20 Comments

You must have had the signs, because you called it.

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I think Red Sox fans (like me) will support — obviously a lot had to do with the talent but I thought he did a great job in 2018 and the fan base loved him.

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If Cora and Hinch are back, there is no reason for the Mets not to try Beltran if they can Rojas. I don’t think they should since Rojas only had 60 games, and I have no idea what Cohen and Alderson are thinking anyway. But why not Beltran?

Though I suspect many Mets fans will disagree.

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I just can't get that wrapped around the axle on the sign stealing scandal.

You don't want your signs stolen? Use better signs. Change 'em every inning. Unpredictably make a sign mean one thing at one at bat and something entirely different the next.

Basically set it up so the MLB needs to hire cryptographers as well as statistics nerds.

The only scandal is that only some were doing it, while others behaved as if it were beyond the pale. If we all just agreed that, hey, just like in war gentlemen DO read each others mail (Henry Stimson notwithstanding, breaking Enigma in the Atlantic and Purple in the Pacific showed the value of sign stealing).

It is of value to highly competitive folks so it WILL get done. Whether they acknowledge the inevitability and plan accordingly is all that's up to each team.

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It took me a moment, and a double-take, to realize you meant <i>that</i> sign-stealing scandal, not that so many Biden-Harris signs were stolen from people's yards in the past few weeks. Just me? Well, OK then…

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Nice HTML markup.

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Yeah! You losers don't want your signs stolen via a coordinated illegal video access scheme, and then communicated to batters with an auditory signal from the dugout?

Then just figure out a way to feed an out-of-phase audio signal via the PA system that will cancel out the sounds coming from the banging garbage can. Super simple. I mean, I'm not even sure the Astros are to blame here -- this is pretty much the fault of all those stupid teams who just sat back and let it happen.

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The scandal isn't that signs were stolen. It's that they were stolen using off the field personnel and technology. It's not baseball. It's wrong for the same reason it's wrong to hack into another front office's computers. We're watching baseball, not codebreaking.

You may as well say breaking opposing players' kneecaps is of value to highly competitive folks and will get done. That's why we need rules and punishment for breaking them.

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I never got wound up about it, either. I don't much care for the Astros cheating when they were a dominant team, and was rooting against them, but I sort of wish that sign stealing were just something that was permitted.

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Found the Astros or Red Sox fan. Ignoring that this rationale excuses any and all conceivable cheating, no matter how egregious, it's also uninformed. Teams did change their signs on the fly against the Astros, and it wasn't enough, because the Astros had guys acting as codebreakers, figuring out the signs in real time by using illegal video! I'm sure the pace of play cranks will love every team having their own Alan Turings on the hill and behind the catcher to interpret and relay signs of sufficient complexity so as not to be stolen by teams with scumbags like Cora.

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Still don’t think they will be more than an average team next year, and maybe even the year after.

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Makes you wonder why Cora was so valuable to them in the first place. The Red Sox had an all time historically great season without any major stars and it's tempting to attribute that to the manager, but is it really?

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Without any major stars?

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I inexplicably forgot about Mookie. Sorry. But other than that a lot of solid players having good years but Bradley, Sale, Price, Bogaerts, Devers aren't exactly big stars.

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And so, cynicism chalks up another win.

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Honestly, he did his time. He should be allowed back into society. I feel the same way I would about any offender who isn't a danger to others. If you want to make an example out of him, you just encourage the next guy to scorch the earth because the punishment is exactly the same.

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The point isn't punishment. The point is why would any team bother playing by the rules. After Landis kicked the White Sox out, and Hal Chase, and the other gamblers, there wasn't a gambling problem.

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The teams were barely punished at all. They lost a pick and paid a fine equivalent to a late round rookie contract. That's like you and me dropping a buck in the swear jar. They punished Cora and Hinch, guys who are only millionaires much harder. But again, the followed they did their time. You want extra-judicial punishment because they made you mad. That's not how any of this works!

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Chicken shit decision to bury the whole thing.

There's a series of movies -- long TV episodes, almost -- called "The Worricker Trilogy", written by David Hare and starring Bill Nighy as a British spy trying to do the right thing. In the second installment, there's a scene where Nighy and Christopher Walken are sitting on this porch, ruminating about the world. Nighy's character says (paraphrasing), "Whatever happened to shame?" Walken responds, "Shame? It went the way of honor, didn't it?"

That's our world, it seems. Honorless. Shameless.

And while a New England team choosing to support YET ANOTHER cheater is not the biggest news of the decade, it does seem to speak to the absence of either shame or honor.

"But but but but he paid his dues!" Yeah, whatever. If you're going to come at me with that lameness, just go somewhere else. Take it to the MLBTR comments section or something.

My wife, who is a Red Sox fan is not particularly happy.

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At least New England teams supporting cheaters is not as bad as when they cover up for serial pedophile molesters.

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