When I started Part 1 of this “Offseason Of Failure” series, I thought it was just going to be a one article wrap-up of all the terrible failures that occurred this offseason. Turns out there was so much failing that I had to break this up into three parts. Since I started with the Astros, I’m going to make part two about the MLB Commissioner, Mr Rob Manfred. He seems to be public enemy number 2 right behind Jose Altuve these days, and while I am about to rake him over the coals here as well, I have different reasons for doing it that most folks do.
The thing that people seem to really hate right now is that the Astros players were not punished for their roles in trashcan-gate, the team was not stripped of their World Series Championship title, and that the penalty for the Astros ownership was light. From where I’m sitting, while I can certainly sympathize with the feelings on all counts, these to me are more simply lousy situations than Manfred showing his woeful incompetence as commissioner. Incompetent as he may be, none of those things are his fault. You can be pissed off at the Astros if you want, but you can’t really blame Robby here for not hitting the players or ownership harder. Part 1 of this series features my extensive argument for not stripping the title so I won’t dive any deeper there, but the other two matters were simply out of his control.
For starters, Manfred absolutely had to give the players immunity in order to get the testimony needed to uncover the plot and end it. While clearly in a perfect world Altuve, Bregman, and the rest of the crew would be suspended for a very long time, the reality is, without offering immunity to all players Manfred was never going to be able to put a stop to the cheating. I feel very strongly that the importance of ending the scheme supersedes the importance of punishing the players, and since I am confident that it was an either/or scenario for Manfred, I think he made the right call. Additionally, even if Manfred had some other way of getting to the bottom of what was going on, he still was going to have an incredibly difficult time getting any suspensions to stick. It would take some pretty solid proof in my opinion to suspend a guy for a significant amount of time, and just being on the team and not ratting them out wouldn’t quite cut it all the way for me. If what Correa said about Altuve is true and that he didn’t “use” the trashcan, well, he still benefited from the cheating, and he still didn’t do anything about it, but is he as bad as a guy who was getting the signs? Is he as bad as the guy who was doing the banging or the guy who rigged up the live feed? It’s a very slippery slope, it’s impossible to be fair, and with all the ambiguity the player’s union would make Swiss cheese out of any potential punishment.
Next up we have the way he dealt with the organization. I think everyone agrees that the punishments handed down to Luhnow and Hinch were very severe, and obviously Crane did the right thing by firing them outright (as did the Red Sox with Cora). Many people have mentioned that the $5MM and a couple picks are not a very stiff penalty for the organization as a whole, and on that I would certainly agree. The $5MM is like a speeding ticket to Jim Crane, and while obviously young talent is the most valuable commodity going in baseball now, draft picks and high draft picks have an overall extremely low correlation to major league success. The loss of picks can easily be offset by intelligent drafting with their remaining picks, and savvy work on the trade and free agent markets. The problem is, there was nothing else Manfred could do about it! The owners decided that $5MM was the maximum fine for any infraction, so that is what Manfred meted out. What else was he supposed to do? If you’re mad about the small fine go ahead and be mad about it, but turn your rage on the money-grubbing MLB owners who put the limitation in place to begin with. I’m not sure if Manfred has the power to force Crane to sell his team (probably not), but that is the only other possible thing he could have done that was more severe, and realistically, that would probably be a little too extreme.
Enough nice things about Manfred, because I think he has done an atrocious job with this scandal and I’m ready to let you know why. Here’s my beef – I think that Manfred is doing absolutely everything he can to sweep this as much under the rug as possible. For starters, all the stuff I’ve been reading about how Mike Fiers and the A’s complained repeatedly to deaf ears within MLB before going to The Athletic is deeply concerning for me. With Manfred being aware of the problem and not immediately acting, it his clear that his main goal is public perception rather than making baseball be the best it can be.
I also think the problem with Houston was much bigger than Manfred is letting on. I am firmly on the side with folks who don’t believe for a minute that the Astros just stopped cheating of their own accord part-way through the 2018 season. I think Manfred either found and buried or never even really looked for much proof of what they were doing in 2019. Once the Athletic article came out he knew that the scandal wasn’t going away quietly, but I think a main goal of his investigation into the Astros was to “expose” the scandal and put an end to it while “tainting” as little baseball as possible. I feel that he is sacrificing the good of the game in the interest of keeping up good PR and wanting the public to feel that baseball is clean and pure – or as close to it as possible. Now I certainly don’t want potential fans turned off from the game because of fears of cheating, but I just can’t abide covering up for cheaters.
This leads right into my next problem with Manfred and his investigation, and that is the scapegoating. I suspect that the Astros were in fact the only team utilizing a real-time video feed to steal signs. However, I further suspect that many teams were doing something similar to what the Red Sox have been accused of, in improperly utilizing the high-tech video feeds available in the replay rooms to analyze video better. If we believe Logan Morrision’s accusations, it sounds like it was better than half the league, including the Yankees and Dodgers who are both up especially high on their horses these days. We should be hearing from Manfred on the Red Sox this week, and in spite of the player’s statements that they were doing nothing wrong, my guess is that they were pushing the line a little bit in the video room, and that the organization will be punished for it. As a Sox fan it is frustrating to feel singled out here, especially since I think “the biggest free agent acquisition of 2019” Carlos Beltran-lead Yankees were doing something every bit as bad along with many other teams.
Now if the Sox were in fact breaking the rules, clearly I’m fine with any punishments they receive as a result, as I’d very much like to see that behavior cleaned up league-wide. What I’m not fine with is that being the end of it all, Manfred declaring the Astros as the terrible offender, the Red Sox as a secondary one, and then saying the rest of the teams are blameless as a newborn baby, and the game is now clean. I think that the punishments handed down to Luhnow and Hinch will serve as a strong deterrent that will clean the game up moving forward, but I think the reason that the Yankees, Dodgers, and many other teams are not being investigated is that Manfred does not want the public to think that this type of cheating was rampant across the league. To me, that is just a cop-out. You can’t publicly punish and chastise one team for doing something and declare ten other teams who were doing the same thing as clean just because you don’t want to make the scandal bigger. I don’t want the MLB to have bad press any more than Manfred does, but the facts are the facts and you can’t sweep them under the rug while pinning all the blame on a couple scapegoats and being satisfied that the game will be clean moving forward. The technology in the dugout/replay room has obviously gone too far and is too tempting for the players and coaches to use. It seems likely that the Astros were the only ones to take it to the level of real-time sign-stealing, but it seems like pure naivete to believe that the Red Sox are the only team out of the other 29 to bend the rules in the replay room a little.
Maybe my homer fandom is clouding my rational thought process, but I don’t think so. If you continue on to part three of this series you’ll find out just how mad at the Red Sox I am right now, so I feel like I’m about as objective as I can be. Maybe Manfred will find them completely innocent of any wrong-doing, and we’ll be fed the story that the Astros were bad and everyone else was good. I’ll probably still be under the assumption that the Red Sox and many other teams were pushing the envelope in the replay room. I’m not opposed to the Red Sox getting punished if they broke the rules, in fact, if they did break the rules I’d rather see them punished than have it swept under the rug like the infractions of other teams. I am opposed to selective enforcement and allowing other organizations that were doing the same thing to avoid scrutiny and punishment in the interest of Manfred making the game as a whole look better.
I don’t know what Manfred needs to do in order to make me feel like all the information is out there, but right now I feel like we’re just looking at the tip of the iceberg and that there is a lot more down below that we are not allowed to see. Beginning with the report clearing the Astros of any wrongdoing in 2019 and I assume ending soon with the Red Sox being nailed as a secondary scapegoat while all the other cheaters skate, I feel absolutely zero confidence that we have all the facts. I feel reasonably confident that this type of cheating will not happen in the game moving forward, and for that, I appreciate Manfred’s efforts. That is the most important thing, and the game will be better for it. As for how we got there, in almost any scenario, I’m probably never going to believe that we got the whole truth.
