Seemingly everybody cheats
one way or another.
Some people cheat on their taxes.
Others cheat while driving, as they go through stop signs, pass school buses, and speed toward their destination, among other things.
Some people say that we were cheated out of 2020 and maybe even 2021 by the presence of a virus that has established new protocols that are untenable.
Heck, our prior president, Donald Trump, said he was cheated out of a second term by voting irregularities, including people voting more than once, people voting under different names, and people voting who were not citizens and thus, should not have been anywhere near a voting booth.
But most of us who cheat do get away with it, at one level or another, unless you are someone like Bernie Madoff, who cheated with peoples’ money and ended up paying the ultimate price for his shell game.
I mean, how many times have you gotten a ticket for speeding or gong through a red light versus how many times you actually did it?
What I am leading up to here is that in Major League Baseball, cheating, to a certain degree, has been going on since the beginning of time, or in baseball’s case, certainly during the past 100-plus years.
Even non-baseball fans have heard of the 1919 Chicago White Sox, who, during supposedly the last pandemic we had, threw the World Series that year at the behest of some big-time gamblers.
Those participating in the scheme paid for their deeds by being banished from the game, including “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, one of the best players of the era, who was not only “Shoeless,” but he was also evidently “Clueless.”
Flash forward to more recent times, and just about every team has been accused of stealing signs—either “legally” or “illegally”—and some have been found out, but most have not.
When I say “legally,” I mean that there are certain players who have had the knack for being able to pick up things from the other team simply by watching them. Fred “Chicken” Stanley, not one of the greats of the game, was a Hall of Fame sign stealer, and he did it right from his usual perch on the bench.
Then there are the “illegal” sign stealers. Cleveland’s old, cavernous Municipal Stadium was a ripe place for these actions, as people were regularly perched at different points in the often nearly empty 80,000-seat stadium with cameras and other electronic devices stealing signs with aplomb.
And then you have the more recent steroid area, where players were pumping up their bodies with substances to make them both super-human and weird, i.e. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the poster boys of this era, who weren’t really ever convicted of much of anything untoward.
Fast forward to the past few years, and you have teams that are stealing signs electronically through Apple watches and even through … get this … banging on garbage pails.
And the latter is where we sit now, with the Houston Astros having been proven to have stolen signs during at least the 2017 American League Championship Series, but who probably were stealing signs against baseball rules during the entirely of that season and into 2018 and 2019, too, before they were found out.
Sure, a few heads rolled when all of this came out—the manager, a coach, a general manager and one specific player who had retired and was named manager of another team all lost their jobs—but players were given immunity, so with the exception of the one player who had already moved on, none of these players were penalized at all for their wrongdoing, which led to their World Series win in 2017.
Yes, the Astros are still considered World Series champions of 2017, even though they cheated their way to this success.
And what has made it all the more worse is that the main culprits of this nonsense, the very players who benefited from this canard, have pretty much blown it off, and never admitted to doing much of anything wrong.
This has riled some opposing players and many fans of opposing teams, and last night, the Astros met the New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium for the first time with fans in the stands since all of this has come out.
The Astros beat the Yankees in the American League Championship Series of the years that they have been accused of cheating by banging garbage pails to alert batters of what pitch was coming, and the Yankees have not forgotten that they might have been prevented from going to the World Series in at least two years because the cheating went down to the deciding games of that series, and it appeared that the Astros knew exactly what was coming when they won each of the deciding games.
So yesterday, with about 10,000 fans in the stands sounding like the place was full to the brim with nearly 50,000 fans, the Astros came to play, and the Yankees handled it with their own type of aplomb. The only way to answer the Astros was to outplay them, and that is what they did, beating them 7-3 while the fans booed and yelled and held up signs and stamped their feet berating the Astros for what they did.
Sure, it was just one game, and there are two more in this particular series, and further, no one would bat an eyelash if the two teams meet again in this year’s American League Championship Series to see who goes to the World Series.
Each team got off to rotten starts, but have picked it up the last two weeks, and nobody would be surprised if five months from now, the scenario presents itself once again.
So one game is one game, but the Yankees did just about what they had to do to get a very slight amount of solace for what happened a few years ago.
It probably didn’t amount to that much, but for the players that were there a few years ago, I guess it gave them at least some temporary and minor satisfaction.
But again, they have a game today against the Astros, a game tomorrow against the same team, and then they have more than 100 more games to play this season, so they just have to play on, continue to play at the high level that they have been playing at after a miserable start, and hope that things fall their way during this season.
Would they love to play the Astros in this year’s American League Championship Series once again?
You bet they would, and if they beat them, that might close the door on this entire episode …
But it won’t really, until an asterisk is attached to the Astros’ World Series win in 2017, with the footnote stating clearly that the team cheated their way to the title that year.
Nothing else would close the book on this than the addition of that little asterisk, but whether that happens or not, yesterday had to make the Yankees feel a bit better, their fans feel a little bit better, and yes, baseball feel a little bit better …
If only for one day and one game.
Some people cheat on their taxes.
Others cheat while driving, as they go through stop signs, pass school buses, and speed toward their destination, among other things.
Some people say that we were cheated out of 2020 and maybe even 2021 by the presence of a virus that has established new protocols that are untenable.
Heck, our prior president, Donald Trump, said he was cheated out of a second term by voting irregularities, including people voting more than once, people voting under different names, and people voting who were not citizens and thus, should not have been anywhere near a voting booth.
But most of us who cheat do get away with it, at one level or another, unless you are someone like Bernie Madoff, who cheated with peoples’ money and ended up paying the ultimate price for his shell game.
I mean, how many times have you gotten a ticket for speeding or gong through a red light versus how many times you actually did it?
What I am leading up to here is that in Major League Baseball, cheating, to a certain degree, has been going on since the beginning of time, or in baseball’s case, certainly during the past 100-plus years.
Even non-baseball fans have heard of the 1919 Chicago White Sox, who, during supposedly the last pandemic we had, threw the World Series that year at the behest of some big-time gamblers.
Those participating in the scheme paid for their deeds by being banished from the game, including “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, one of the best players of the era, who was not only “Shoeless,” but he was also evidently “Clueless.”
Flash forward to more recent times, and just about every team has been accused of stealing signs—either “legally” or “illegally”—and some have been found out, but most have not.
When I say “legally,” I mean that there are certain players who have had the knack for being able to pick up things from the other team simply by watching them. Fred “Chicken” Stanley, not one of the greats of the game, was a Hall of Fame sign stealer, and he did it right from his usual perch on the bench.
Then there are the “illegal” sign stealers. Cleveland’s old, cavernous Municipal Stadium was a ripe place for these actions, as people were regularly perched at different points in the often nearly empty 80,000-seat stadium with cameras and other electronic devices stealing signs with aplomb.
And then you have the more recent steroid area, where players were pumping up their bodies with substances to make them both super-human and weird, i.e. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the poster boys of this era, who weren’t really ever convicted of much of anything untoward.
Fast forward to the past few years, and you have teams that are stealing signs electronically through Apple watches and even through … get this … banging on garbage pails.
And the latter is where we sit now, with the Houston Astros having been proven to have stolen signs during at least the 2017 American League Championship Series, but who probably were stealing signs against baseball rules during the entirely of that season and into 2018 and 2019, too, before they were found out.
Sure, a few heads rolled when all of this came out—the manager, a coach, a general manager and one specific player who had retired and was named manager of another team all lost their jobs—but players were given immunity, so with the exception of the one player who had already moved on, none of these players were penalized at all for their wrongdoing, which led to their World Series win in 2017.
Yes, the Astros are still considered World Series champions of 2017, even though they cheated their way to this success.
And what has made it all the more worse is that the main culprits of this nonsense, the very players who benefited from this canard, have pretty much blown it off, and never admitted to doing much of anything wrong.
This has riled some opposing players and many fans of opposing teams, and last night, the Astros met the New York Yankees in Yankee Stadium for the first time with fans in the stands since all of this has come out.
The Astros beat the Yankees in the American League Championship Series of the years that they have been accused of cheating by banging garbage pails to alert batters of what pitch was coming, and the Yankees have not forgotten that they might have been prevented from going to the World Series in at least two years because the cheating went down to the deciding games of that series, and it appeared that the Astros knew exactly what was coming when they won each of the deciding games.
So yesterday, with about 10,000 fans in the stands sounding like the place was full to the brim with nearly 50,000 fans, the Astros came to play, and the Yankees handled it with their own type of aplomb. The only way to answer the Astros was to outplay them, and that is what they did, beating them 7-3 while the fans booed and yelled and held up signs and stamped their feet berating the Astros for what they did.
Sure, it was just one game, and there are two more in this particular series, and further, no one would bat an eyelash if the two teams meet again in this year’s American League Championship Series to see who goes to the World Series.
Each team got off to rotten starts, but have picked it up the last two weeks, and nobody would be surprised if five months from now, the scenario presents itself once again.
So one game is one game, but the Yankees did just about what they had to do to get a very slight amount of solace for what happened a few years ago.
It probably didn’t amount to that much, but for the players that were there a few years ago, I guess it gave them at least some temporary and minor satisfaction.
But again, they have a game today against the Astros, a game tomorrow against the same team, and then they have more than 100 more games to play this season, so they just have to play on, continue to play at the high level that they have been playing at after a miserable start, and hope that things fall their way during this season.
Would they love to play the Astros in this year’s American League Championship Series once again?
You bet they would, and if they beat them, that might close the door on this entire episode …
But it won’t really, until an asterisk is attached to the Astros’ World Series win in 2017, with the footnote stating clearly that the team cheated their way to the title that year.
Nothing else would close the book on this than the addition of that little asterisk, but whether that happens or not, yesterday had to make the Yankees feel a bit better, their fans feel a little bit better, and yes, baseball feel a little bit better …
If only for one day and one game.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.