Let's start here and hope I get very distracted very quickly.
Herbert Hoover once said, "baseball has had a greater impact on our American way of life than any other institution." I'm glad he wasn't around this week. Baseball is my very favorite sport in the world (Deutsche Fussball Bund, shau wo anders) and as ill as the Performance Enhancing Drugs scandal of a decade ago made me, this week is worse, far worse.
When this kind of stuff happens in the Olympics athletes, teams, and their countries are STRIPPED of their medals. So what about Major League Baseball? Do I think we give a World Series Trophy or pennant and rings to the Los Angeles Dodgers who, it could be argued suffered the most damage at the hands of the Red Sox and the Astros? No (mainly because I hate the Dodgers) and not because of that old chestnut 'everyone does it.'
EVEN if that were true, so what? That still would not make cheating okay. Nope, there should be no trophies for the Astros or the Red Sox (and fuqq you, John Henry and Sean Kennedy individually and collectively)) just holes in the display cases and no jewelry for fingers either. Donate the money all that stuff cost to someone like Doctors Without Borders, International Refugee Committee or Puerto Rican Earthquake Relief.
And spare me punishing just the managers and general managers who 'should have known' or 'could have known' and start stringing up the players who were involved in this stuff (and not just former-Astro Carlos Beltran), just beneath those Divisional and League Champion pennants the teams have at their stadia (those trash can lids didn't bang themselves, did they?), who did know but cheated anyway because rules are for people who don't know any better or something.
And finally, make the Astros and Red Sox forfeit all their games through the All-Star break (my apologies to their fans for that punishment) and then make them play the rest of the season's home schedule for free admission. Now go forth and sin no more.
-bill kenny
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