being thrown to him doesn't guarantee he will be successful--many players are "guess hitters," not wanting to know what is being thrown to them--other players relish knowing what pitch they are going to get, because they can adapt to that pitch, maybe change their stance or their stroke a bit, and this can lead to success.

According to two former pitchers, one of them, Mike Fiers, on  the Astros 2017 staff and the other, Danny Fahrquahr, a member of the Chicago White Sox staff during that season, this ploy was used during the American League Championship Series in 2017, when the Astros beat the Yankees four games to three and went to the World Series, winning it all that year.

Lending credence to the accusations is that the Astros won all four games at their home park and the Yankees won all their three games at their home park.

Video evidence has been provided by the White Sox pitcher during one of his own pitching performances, where very clear banging on garbage pails can be heard when the Astros are facing him, and they are all over his best pitches. This is verified by the other pitcher, who claims that when he was with the Astros, the team did this on a regular basis.

Now, banging on garbage pails really doesn't mean anything, but couple that with well-placed video cameras, and what you have is a situation which is not on the up and up,

And the question persists: if the Astros, once the doormat of the league with three straight 100-loss seasons prior to its emergence as one of the elite teams in baseball, not only used these cheating techniques during the 2017 season and into the playoffs and World Series, did they continue to use these techniques during the 2018 season and into the playoffs, and how about the 2019 season, where they made it into the World Series when Jose Altuve homered off of Aroldis Chapman in the American League Championship Series to win that series in walk-off fashion?

This behavior is not fool-proof, of course, as the Astros lost to the Washington Nationals in this year's World Series.

And such behavior is not permitted by the rules of baseball, which really is the bottom line of this whole thing.

Look, baseball has had sign stealers for decades. Teams once said that in the Cleveland Indians' cavernous Municipal Stadium, that the team consistently had people sitting in dead centerfield with binoculars to steal signs, and even players have hung on to their spots on major league rosters by being sign stealers. One of them was Fred "Chicken" Stanley, who played a good part of his career with the Yankees. He rarely played, and was most valuable on the bench because of his penchant for stealing signs.

And then there is the Red Sox, who have been accused of stealing signs every year since I can remember.

But that was then, this is now.

The use of technology is rampant in our civilization. You are using it now to read this blog. But its use in stealing signs is thought to be cheating, and if the Astros are found to be guilty of this, you can expect healthy fines, perhaps the loss of draft choices, and who knows what else.

In a game that basks in its integrity, and onc that has withstood the steroids cheating scandal, this is a heinous act, and one that must be punished.

Baseball is not football, it is not basketball, and it is not hockey. Sure, the integrity of those games is important, too, but in baseball, the integrity of its games and its players is absolutely sacred, and if the Astros did what they are accused of doing, it throws all the statistics on the bubblegum cards into disarray once again as it did during the steroid scandal, and as it did 100 years ago during the Black Sox cheating scandal.

And baseball cannot have that stain its reputation once again as our national pastime.

What's more, if the allegations are found to be true, the difference of millions of dollars going into the coffers of a World Series team and one that was the league runner-up is enough to throw the game into panic mode.

With the bottom line always being defined in dollars, you just know that these allegations are going to be looked at, and looked at thoroughly, and one way or the other, new rules will be created to thwart any such behavior in the future--until new technology is created to circumvent those new rules.