“We paid the price for it.”
“As far as I’m concerned, it should be over with.”
“I think that sometimes we need to look at ourselves before you spew hate on somebody else.
“What are they going to say now?”
“I think they’ve just been carrying a lot of guilt and shame for so long.”
“We paid for ours, and I wish they’d leave it alone.”
These are all quotes from the Astros players and coaches regarding fans finally getting a chance to voice their displeasure with the team’s cheating scandal that broke about a year and a half ago. What do all those quotes have in common? They’re all blatantly false.
They paid the price for it? It should be over with? C’mon, everyone should be smart enough to know that the Astros paid close to nothing relative to the magnitude of their efforts to get an advantage. In fact, none of the players involved were actually punished at all — it was all at an organizational level. Some might say they have been “carrying a lot of guilt and shame for so long”, but anyone who has watched any of their interviews since then knows that is not at all the case.
“The problem I have is when players go out there and they don’t know the facts, they’re not informed about the situation and they just go out there and go on camera and just talk. With me, that doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t seem right at all.” -Carlos Correa in February 2020
Then tell us the facts! They were trying to frame themselves as the victims from the get-go. This was after Rob Manfred had released the entire report on the investigation. It is like if I were to cheat on a test and then go on to claim that the teacher doesn’t know all of the facts — right after they were given all of the facts. And that they should just move on because I was the one who was inconvenienced. That times 100.
So for all the Astros players and fans saying to just “move on” and “enough of this already” — that’s not how this works. You cheated, you didn’t pay any price, you absolutely don’t care except that you got caught, and you tried to play it off as if you were the victims. That 2017 Yankees team was one of the most fun teams I have watched, and they could have won it all. The Dodgers could have won it all and broken their drought three years earlier. Dodgers fans should go all-out when Houston goes to LA in August, especially considering that the stadium may be close to full-capacity by that point. And for those saying they didn’t cheat in the postseason — it doesn’t matter. Had they not cheated in the regular season, maybe they don’t have home-field advantage; maybe they lose in the first-round; maybe they don’t make the playoffs at all. I don’t care if you cheat and go 0-162 — you still cheated and deserve to be punished.
And they have gotten off easy. They didn’t have to face fans last year, and this year so far they’ve only encountered limited-capacity stadiums with fans who are required to wear masks (which could muffle some of the jeers). Look, if the Yankees were to have been found to have cheated at the scale the Astros did, there’s no way I would defend them. They would have to take the heat. So no, I don’t care if Altuve’s feelings were hurt and that the fans were “extremely hard on Altuve tonight [Tuesday].”
People shouldn’t have to move on. The Astros deserve every bit of this. If you don’t want people hurting your feelings, here’s an idea: don’t cheat in the first place.
