What's best about Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred's response to the 2017-18 sign-stealing scandal is that which distinguishes it from the steroid scandals of the '90s/'00s: Executives responsible for the conduct of their teams are taking the brunt of the punishment.
What's worst: It’s a policy from which team owners remain immune.
In the Steroid Era everyone in baseball, from the bat boys to Commissioner Bud Selig, knew players were doping; it was an open secret for 15 years. (The sport failed to take steroid use seriously until 2003, when, under public pressure, it instituted testing.) Yet the only people to receive punishment (from the arbiter of baseball history, its Hall of Fame) have been players. Tony LaRussa and Joe Torre, to name two managers, had clubhouses filled with steroid users. Yet they've been inducted with nary a mark on their reputations. Worse, Selig, who oversaw the era, is inducted as well. (He also bears large responsibility for the 1994 strike, which alone should bar him from entry.)
If they didn't want players taking steroids, baseball poobahs certainly benefitted from turning a blind eye. Steroid use became part of the game's culture. The 1998 home-run battle between two prominent users, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, was, at least in lore, responsible for baseball's "comeback" to popularity after the disastrous '94 strike. I don't like cheaters, but this cheating was (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) ignored to the point of implicit encouragement. The subsequent hypocrisy is sickening.
(For what it's worth, I'm in favor of a Steroid Wing in the Hall for the likes of McGwire, Sosa, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and, probably, David Ortiz. You can't tell the story of their baseball era without them.)
Stealing signs in baseball is a time-honored tradition, but doing so using technology, such as binoculars or hidden cameras or, in the case of the Houston Astros, video monitors and signals banged on a garbage can, violates game rules. Houston's 2017-18 sign-stealing regime (the one we've learned most about; other teams, apparently including Manager Alex Cora's 2018 Red Sox, had them, too) was created by players, facilitated by coaches (including Cora, in 2017 with the Astros), and known throughout the organization. The best detail in Manfred's report is that Manager A.J. Hinch so disliked his team's scheme that he twice damaged video monitors used to facilitate it. But he declined to stop it or say as much as a word about it to his players. (Several told investigators they'd have stopped had Hinch asked them to.) That he and his boss, General Manager Jeff Luhnow, are the two to receive year-long suspensions shows that Manfred understands that greater responsibility for maintaining sporting integrity lies higher in a team's hierarchy.
No players have received punishment -- in part to generate their honest, if anonymous, testimony; in part because punishing players who've left Houston could damage blameless franchises; and in part because determining punishments would be a morass and the players' union would grieve their cases, drawing out the scandal and creating bad publicity for the sport. The report named only one player, scheme ringleader Carlos Beltrán, then in his final year and now the newly minted manager of the hapless Mets. What Manfred and the Mets decide to do about Beltrán remains this story's most intriguing remnant. (UPDATE: Hours after this posted, Beltrán resigned.)
One major caveat to this praise of Manfred: Astros owner Jim Crane got off virtually scot free. (The team was fined $5 million, the maximum allowed, and lost four draft picks.) The report found no evidence that Crane knew of the sign stealing. But lots of baseball execs are angry that Crane skates away, his 2017 championship in hand and his franchise damaged but intact.
Manfred called the Astros' culture "problematic," blaming "an environment that allowed the conduct described in this report to have occurred." The report went out of its way to mention the team's disturbing response to an October Sports Illustrated story that detailed Assistant General Manager Brandon Taubman's postgame outburst at three female reporters, at whom Taubman screamed, "I'm so fucking glad we got Osuna!" That would be closer Roberto Osuna, whom the team acquired from Toronto in 2018 in the midst of a 75-game suspension for domestic abuse. Many in the franchise opposed the deal. (Canadian prosecutors dropped charges against Osuna only after the woman, with whom Osuna has a child, returned to Mexico and declined to testify.) But Osuna is talented, and GM Luhnow jumped at the chance to pick up damaged goods at a reduced cost. Crane approved the trade. When SI reporter Stephanie Apstein wrote about Taubman's outburst, an official team statement slimed her accurate story as "misleading," “irresponsible,” and "fabricated." It took days of withering criticism before the Astros apologized and, ultimately, fired Taubman.
The person most responsible for creating such an organizational environment is, of course, the person who leads it. But Crane sees no systemic problem. In the press conference announcing the firing of Luhnow and Hinch, Crane, asked about Manfred's criticism of his team's culture, simply said, "I don't agree with that."
Manfred's problem here is at least in part structural. The commissioner's bosses are the 30 team owners, whom he will punish only if their actions directly threaten the game's integrity. (Former Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and Reds owner Marge Schott are decades-old examples.) So long as that structure endures, baseball commissioners will continue to ensure that the buck stops with ... a team's general manager.
