Poll: what do you think of the Astros’ punishment?

[Ripken]

3 hours ago, Moose Milligan said:

Stephen A, screaming that the Astros should get their title stripped.  

Which I'm fine with, as long as the Red Sox get theirs stripped too because of that doucheloaf Cora.

Screamin' A.

[atomic]

I think a good actual punishment would be to let them keep their draft picks but make Springer, Correa, and Alvarez free agents. 

[BRobinsonfan]

8 hours ago, Ripken said:

I'm a well reasoned person.  The punishment seemed right to me at first but, after consuming the report and giving it some thought, it is way too lenient.  The money is nothing to a billionaire owner, so forget that.  The one year suspensions aren't much either.  A GM can keep doing his job while suspended; he just does it more behind the scenes.  IMO, Hinch was grossly overrated anyway but after a year he could have returned like nothing happened.  It wasn't MLB that fired them, it was the Houston owner.  All this really comes down to are the picks.  Four high picks is certainly a penalty but it's not that severe.  Four picks is nothing compared to a championship.  No player was punished.  It's not nearly enough and I believe it's because of embarrassment to the game, widespread abuse, and fear of the MLBPA.  

Short of stripping a title, which I do not believe MLB can do, lifetime bans should be handed out to several people, fines should be 10X what they are, pick loss should go for several years (or possibly no picks for two entire drafts), and players known to have cheated should get a one year suspension.  Let Houston go 38-124 next year, fielding a team of Rule 5 players and other cast-offs.  

You may think that the money is "nothing" but, as others have pointed out, it is the maximum allowable and is unprecedented.  

[Scalious]

3 hours ago, atomic said:

I think a good actual punishment would be to let them keep their draft picks but make Springer, Correa, and Alvarez free agents. 

Yeah, voiding contracts is going to cause more problems then it solves. If you are going to an extreme of breaking up an MLB team. You would have a draft. Not make them free agents.

[OsFanSinceThe80s]

1 hour ago, Scalious said:

Yeah, voiding contracts is going to cause more problems then it solves. If you are going to an extreme of breaking up an MLB team. You would have a draft. Not make them free agents.

How about the Astros have to swap their major league roster and farm system with the Orioles? Astroball part two (without the cheating) in record time!

[waroriole]

13 hours ago, SteveA said:

Yeah, and what does it really mean?   The fans still remember the championship, and the celebration.   Do USC fans feel any different about the 2004 national championship because it was "vacated"?   I don't think so.   I guess they can't fly a flag over the football field, or display a trophy in a trophy case.

The Astros championship will now be tainted in a lot of people's minds, and not in others.   Making some official statement that there was no champion that year, what does that really add?   Are you going to declare the Dodgers the champions now?   Are they going to have a parade for them in LA?

It's meaningless and I'm not sure what the people calling for it really are asking for.

If USC were actually the best team in 2004, they might still feel good about that season. 

[weams]

https://www.mlb.com/astros/news/astros-lose-draft-picks-as-penalty-for-sign-stealing

[Frobby]

Fangraphs’ take: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/rob-manfred-hammers-the-astros/

Their comment on the loss of the draft picks:

From a financial standpoint, this is the most impactful aspect of Manfred’s punishment. Building on previous research and using a figure of $9 million per Win Above Replacement, last April Craig Edwards estimated the present day dollar valuation of the top 70 picks. For a team finishing with the best record in baseball and therefore picking 30th, as the Astros were slated to do, the present value of that pick is $10.1 million, while for the 70th pick — where such a team might draft again after the compensation and competitive balance picks are tacked on at end of the first round — that figure is $3.8 million. Double that (for two years) and that’s nearly $28 million in lost future value from those four picks alone, and perhaps more. A team finishing with, say, the sixth-best record in 2020 could receive picks 25 ($12.0 million) and 65 ($4.3 million) in 2021.

[DrungoHazewood]

20 hours ago, Moose Milligan said:

And yes.  Always Free Pete Rose.  Ain't that right, @DrungoHazewood?

Pete Rose is free.  Free to sit at a table on Cooperstown's main street signing autographs for $100 each, jawing with the adoring hoards who think a decades of compulsive gambling on MLB while in their employ and 1930s Louisiana politician levels of lying are not terrifying and destructive, but in fact endearing.  If baseball wants to give him a plaque and a platform to say whatever he wants about the game, go for it.  That's the era we live in, you don't have to ask for forgiveness from your sins because they were really not sins at all, just funny stories.

[Moose Milligan]

1 minute ago, DrungoHazewood said:

Pete Rose is free.  Free to sit at a table on Cooperstown's main street signing autographs for $100 each, jawing with the adoring hoards who think a decades of compulsive gambling on MLB while in their employ and 1930s Louisiana politician levels of lying are not terrifying and destructive, but in fact endearing.  If baseball wants to give him a plaque and a platform to say whatever he wants about the game, go for it.  That's the era we live in, you don't have to ask for forgiveness from your sins because they were really not sins at all, just funny stories.

Ah, Drungo.  Still thinking that antiquated rules and thoughts drummed up by a cranky old fartknocker with frizzy white hair and an intense look are the most serious blights on the face of MLB because said cranky old fartknocker said so.  Let's overlook that the HoF already houses plenty of Pete Rose memorabilia and exhibits yet you draw the line at having a plaque of his in a room with the other plaques and letting him on stage for a few minutes in July.  

If only you could take your open mindedness and progressive ideas on how baseball should be run and apply them to Pete Rose.  What a wonderful world this could be.

[weams]

10 minutes ago, Moose Milligan said:

Ah, Drungo.  Still thinking that antiquated rules and thoughts drummed up by a cranky old fartknocker with frizzy white hair and an intense look are the most serious blights on the face of MLB because said cranky old fartknocker said so.  Let's overlook that the HoF already houses plenty of Pete Rose memorabilia and exhibits yet you draw the line at having a plaque of his in a room with the other plaques and letting him on stage for a few minutes in July.  

If only you could take your open mindedness and progressive ideas on how baseball should be run and apply them to Pete Rose.  What a wonderful world this could be.

https://www.yahoo.com/sports/if-pete-rose-is-out-of-baseball-forever-then-so-should-alex-cora-230843168.html

[atomic]

54 minutes ago, weams said:

https://www.yahoo.com/sports/if-pete-rose-is-out-of-baseball-forever-then-so-should-alex-cora-230843168.html

I see why Pete Rose shouldn't be involved with baseball but he should be in the Hall of Fame.  What he did wasn't related to his playing days.  If they want Alex Cora out of baseball forever than I have no problem with that either.  

I consider tanking worse than what Pete Rose did as he bet on his own team.  Elias is purposely making his team a loser.  Him and the other tankers should get life-time bans.

I do think that they need rules with players cheating that is agreed to with the union that if you cheat you get punishment.   Nothing about the punishment in this scandal affects any of the players who cheated.  They still got their awards, their titles.  

Baseball is in a bad spot with all the tanking which is another form of cheating and now the sign stealing scandal.  They really need to straighten up the league.   It is hard to even be a baseball fan these days. 

 

[DrungoHazewood]

1 hour ago, atomic said:

I consider tanking worse than what Pete Rose did as he bet on his own team.  Elias is purposely making his team a loser.  Him and the other tankers should get life-time bans.

The slight nuance separating the two things is that gambling on baseball has been explicitly called out as a banning offense since the 1800s, while the rules are totally and completely silent on losing today to win more tomorrow.

Your position is that you should get the death penalty for murder because the law allows for that, but the death penalty should also apply to things that are currently legal but that you don't like.

[DrungoHazewood]

17 hours ago, SteveA said:

Yeah, and what does it really mean?   The fans still remember the championship, and the celebration.   Do USC fans feel any different about the 2004 national championship because it was "vacated"?   I don't think so.   I guess they can't fly a flag over the football field, or display a trophy in a trophy case.

The Astros championship will now be tainted in a lot of people's minds, and not in others.   Making some official statement that there was no champion that year, what does that really add?   Are you going to declare the Dodgers the champions now?   Are they going to have a parade for them in LA?

It's meaningless and I'm not sure what the people calling for it really are asking for.

I'm not in favor of airbrushing out history.  The titles happened.  You can't pretend that they didn't.  I was at a 2004 game at FedEx where USC beat Virginia Tech.  For some reason they get to keep that win, but not several others from that season and the next.  Nevertheless, all those games happened, millions of people saw them, and it's silly to play make-believe they didn't.  

[DrungoHazewood]

23 hours ago, Can_of_corn said:

I've said before that the issues I have is with the lack of guidelines in place and how this ruling doesn't follow established precedent.  If I were to exclude those factors and just look at it from a punishment standpoint I don't think it is out of line.

All they would have had to do was after the Apple Watch incident make it clear that future violations would result in suspensions for the executives involved and the forfeiture of draft picks in addition to the fine the Red Sox were subject to.  But MLB won't do that.

It's my understanding that the rules didn't set forth a specific punishment for violating the ban on electronic equipment in the dugout.  To me that's the main difference between this and gambling.   A lifetime ban has been the punishment for gambling since at least 1877.  Jim Devlin was banned in the '77 Louisville scandal, and spent most of the 1880s literally begging for reinstatement, destitute and living on the streets before dying of the consumption.

What's the punishment for electronic sign stealing?  I don't know, but in most cases it's been nothing.  To me it's unprecedented to impose draconian penalties for something like this.  Loss of draft picks seems somewhat reasonable.