The chorus of voices calling for the commissioner’s office to strip the Astros of their 2017 title is growing louder. And sillier.
It’s not just callers to radio stations or posters to blogs, either. That’s easy to dismiss. What do fans know?
But what’s surprising is the increasingly vocal chirping coming from baseball executives. The brains of the operation. The same guys who brought you 114-loss teams. Some are wondering why baseball didn’t take away the Astros title. Just vacate it like all those Tour de France titles Lance Armstrong won by cheating.
One even suggested they take away all the wins from that year.
How, exactly, would that work? Would their record from now on be listed as 0-162? Do you take away every W that any Astros pitcher earned? So, instead of going 5-0 after coming over to Houston, Justin Verlander is officially 0-0? Charlie Morton was 0-7 that year? Dallas Keuchel is now 0-5?
And then do you go back to the opposing pitchers who earned the losses and now give them Ws? Do you add Ws onto each team’s totals for every game they lost to the Astros? That would have made the wild card race different. So, do we scrap the entire 2017 post-season? You’d have to. And the regular season as well. It would be a Back To The Future type nightmare.
Look, you can’t rewrite history. Is that fair? Maybe not. But whoever said life was fair? It’s not. It’s never been.
The Houston Astros won the 2017 World Series. Just like Barry Bonds is the all-time home run leader. Just like Rafael Palmeiro won the Gold Glove at first in 1999 when he played only 28 games there, the rest at DH.
The best you can do is look at things like that and say, Okay, but.
Okay, but.
It’s a mental asterisks. That’s the best you can do. But even then, isn’t there more important stuff in life to get worked up over?
That’s not to say they should have ignored the sign stealing. That was wrong. Everyone knew it was wrong. How do you know that they knew? One game, when White Sox pitcher Danny Farquhar heard the pounding and was visibly upset by it, Astros players realized they’d been caught, panicked, and quickly removed the monitor from the wall and hid it. Innocent people don’t act that way.
But how can you take away their title or revoke their wins when you have no idea how many other teams were cheating? It’s just too complicated and too much of a mess to even start to figure out how it could be done in the first place.
So all you can do from now on is say, the Houston Astros won the 2017 World Series.
Okay, but. Your brain can figure it out from there.