The Houston Astros made the MLB playoffs. That sucks.
They limped in with a record of 29-31. That sucks.
They won their wild-card series in two straight games over perennial playoff patsy Minnesota. That sucks.
The Astros systematically stole signs for years, won, and got away with it. None of their players got suspended. That sucks.
Foes threw at them by way of reckoning. MLB stopped it. That sucks.
Now they’re pretending to be anti-heroes instead of the cheaters that they are. That really sucks.
"I know a lot of people are mad. I know a lot of people don't want to see us here," the Astros’ Carlos Correa said. "But what are they going to say now?"
Let’s try this: “***k you. Your accomplishments are meaningless.”
Imagine if the Astros won the World Series again. How many blemishes can these frauds put on baseball?
As many as MLB allows, it looks like.
When the Astros play in the AL Division Series against Oakland or the Chicago White Sox, the umpires should make the strike zone a bit bigger for Astros hitters and a bit smaller for the opposition’s batters. The knife of cheating should cut both ways.
The Astros simply can’t win the World Series again. If they do, it dilutes the significance of their cheating. “Oh, we didn’t need to steal signs. We would have won anyway.”
To reiterate: The Astros cheated, won the World Series in 2017, kept cheating, and totally got away with it.
The team got fined. The GM and manager got fired. But that was cosmetic. The players perpetrated the sign-stealing, confessed to get immunity, and suffered nothing but loss of reputation. Even that didn’t marinate like it should have thanks to the pandemic.
It becomes a bigger disgrace with every playoff game the Astros win. They should have been declared ineligible for the postseason in the first place. That’s punishment that fits the crime.