Teams should give Astros' batters the sound of banging trash cans as their walk up music.
FFF - BB, BB, 2B, HR, 2B, HR, 1B, BB, BB, 1B, BB, BB, HR
jpx7 (02-19-2020)
Yeah, but there were some guys that were killing baseball for not stepping into steroids when everyone knew it was going on too. I think maybe less people were willing to kill the teammates who were using than are willing to kill guys who play for another team. Literally, not figuratively, ya know.
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.
Last edited by jpx7; 02-19-2020 at 05:19 PM.
"For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal."
This line of argument is especially bizarre to me. From my perspective, the fact that the league for so long tacitly approved of (by not expressly forbidding) the otherwise-illegal use of restricted pharmaceuticals for improper material benefits makes the steroid scandal much worse in terms of its effects on the game of baseball. The fact that you and others think that is somehow indemnifying or exculpating is pretty absurd, in fact, when discussing the gravity of offense to the game of baseball; if anything it exacerbates the nature and scope of the offending scandal.
However, if you really want to go down that road: the logic on which such a claim rests is that pharmaceutical abuse is to some degree less severe or scandalous or unfair because players were not explicitly forbidden by the league, or otherwise properly apprised of the impropriety and/or illegality of PED use. Well, by that logic, neither were the Astros players re their use of digital equipment for "sign stealing", since MLB has expressly stated that one of the reasons they did not pursue punishment against players (as opposed to front-office personnel and other team staff) is because the 2017 memorandum explicitly forbidding this sort of deployment of digital technology was not circulated to Astros players by the team, contra their responsibility to do so. So, in each case, the players in question technically didn't know what they were doing was impermissible.
Such logic seems to skirt both the spirit of the sport's propriety, and the sort of moral questions that people like to trumpet when talking about "cheating", but it also doesn't hold up to scrutiny when you're trying to make the aggressively-silly claim that the Astros have wronged baseball to an extent worse than rampant PED use over decades.
"For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal."
LeBron James dropped a 10 ton truck load of crap on Manfried. Said Commish didn't do his job and suggested that players should be suspended, fined or forced out of game.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;......
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
High Flight
by
John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
I think it's exactly the point, especially since—for a lot of people—this seems to be about calibrating their relative outrage.
Personally, I'm not really interested in "which one actually broke the rules 'more'", since (a) I don't think strict adherence to "rules" is necessarily an effective proxy for fairness or propriety or morality, and (b) I think considering what's more deleterious "for the game as a whole" is both a more interesting topic of discussion, a more relevant and salient question, and a much better metric by which to judge the severity of the infraction and by which to index one's outrage.
"For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal."