Deserved punishments for the Astros, Cora and Beltran protect baseball’s integrity

Former St. Louis Cardinals slugger Carlos Beltran became the latest domino to fall in the wake of the sign stealing scandal surrounding the Houston Astros.

It’s amazing to see how hard Major League Baseball has come down on the participants of this scheme. The commissioner’s office couldn’t ever really do much with steroid abusers. But some of the biggest stars in the game from Beltran all the way to Jeff Luhnow, darling of the analytics crowd, lost their jobs for their role in using electronic devices to aid hitters in knowing what pitch was coming.

I, for one, am glad to see it.

Using television cameras, apple watches and buzzers to let batters know when a curveball is coming isn’t the same thing as players sitting in the dugout trying to steal signs from the third base coach to figure out when the hit and run is on (as if they hit and run anymore in this boring era of baseball.) When the batter has a quarter of a second to locate the ball and figure out if he wants to swing or let it pass, knowing if a breaking ball or a fastball is coming is everything. It’s a huge advantage that threatens the integrity of the game. The practice had to be stopped, and a slap on the wrist wasn’t going to do the job. Coaches might actually do something to protect the integrity of baseball if they knew they might lose their paycheck for a year — or their job altogether — if they turn a blind eye on electronic aides.

Sending some of the biggest names in the game to the showers for a year is a message that can’t be ignored. Suspending Lunow and Astros manager A.J. Hinch prompted the Boston Red Sox to fire former Astros coach Alex Cora for his role in the scandal and the New York Mets were moving to fire Beltran when he decided to “mutually” part ways. That’s a big deal because Beltran is a guy a lot of people thought, at least before Thursday, was destined to be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He was a guy who was named on the short list of several high profile managing jobs. Did he ruin his Hall of Fame candidacy like Pete Rose? Is he forever going to be blacklisted as a skipper? Only time will tell.

Either way, it’s a better option than what happened with the steroids scandal, allowing big name players to find loopholes in the system to keep playing and hitting monster home runs. Every time Ryan Braun plays a road game, receiving well-earned boos, it’s an embarrassment to the game.

Still, while the punishments handed out so far have been a good step, the revelation Thursday that players wore buzzers under the uniforms in addition to the monitor watching and garbage can banging we already knew about, something has to be done to the players who were involved. That’s where we’ll see the sort of guts the commissioner’s office really has. It’s one thing to punish coaches and front office types who aren’t represented by the MLB players association. But the union is going to have a big problem with it if players start getting suspended without pay for an entire year for cheating, which is absolutely what needs to happen. The precedent has been set in terms of length of punishment. It’s not justice for the manager and general manager to pay the ultimate price while the players who executed the cheating plan are allowed to skate away unpunished.

If nothing else, the players should be punished for being so stupid that they didn’t realize, sooner or later, that they were going to get caught. Players switch teams every year. If you played for the Astros one year and then you were playing against them the next, aren’t you going to say something so you’re not victimized by the scam? Someone so careless about their reputation deserves to have it tarnished.

Scott Wuerz

Belleville News-Democrat

Scott Wuerz has written “Cheap Seats,” a St. Louis Cardinals fan blog for the Belleville News-Democrat, since 2007. He is a former BND reporter who covered breaking news and education.