When Major League Baseball's historic axe swung down upon Houston's front office yesterday, it brought similarly strong reactions from across the continent, from commentators and fans alike, almost all of them in approval.
Which is wonderful. And I'll get to that in a spell.
But I feel compelled first to point out that a lot of those same moral compasses had been accumulating an awful lot of dust in recent years on the subject of cheating, particularly as it relates to steroid users and the Hall of Fame. And yeah, without naming names, that includes a bunch of my comrades in the Baseball Writers Association of America who were suddenly voicing outrage at the Astros' actions.
Well, we can't have it both ways, friends, now can we?
Cheating is cheating.
At the risk of repeating from my annual Hall ballot column a week ago, Barry Bonds and untold others cheated by using banned substances. They cheated baseball, and they did so beyond any doubt. The documentation regarding Bonds, specifically, is more voluminous, more convincing even than for those who've confessed, as the result of intensive investigations. The fact that those were independent investigations rather than a court conviction or MLB adjudication doesn't matter in the slightest. He's as guilty as his head was huge.
And yet, we've somehow seen Hall voters supporting Bonds more each year, to the point that he just might get enough to push him over the 75 percent line needed to be elected.
That's happened because of this subtle undercurrent, one I believe originated with the advanced analytics community, to cast cheating as no big deal since, hey, his numbers are his numbers and everything that isn't numbers must be subjective. From there, social media pressure's mounted on the voters, and more than a few have caved.
To be clear: The voting writers didn't create the character clause, and the voting writers didn't endorse it. It's been there since the first Hall class in 1936, and it remains there because neither the Hall nor MLB has removed it. Nor will they. Nor should they.
These Astros are why.
Let's hope the public pendulum swings back on this as hard as that axe swung down yesterday.
• The coverage of this at the Houston Chronicle is without peer.
• Rob Manfred might not make many decisions bigger than levying full-year, no-pay suspensions on Jeff Luhnow and AJ Hinch, the Astros' GM and manager overseeing the cheating, plus the docked draft picks and maximum $5 million fine.
And man, he nailed it.
This couldn't be just about punishing the Astros as an organization. It had to be more. It had to be something that swept across the baseball landscape, that cut off the culture. Manfred had to have realized that, by suspending Luhnow and Hinch as he did, there was no way Houston could ever have them back. And sure enough, within a couple hours, Jim Crane capitulated and fired both.
Both are ruined in baseball.
That'll scare the hell out of the whole fraternity.
• So will the shame. And my goodness, let there be shame:
DC4L CUSTOM TEES• With Luhnow and Hinch each getting a year, Alex Cora, the current Red Sox manager who was named 11 times times in Manfred's nine-page document as the mastermind behind schemes in both Houston and Boston, should double that. As well as fired, which still hasn't happened.
• And what of the players?
Carlos Beltran's named in the document as a heavily involved co-conspirator with Cora, but he went unpunished, presumably because he was only a player. Which makes no sense. In the Olympics, they punish the athlete who cheats far worse than the coach/administrator who oversees it. It defies belief that all of Houston's players -- including the Pirates' Joe Musgrove -- weren't aware of what was going on at the time. Not one spoke up.
Following the Black Sox scandal of 1919, the legendary Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball's first commissioner, ruled that players must come forward with knowledge of anyone approaching them about gambling. That's still in place today, posted on the bulletin board in every clubhouse.
Force them to speak up on cheating, too.
• Spelling this out: I want the players' names. I want to know who participated, who knew. If that's Musgrove, Gerrit Cole, Charlie Morton, anyone and everyone.
• Luhnow himself piped up by nightfall to blame the players and, unsightly as that appears, it's hard to disagree with that stance in isolation:
Here is Jeff Luhnow's full statement, his first response to today's news. pic.twitter.com/9AbDFEtkbP
— Jared Diamond (@jareddiamond) January 13, 2020
That said, Luhnow knew. Hinch knew. It's baseball. In baseball, everyone knows everything.
• Speaking of the Olympics, that's the only setting in which this is done right: You cheat, you lose. Even after the fact, the gold medal gets stripped away, and the athlete who originally took silver gets bumped up the figurative podium. In the past half-century, beginning with the 1968 Games, a total of 147 medals have been stripped away.
So hey, congrats to the Dodgers, your real 2017 and 2018 world champs!
• It'd be unprecedented to vacate a championship in North American professional sports, so advocating that would be over the top, even if I'd endorse it. But imagine the intangible sting if the Astros were told they weren't allowed to fly their championship banners at Minute Maid Park for, say, five years.
Make it known that it's not OK. To everyone.
• Baseball's had two significant scandals in the past 30 years, and the Pirates were untouched by both. Impossible to know how their own history's been affected by that.
• The Pirates' current payroll projection for 2020 is slightly more than $60 million. And that's before Starling Marte gets traded for prospects, as he surely will. I'm sure that'll qualify as scandalous for some.
• Been a rough week for sports in Houston, and it might actually have bottomed out with Bill O'Brien's spectacularly bungled second quarter for the Texans in their 51-31 playoff loss to Chiefs in Kansas City. It wasn't just the fake punt. It was pretty much everything.
That's too bad. I had a ton of respect for what O'Brien did at Penn State in the impossible aftermath of the Jerry Sandusky NCAA sanctions, and he hasn't exactly been a disappointment in the NFL. But there are a billion ways to hold onto a lead that big, and he took the exact opposite route at every turn.
• Watching all four NFL games over the weekend -- a rare luxury in this business, I might add -- I came away most impressed with ... the Chiefs, still. Been my pick all along, and Patrick Mahomes and that epic version of Travis Kelce did nothing to dissuade it.
• Bill Cowher earned his Hall honor. All too often, mostly in football, the conversation gets condensed to a simple Super Bowl count. Nothing is more challenging to a coach in any sport at any level than consistent excellence. Bud Grant's Vikings and Marv Levy's Bills were consistently excellent, and neither should be judged by whether or not a kicker goes wide right at the worst possible moment. They built the programs that made such a kick possible.
• Mike Tomlin will follow Cowher to Canton. That path's now clearer than ever. But it'd be welcome toward that end if, like Cowher, he finished strong in playoff achievements. Being inducted after winding up with a whole lot of whatever seasons just wouldn't feel the same.
• Antonio Brown's an idiot:
There’s a 99.9 % chance Antonio brown doesn’t play football ever again lmaoo pic.twitter.com/AlAp8KUEJU
— john (@iam_johnw) January 13, 2020
The most bizarre subsection of public reaction to the above video brought an outpouring of ... uh, sympathy and concern and worry for the guy.
Yeah, he needs help. I hope he gets it, if only for those kids' sake.
But it really is possible to be both troubled and a vile, reckless, delusional, self-absorbed, misogynistic, racist, sociopathic scumbag. He's both.
• Your favorite hockey team is awesome.
I'll save my thoughts on these extraordinary Penguins for what, ideally, will be an extraordinary day today at PPG Paints Arena with the generation's greatest player rejoining a group that, somehow, some way had the NHL's very best record -- 18-6-4 -- in the 28 games he's missed. And one can easily add a win from the Nov. 9 game he exited early with the injury, as the Penguins needed a shootout to beat the Blackhawks.
I mean, wow.
• In the interim, let this start your day:
Brad Marchand overskating a shootout attempt, in full, with audio, because that's just the right thing to do:pic.twitter.com/OMQHgz5BVq
— Dejan Kovacevic (@Dejan_Kovacevic) January 14, 2020
And then this ...
The Flyers, leaving the ice, can't keep from laughing at Brad Marchand abandoning the puck at center red on the shootout.
Alain Vigneault: 'Haven't seen that before.'
Unidentified player: 'Maybe his nose got in the way.'
That's unkind.pic.twitter.com/O9ooSeDPca
— Dejan Kovacevic (@Dejan_Kovacevic) January 14, 2020
You bet, Bruins lost, too.
