Rob Manfred can’t fix the past. The commissioner of baseball has far-reaching powers, but he can’t redo the 2017 playoffs or retroactively name another champion or restore Joe Girardi as Yankee manager.
So Manfred did what is actually within his powers. He punished the leadership of the Astros severely to try to fix the present and future. Following the completion of an investigation into the Astros — mainly their illegal sign stealing, particularly in 2017 — Manfred suspended GM Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch for one year, took away the organization’s first- and second-round draft picks for 2020 and 2021 and fined them $5 million.
An argument for worse could be made. Lifelong bans. Player punishments. Greater draft penalties. Larger fines. And — most vitally — a punishment for owner Astros owner Jim Crane, whom MLB went a long way to exonerate. But Crane hired both Luhnow and Hinch — and fired both on Monday after the announcement of the punishment. And he oversaw what was generally viewed as an organization that, at minimum, tap danced near the third rail of legality. Crane should have been asking tougher questions of his employees long ago if he really wanted to run the squeaky clean shop he is saying he desires now.
But if we have learned anything in modern America, it is hard to get consensus on much, including whether these penalties were too lenient or too harsh. So I will offer this — they were harsh enough to get across what Manfred wanted to deliver: That those who cross the line by using technology to cheat do so at the peril of losing their jobs and perhaps their right to ever participate in Major League Baseball again.
Every baseball operations department in the majors was put on notice. After all, MLB’s three-month investigation into the electronic sign stealing revealed that this was more player/coach driven than motivated by Luhnow and Hinch. Yet, both paid with their reputations and jobs while no players were punished — though then-player and new Mets manager Carlos Beltran was the only player mentioned as having been part of the cabal that created the cheating mechanisms.
MLB recognized the hurdles and hassles of trying to further probe and prosecute players protected by a union that does not offer the same defense for, say, coaches, managers and GMs. But also MLB knows the cheaters are almost always ahead of the police and that new implementations of current technology or new technology will reveal further ways to cheat. Keep in mind this cheating sprung from teams seeing how much could be gleaned from the real-time monitors initially used to advise managers whether to make an instant replay challenge. More technology, more unintended consequences.
MLB, therefore, is warning GMs, managers and coaches to know what is going on in their shops — and to police it. The players are not the adults. Management is. And management, therefore, must diligently make sure this does not occur again.
Because what did occur forever stains, of course, the Astros, but also the game. In trying to protect the sanctity of Houston’s only title ever, Crane said there was “nothing clear that it affected the outcome.” But why go to this much trouble if players did not think they were gaining great advantages? The Astros, according to the MLB report, kept on cheating even after a mid-September 2017 MLB-wide warning from Manfred that technology-enhanced cheating would be handled more harshly in the future. They kept cheating into that postseason.
They won’t be stripped of that championship — in the way Roger Clemens has lost no Cy Youngs or Barry Bonds MVPs — because what do you do? Do you just vacate the title? Give it to the NL champ Dodgers? AL runners-up, the Girardi Yankees? No, Houston keeps the hardware, like Clemens and Bonds. But we all know forever who those Astros were. Which is terrible for MLB, too, especially since the next year’s champion, the Red Sox, also are part of this.
Alex Cora, a coach for those Astros, is prominently mentioned in the report as central to creating the sign-stealing protocol. He was not punished yet because MLB is still investigating allegations that the 2018 Red Sox also cheated with Cora as their manager in a year in which Boston won the title. Cora is likely facing at least a year ban, too, and, thus, potentially a firing by the Red Sox. Again, these punishments have tentacles that make them more severe.
And for Manfred and MLB the aim is that they are draconian enough — with precedent now allowing for even stiffer penalties in the future — to curb further cheating. The commissioner could not fix that the 2017 and 2018 champions now have a touch of 1919 to their reputations — and took the game’s perception with them.
He could only try to stop this in the future. For that, these punishments feel a worthy deterrent.