With the 2020 slate of Spring Training games underway, I can almost taste Opening Day and real baseball. The break since we last saw a meaningful ballgame has been quite chaotic with much of it fraught with utter failure – and not the kind I usually like to write about on this website. Not the kind of failure that requires mental fortitude to overcome, but simply the failure caused by being terrible at what you do. On that note, let’s start by talking about the Houston Astros. I’m not sure that you can call their rampant cheating a “failure” since they won so much, but they certainly failed at not getting caught, and I’m pretty sure the next time you go to look up the word “failure” on Wikipedia, the definition will simply be a video of Jim Crane’s press conference on the first day of Astros camp. Their front office has butchered this at every turn, and listening to their players posit weak defenses for their abhorrent behavior is sickening to me.

Quite frankly Carlos Correa, I don’t give a tin whistle if some specific game-deciding AB in one game of the 2017 World Series was actually not affected by your cheating – you cheated the whole season, and therefore everything you did is tainted. I don’t care if the Dodgers lost a game in their park where you (supposedly) weren’t cheating, the fact that they didn’t have a fair shot at the games in your park renders your argument completely worthless. You most certainly did not win the World Series “fair and square”, and you need to say you’re sorry, take your lumps, and go out there and prove that you can hit the ball even when you don’t know what pitch is coming. Trying to get on your high horse and claim how “legit” your title is when you were obviously cheating the whole season just makes you look like a crybaby and a jackass.

I don’t think that take on the Astros is especially hot, I’m pretty sure everyone outside of Houston agrees with me on those thoughts. Where I seem to be diverging from the general non-Astro fan consensus is when it comes to “stripping” the 2017 World Series title away from those cheating scumbags. I totally understand the desire to alter the record books of the past and “vacate” the title, leaving the 2017 Championship un-won in the history books. I can almost even more understand the desire to strip the 2017 AL MVP award from Jose Altuve and award it to Aaron Judge, the runner up. In a vacuum, both of those actions make perfect sense to me, as they should to just about anyone. The problem I run into is reconciling those actions with baseball history as a whole. Where do we stop? I don’t really have a dog in the fight when it comes to Altuve or Judge getting an MVP award, but as a Red Sox fan, if we’re going to start taking away MVPs for cheating, you absolutely have to take the ’88 AL MVP award away from Jose Canseco and give it to one of my early heroes, Mike Greenwell!

While Dodgers fans might feel some vindication from the Astros being stripped of their franchise’s lone championship trophy, if we’re going around taking rings away from cheaters I would really love all my Yankee fan buddies to only be able to say they have 22 rings. Or even fewer because we could also absolutely strip the ring from any team Whitey Ford played on for the exact same reason we’d be stripping the Astros. The ’51 Giants NL pennant would have to go too in my opinion, along with the accomplishments of any team Gaylord Perry played for (and get both him and Whitey out of the HoF while we’re at it), and that’s not even beginning to get into rectifying the effects of what in my opinion is the most despicable scandal in MLB history – the owner’s collusion against free agent players throughout the early 80s. Until every fan is refunded for every ticket purchased during those seasons and all championships are voided due to the owners not actually doing their best to win them, I can’t really get behind picking this particular ill-gotten trophy to take a stand.

My point is that baseball has a long and storied tradition of players, coaches, front office folks, and owners all pushing to get an edge – and being willing to bend or completely break the rules in order to do so. We don’t have to like it, and in fact I don’t. Unfortunately, changing the record books isn’t going to make me feel any better. I know Mike Greenwell was the best legit player in the AL in 1988, but going back in time to award him the MVP can’t change how I felt at the time when he got robbed. I know that the Astros were a bunch of cheaters in 2017, but editing the history books isn’t going to change what happened on the field. Baseball history is baseball history – the good, the bad, and the ugly. This happens to be an ugly chapter, but it just one of many ugly chapters from the past, and most likely won’t be the final ugly chapter as we move forward. The history book isn’t a whitewashed version of what we’d like the history to have been, or what it would’ve been if there weren’t players breaking the rules – it is simply a record of what happened on the field. We keep the record book so we can remember what happened, and we keep our own records in our minds of the circumstances around them to know things like how dirty and fake the Astros 2017 title is. No matter how much we want the outcome to have been different, editing the record books to suit our taste isn’t going to change the history.