The fallout of the Houston Astros cheating continues another day as many can’t seem to figure out why the players who were involved in a cheating scheme did not get punished. On top of that, the players and the franchise got to keep their World Series title.
Over the weekend, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred defended his punishments for the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal and his decision to grant players immunity for cooperating with the league’s investigation.
“I understand people’s desire to have the players pay a price for what went on here,” Manfred said. “I think if you watch the players, watch their faces when they have to deal with this issue publicly, they have paid a price. To think they’re skipping down the road into spring training, happy, that’s just a mischaracterization of where we are.
“Having said that, the desire to have actual discipline imposed on them, I understand it and in a perfect world, it would have happened. We ended up where we ended up in pursuit of really, I think, the most important goal of getting the facts and getting them out there for people to know it.”
Others are not taking this so lightly as someone elected to create a petition to get Major League Baseball to strip the Astros of that 2017 title.
It reads as:
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“They cheated, horribly, and MLB went soft.
It’s time the fans united and forced MLB’s hand to take more significant action.
Uphold the integrity of baseball.”
Chicago Cubs pitcher Yu Darvish, who pitched against the Astros in Games 3 and 7 of the World Series in 2017, said that the team’s 2017 World Series title should be stripped.
“It’s like the Olympics,” Darvish said on Sunday. “When a player cheats, you can’t have a gold medal, right? But they still have a World Series title. It [feels] weird.”
“I know they were stealing signs, but at the same time, I was not good during the World Series,” Darvish said. “I’m better for what I went through. But, yeah, everyone is wondering about [their numbers] pitching against them.”
Manfred suspended manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow for a year without pay, but hours later, owner Jim Crane, who nothing of the scheme, fired Hinch and Luhnow.
The Astros also lost four MLB draft picks and were fined $5 million.
