Rant #2,505: Bad

Well now, Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora has gotten the boot for his part in the Major League Baseball cheating scandal when he was the bench coach of the Houston Astros back in 2017, and who goes down next?

Could it be the only implicated player, Carlos Beltran, who is today the newly named manager of the New York Mets?

MLB clearly did not want to deal with the players union in handing out punishment, so it stayed clear of giving any Houston Astros player on the 2017 championship team any punishment.

However, Beltran was the only player named in the report on the cheating scandal.

He was also squeaky clean before this, baseball's Latin version of Jack Armstrong, and nobody had a negative word to say about him.

He will also be eligible for the Hall of Fame in a few years, and that is where the ultimate punishment might be found, and maybe that is another reason that MLB has held off on Beltran.

He has Hall of Fame statistics, and might just be a first-ballot shoo-in when his time comes. But with this major blemish on his record, Beltran might just suffer the same fate as the PEDers, who have had their records tainted by their use--either admitted to or assumed--of drugs to boost their performance.

Carlos Beltran, and Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens--strange bedfellows indeed, but perhaps this scandal will force voters to look at Beltran as nothing but a cheater, as the other two have been looked at since they became eligible for the Hall of Fame.

And then we have Pete Rose, another MLB cheater who has so many marks against him that it is insane that some people are lumping him in with those cheaters.

What Rose did was even worse--bet on his own team while its manager--and he has so many other notches on his belt that some are making him something of an "elder statesman" of the cheating crowd, someone to go to and ask his opinion related to the latest cheating scandal.

That's like asking a jailbird what he thinks of his fellow inmates, and how does his penalty rate against theirs, and how insipidly stupid is that?

Baseball has had cheating scandals throughout its history, including the infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal, where several members of the Chicago White Sox were proven to have thrown the World Series at the behest of the mob.

There were other things involved in this travesty--including the fact that some of the player participants, including Shoeless Joe Jackson, signed paperwork acknowledging their role in the scandal even though they were illiterate and could not possibly have read or understood what they were signing--but baseball took care of this, and such an incident never reared its ugly head again in the sport, or at least at such a level.

There have been other cheating scandals in the sport, including the one involving Rose, who might have not cheated--we will never know--but betted on his own team, which is a no-no in any sport known to man, and there has been the PED scandal, where certain players used illegal substances to pump themselves up.

Baseball has always taken care of these situations, and commissioner Rob Manfred proved that he, too, would follow suit, and acted swiftly after the cheating report came out.

Baseball is our national pastime, but like just about any organization, it is open to outside influences. And it is certainly open to money too.

On top of players' incredible salaries, teams that make it to the World Series, and win the Series, are also open to huge payouts, and the reach for the almighty dollar might far outweigh sportsmanship when it comes to what one, or a team, does to get the ultimate prize.

If Beltran was the only player implicated in this latest scandal, it is up to MLB to punish him, with monetarily, through suspension, or a mix of both. It is not the Mets' problem, so to speak, what he did with another organization, and it might not be fair to penalize them for his indiscretions by suspending him.

But a monetary fine--perhaps turning over a good portion of his salary to a needy institution--might be the answer, one that would satisfy everybody's taste for penance by the player.

But again, the Hall of Fame beckons, and that is where the court of public opinion might put him in with Clemens, Bonds and lesser lights like Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa as far as cheaters are concerned.

We will know when Beltran's candidacy comes up, and we just might have to wait for that to happen to feel that he finally got punished for his actions, and the punishment was a just one.

Time will tell, time heals all wounds and Beltran, like Cora and Hinsch, will get his due, just not as quickly as the others.