MLB suspends Astros GM and Manager for a year, yuge fine and takes away draft picks.

Snowman said:
I mostly agree with the rest, but think you're totally off base here. What happened in 1919 was a team actively throwing a World's Series, and I do believe that is substantially worse than a team cheating to try to win one. Cheating to win always has a chance of failing, while purposefully losing is a virtual lock.
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Eh I can see your argument, but the premise is still the same: being deceptive/nefarious and purposely going out of your way to alter the outcome of the game. Lying, cheating and stealing is still lying, cheating and stealing if you’re doing it, no matter the outcome.
 
tululush said:
I don't think you are understanding exactly what has taken place here. And if you do, and still not seeing it, then I don't know what to tell you. You're wrong. Period.

This is on par with what the White Sox did in the 20s. This is much worse than steroids. When the whole steroid scandal was taking place there wasn't this much backlash from everyone. You have virtually every fan and player calling out Manfred and the Astros. The only people who are supporting the Astros are the Astros and their fans. This is an absolute disgrace to baseball. You have players who rarely, if ever, say a word and who are vehemently calling attention to how much of a disgrace what the Astros have done and how what Manfred hasn't done. Manfred has absolutely no business being the commissioner of baseball. He is so out of touch with what is required to hold his position. I mean it was bad enough that he did absolutely nothing, but then he continues to put his foot in his mouth by referring to the World Series trophy as a piece of metal? Go listen to Trout. Go listen to Justin Turner. Go listen to Nick Markakis. Go listen to Kris Bryant. The commissioner has completely lost the players. To have player after player 100% disagreeing with what Manfred has done and then to flat out say he's clueless should help you understand how bad this is. When he has to sit down with the players union at the next collective bargaining agreement in a few years, good luck to him. Hopefully by then he's either resigned or he's been forced out. He's a disgrace and has no idea how to handle the authority that's been given to him.

And yes, the Astros deserve a postseason ban. At the very least for one year. Man City just got suspended from two years of Champions League play (essentially equivalent to two postseasons) for cooking their financial books. There is zero reason why the Astros should not get banned from MLB postseason play for at least one year.

When you take basic sign stealing to a whole other level and ruin players careers because their numbers are so beyond skewed you deserve any and all punishment handed to you. Not to mention from a pitcher's standpoint, his health and well being is put in jeopardy and harm a lot more. If a hitter knows what pitch is coming over and over again the game essentially turns into batting practice. There's a reason why they put an L screen in front of the pitchers mound during batting practice. Now you take that away and we're lucky more pitchers didn't get smoked with hits back through the box.

Manfred is a disgrace and the punishment he handed out is an absolute joke.
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In truth you had the same kind of player backlash against steroids, where guys said it cheated the game and deprived clean players of livelihoods and money. You might have forgotten how vocal some players were.

It just never focused on one particular team before.
 
tululush said:
Eh I can see your argument, but the premise is still the same: being deceptive/nefarious and purposely going out of your way to alter the outcome of the game. Lying, cheating and stealing is still lying, cheating and stealing if you’re doing it, no matter the outcome.
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It's been surprising to me in adult life how many people are perfectly ok with cheating in all forms so long as it benefits them. Maybe more people than not are ok with it, honestly.
 
Southcack77 said:
It's been surprising to me in adult life how many people are perfectly ok with cheating in all forms so long as it benefits them. Maybe more people than not are ok with it, honestly.
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Exactly. The lack of a moral compass is quite disturbing. Let those people have their spouses cheat on them and we’ll see how quickly their tune changes. Cheating is cheating regardless if it benefits you or someone else.
 
Southcack77 said:
In truth you had the same kind of player backlash against steroids, where guys said it cheated the game and deprived clean players of livelihoods and money. You might have forgotten how vocal some players were.

It just never focused on one particular team before.
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The crazy thing about this scandal is it’s not only about player on player backlash. It’s equal parts player on commissioner backlash. This is much worse than the steroid scandal and the level of outspoken rhetoric is worse.
 
tululush said:
The crazy thing about this scandal is it’s not only about player on player backlash. It’s equal parts player on commissioner backlash. This is much worse than the steroid scandal and the level of outspoken rhetoric is worse.
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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.
 
tululush said:
Exactly. The lack of a moral compass is quite disturbing. Let those people have their spouses cheat on them and we’ll see how quickly their tune changes. Cheating is cheating regardless if it benefits you or someone else.
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Ryan Braun can GTFO, still.
 
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.
 
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jpx7 said:
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.
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Which one was allowed and which one wasn’t?
 
CyYoung31 said:
Which one was allowed and which one wasn’t?
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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.
 
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.
 
jpx7 said:
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.
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It was a bigger scandal for the game as a whole. That's not the point. The question is, which one actually broke the rules "more," for lack of better phrasing.
 
CyYoung31 said:
It was a bigger scandal for the game as a whole. That's not the point. The question is, which one actually broke the rules "more," for lack of better phrasing.
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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.
 
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