A national disgrace

Just days after the football season ceased to mean anything to me, news from the world of baseball popped up, and this is a big deal. Houston Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch were both suspended by Major League Baseball and then fired by owner Jim Crane after MLB announced results of their investigation of a sign-stealing scandal.

It turns out that the Astros cheated their way to a World Series title in 2017. They used a camera to zoom in on the finger signals opposing catchers used to tell their pitchers what to throw next (fastball, curve, off-speed pitch, or a fit) and then relayed this information to a player sitting in the dugout next to a big Rubbermaid trash bin.

The player would then thump beats in a code on the trashcan to tell the player at the bat to stop scratching his goobers and be ready for whatever sort of pitch was next.

MLB determined that this was wrong and worthy of punishment...but, curiously, decided that there was nothing to be gained by stripping the cheaters out of their ill-gotten title and awarding to the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were rooked out of it.

Crane told the press that he did not think the Astros' World Series title in 2017 was "tainted."

In other news, he does not think the sun is hot or that there's an egg in an omelet.

I think their title is tainted, and I think they should not be allowed to fly the pennant at their stupid ballpark which is named for orange juice, and I think they should be forced to alter their uniforms to reflect the new team name "Cheatin' Astros."

That's what I think.

Hinch and Luhnow: out on their astros

By the way, this is not new. We talked before about the 1951 New York Giants baseball team, and now they had a coach with a super spyglass out in the distance reading the signs and relaying them through an electric buzzer, and that team won the National League pennant, although they lost the World Series to the Yankees, four games to two.

My Orioles are currently in a rebuild, being engineered by a guy who used to work for the Astros (!) and unless there is some divine machination going on this summer, the O's will probably finish in last place again this year.

But they'll do it honestly! I remember in eighth grade Spanish class when Mrs Moore found a guy named Charles with a list of verb conjugations in his lap while we took a test on verb conjugations. Snatching the paper away from startled Charles, she cried, "Anyone can pass when they cheat!" 

The Astros should remember that.