Monday afternoon, the Major League Baseball commissioner, Rob Manfred, handed out the stiffest penalties for in-game misconduct in the sport’s recent history. The guilty party was the Houston Astros, who during their 2017 championship season designed a system of stealing opposing teams’ pitching signs and relaying them to their own hitters. Their means of gathering the data were modern (the team used a high-definition camera to beam images to monitors in the dugout), and their means of dispensing them were old-school (players banged on trash cans in a kind of Morse code). Manfred found that both Houston’s general manager, Jeff Luhnow, and its manager, A. J. Hinch, knew of the plan and failed to stop it; Lunhow and Hinch were suspended for a year by the MLB and, hours later, fired by the Astros themselves. Manfred also took away the team’s top draft picks in 2020 and 2021 and levied a fine against the organization: $5 million, the largest he’s authorized to impose. (In the face of an ongoing investigation involving the Red Sox manager, Alex Cora, a former Astros coach, using similar techniques during Boston’s 2018 title run, the team fired Cora last night.)
Yesterday morning, ESPN.com’s Jeff Passan reported a growing consensus among rival teams that Houston’s punishment hadn’t gone far enough. The Astros won a World Series, after all, and neither the players nor the team’s owner, Jim Crane, faced substantial penalties. “He got his championship,” an unnamed team president said of Crane to Passan. “He keeps his team. His fine is nothing.” Others were more direct and demanding. Calls for Manfred to revoke the Astros’ championship, including from some players, rose on Twitter. Stephen A. Smith, on ESPN’s First Take, amplified the sentiment: “The title is illegitimate … They should be stripped of their World Series crown.”