Originally Posted by
jpx7
On the one hand, a single team used technology to improperly gain what is essentially an asymmetrical scouting advantage. They did this over a two-year span (though you can be suspicious and say three-year span), and only gained this advantage in home games (coincidentally, they've been one of the best road-hitting teams over that span, but not an especially good home-hitting team).
On the other hand, a large-but-unknowable number of players over a roughly twenty-year span (if not longer) were engaged in a market of underground pharmaceuticals, using a complex regimen to gain improper physical benefits (strength, but even more importantly, stamina and bounce-back from injury); in so doing, they affected not only the results of entire games, seasons, playoffs, and championships—to a precisely-unknowable but nonetheless-certain extent—while also casting a malignant shadow over their entire era, not to mention throwing innumerable asterisks into the record-books.
I was trolling when I said, "I'm pro-cheating," mostly because I think the moralizing responses to all this have been a little much (though, again, the Astros certainly acted improperly in their extension of digital technology into asymmetrical real-time scouting benefits). Nonetheless, anyone who thinks their "sign stealing" shenanigans rise anywhere close to the level of impropriety and malfeasance and unfairness steroids and HGH introduced into the game is either painfully obtuse, painfully suffering from recency bias, or painfully born-yesterday.
