Those now infamous dugout trash cans that the Houston Astros banged to signal stolen signs to their batters on the way to winning the 2017 World Series have another use these days.
They are receptacles for the careers of the Astros’ now, suddenly, ex-manager and general manager; Boston’s former manager, Alex Cora; and the Mets’ never-was manager, Carlos Beltran.
And they should also be where Houston is made to deposit any claim to its fraudulently acquired championship.
Shortly after MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred announced one-year suspensions of manager A.J. Hinch and GM Jeff Luhnow on Monday, the team’s owner, Jim Crane, canned them, setting off a chain reaction.
The Red Sox quickly fell into step, showing Cora the door, and the Mets did the same, announcing they were “parting ways” with Beltran on Thursday before he had so much as filled out a lineup card.
Meanwhile, Crane has held tight to the spurious claim the 2017 championship wasn’t tainted. And Manfred’s silence has let him get away with it.
What MLB should do is take it out of Crane’s hands — as well as those of any other owner whose team has also been shown to have fraudulently won the World Series or cheated to get there — and order the title vacated.
Sign-stealing in baseball is older than the dirt on Ty Cobb’s Hall of Fame cleats, of course. But what is prohibited is using something besides the naked eye to pilfer or communicate them so that wits aren’t replaced by electronics.
In the age of not-so-instant replay and a manager’s ability to challenge calls, that means an array of opportunities through cameras, computers and Apple watches — all forms of larceny prohibited in directives from the commissioner’s office in recent years.
MLB’s investigation of the Astros was prompted by the claims of former Houston pitcher Mike Fiers in a November story in The Athletic that Houston used video replay equipment to steal and unravel the signs of opposing catchers, banging the trash can as a signal so their hitters could have an advantage.
So, maybe it wasn’t Dodgers pitcher Yu Darvish tipping his pitches, after all, but an electronic thievery system that led to his thumping in the 2017 World Series. And, maybe, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts didn’t totally blow it by sticking with Clayton Kershaw in 2018.
It would be unrealistic to think that just one or two out of 30 teams have engaged in electronic sign-stealing when the means are so widely at hand and the competition to win so cutthroat.
If you are Manfred, it makes sense that, if the first identifiable culprits have won championships, that you start there. However, to really swing a heavy bat that gets the attention of cheaters, you need to do more than hand out suspensions, take back a few draft picks and extract coffee money from a multi-millionaire owner’s wallet. You force them to vacate what they cherish most, championships. Ill-gotten ones.
At a time when baseball is fighting to hold onto its fans, the last thing it needs is to have the integrity of its game questioned and its championships rendered suspect.
History tells us that MLB has been slow and often inept at confronting its trust issues. Witness how the whole performance-enhancing-drugs situation has played out.
It can ill afford to pull its biggest punch on this one now.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
