Most folks have a basic sense that life can be wholly unfair.
Which is why we love sports. Beyond the zero-sum finality of the final score, we understand that the playing field is level for all involved. Sports is the closest thing we have to a true meritocracy. Of course, athletes punch holes through this utopia with PEDs. Sometimes teams spy on practices or tweak field conditions to favor the home team. But in most cases what we are seeing is real and really fair.
So what do we make of the Houston Astros? The darlings of baseball were an archetype of the outhouse-to-penthouse journey that gives sports a clean, moral sheen. In 2014, Sports Illustrated forecasted that the last-place Astros, with a 51-111 record in 2013, would win the World Series in 2017. And they did. As Hunter Thompson would say, it was Horatio Alger all the way.
It kickstarted a pseudo-empire that has the Astros surging deep into the MLB playoffs ever since. For much of the baseball fandom, Houston's deeds are sweetened by the fact that they muscled past the Yankees to reach the 2017 World Series. The Yankees' pain is always some gain for the masses, who are tired of seeing those aristocratic pinstripes splashed across their TV every October.
But what if the Astros won by metrics and malfeasance? They have been accused of stealing signs during their renowned run to the 2017 World Series title, a charge brought by Mike Fiers - who pitched for the Astros that year - and three other unnamed sources, according to The Athletic. The Astros allegedly stole signs by sneaking a camera into the outfield at Minute Maid Park.
This should make Yankees fans dry heave with disgust, now wondering if their enchanted run in '17, which got them within nine innings of the World Series, was in part thwarted by cheating. Imagine the landscape had the Yankees slipped past the Astros and faced the Dodgers. It would have been the most celebrated World Series in decades: two old-world teams with ties going back to Brooklyn, and a century's worth of history and headlines distilled into a classic Fall Classic.
Had the Yanks won that World Series, they would not have endured a calendar decade without a world championship for just the second time since 1920. Joe Girardi surely would have been the manager in 2018. Instead, he was booted and replaced by Aaron Boone. And who knows how many different dominos fall in the intervening years. (The Yankees also accused the Astros of curious whistling from the dugout during this year's ALCS, but MLB has found no clear breach of rules.)
There's also the irony that a Yankees employee in 2019, Carlos Beltran, was a member of those Astros, and reportedly benefitted from their high-tech thievery. On top of his time in pinstripes, Beltran served as an advisor to GM Brian Cashman for the last 11 months. And in a soap opera that could only grip the Big Apple, Beltran is now the manager of the Mets.
Does Beltran's tenure start with accusations and investigations? Is his launch into 2020 grounded by doubt? Or is it just the ADD nature of the sports fan to forget the recent past? Indeed, maybe the Mets and their devotees chuckle at the idea that their new skipper poached some sings from their crosstown tormentors. Maybe the part of New York - and America - that hates the Bronx Bombers sees any action that hurts them as a sweet form of karmic justice.
Probably not. We love or loathe teams based on their deeds, not their crimes. We take wins and losses with such abject gravity because we believe the games are fair and the results are square. There's an ancient maxim that says "if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying." It's archaic, at best, and the modern version speaks to nuanced edges a team gains, like stealing signs based on the pitcher's movements to the naked eye, not to a camouflaged camera squeezed into the padding of an outfield wall.
Baseball has a conflicted past when it comes to cheating, from greased balls to corked bats to juiced-up players. But as we become (allegedly) more enlightened, stripping carbs from our diets, fat from our bodies, and stripping dubious words from our vocabularies, we seem more and more at odds with each other. So we turn to sports to get our fix of fairness, from gridirons of the NFL to the cages of UFC to the timeless joys of MLB.
But as New Yorkers we inherit a special hubris, the certainty that when the universe was created, it started at Times Square. So naturally, an issue of cheating in Houston becomes back-page fodder for New York City.
Twitter: @JasonKeidel
