MLB commissioner Rob Manfred couldn’t, or just chose not to, lay down the hammer on Houston Astros players for their part in the cheating scandal that is tearing apart the national pastime.
And now he’s saying the game can’t police itself, promising swift punishments for pitchers throwing purpose pitches and, ostensibly, baserunners sending messages with hard slides.
Manfred doesn’t get it: the Astros scandal is shaking baseball to its core.
It’s several levels beyond the steroids scandals of the 1990s and 2000s, which left baseball with its biggest black eye since the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
The steroids scandal didn’t benefit a single team, is why that one was different.
Guys hit more homers, gained a few miles per hour on their fastballs, and ushered in the new era that has everybody 1-9 swinging for the fences and striking out at record rates, but still, the impact was diffused.
This scandal gave one team a World Series, and if you believe that it ended in 2017, well, nobody believes that, not even the poohbahs who want you to believe it, in the naïve mindset that pretending that there’s not a lot more to this will help it all just go away.
Nope, instead, it gets uglier by the day, and all MLB can do is insist that we all just please disperse, because there’s nothing to see here.
And if anybody throws at Jose Altuve, you’ll have Rob Manfred to answer to.
Way to draw the line there, dude.
Story by Chris Graham
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