Here's the thing that makes me absolutely livid about this... Cheating happens all the time in baseball. At all levels. All levels. The MLB itself cheats the game by juicing the ball. Players juiced to the absolute gills. Pitchers have been putting every substance known to man on the ball for an edge. Scuffing the ball. Pine tar. Snot. Whatever for an extra inch of movement. Corking bats and getting caught red handed. But almighty baseball and their decrepit, old as fuck, unwritten rules loving core fan base picks and chooses what is "real" cheating and what isn't.
Teams knew what the Astros were doing DURING THE SEASON, as evidenced by mound visits and changing of strategy during the game, and don't say jack shit. People are willing to suspend belief and pretend like the players weren't talking about this behind closed doors while it was happening and sat on it because they were all doing some form of this one way or another. People want to pretend like the MLB home office didn't already hear about this while it was happening and sat on it the way MLB sits on everything. Red Sox did it with Apple watches but nobody cares because they didn't win anything using it. But Mike grows a conscious all of a sudden, goes to the press, and now because the media got its teeth into it and now the MLB is all fire and brimstone and shocked, absolutely shocked that cheating is going on in America's past time of only the holiest of holy integrity and sacred worship of all that is unwritten tradition.
So now all of these players who have shared locker rooms with guys who cheat and said absolutely dick about it and continue to look the other way are getting their soundbites in, getting in their shots so as to appear to be above the cheating fray, but we all know how this is going to end. It's going to come out after all the damage is done to Houston that 16 other teams did this, too, and some of the guys dropping hot sound bites will be popped for some other form of unsanctioned cheating, but people aren't going to give near as much of a fuck as they did when Houston did it. Because that's how sports roll. The only thing people care about is how much blood you can put in the water to feed the frenzy. And if you're an East Coast media darling team that gets ESPN paid like the proven, multi-time champions of cheating NE Patriots, or the "no price is to high, no crime is too big" SEC, then who cares, still a dynasty, bruh. If the Yankees won a World Series and it came out this was happening, it would be "sign stealing has always been a part of the game. It's just more sophisticated now." Fuck, man, when Barry Bonds' head and hands grew 5 sizes in one summer from replacing his entire blood supply with the stem cells of 1,000 baby fetus, you still had people in the media saying "it doesn't put the bat on the ball for him! He still has to hit it!"
And I'll say this: Mike Fiers isn't some hero in the front office behind closed doors. He went outside the family on this one. MLB will crush anyone who says that publicly and will continue to laud him as a catalyst towards "bringing integrity back to the game," but lets be real here. This is the same league that punted for as long as possible on juiced players because the home runs brought more eyeballs. It wasn't until the media started pushing the issue did the righteous indignation popped up. Mike Fiers brewed up a shit storm and nobody in the MLB front office is happy about this. Oakland isn't happy about this. That locker room just lost a little extra "sanctity" over this. A's players will be looking over their shoulder a little more with a guy known to spill the locker room secrets around them. Fiers is in his contract year this year. He had a fantastic first year. If he has anything less than a stellar year, the A's aren't re-signing him. MLB is quietly hoping that Fiers does everyone a favor and fades into the background.
There. That's it. This is everything that I've been quietly ranting to myself about in traffic for the past two months. Now some 65 year old baseball purist can chime in and tell me how I don't know dick about the "real history" of the game and why what the Astros did was somehow different than the thousands of instances of systemic, continuous, and premeditated cheating that happens every season. It's either cheating or it's not. Either it's all punished or none of it is punished. Unwritten rules, my ass.