Ex-Houston Astros GM Jeff Lunhow must say he cheated before he gets a second chance

It’s a real heart tugger listening to former Houston Astros executive Jeff Luhnow whine about how fairly when he was treated when he was suspended from Major League Baseball for a year and fired for his job only for bringing mistrust and shame to Major League Baseball and bringing the results of the 2017 World Series in doubt.

Luhnow, who cut his teeth with the St. Louis Cardinals before being snapped up by Houston, sure knew how to play the victim when he claimed the Cardinals were stealing his secrets in a computer hacking scandal that was the talk of baseball a few years ago. He demanded the book be thrown at the St. Louis organization, you know, for the integrity of the game.

“At the time when it happened a year ago, it was like coming home and seeing your house has been broken into,” Luhnow told Sports Illustrated in 2015. “You feel violated when someone does that without permission.”

Gee, Jeff, how does someone feel when they realize you stole baseball games from them by using technology — and some decidedly more analog methods — to steal signs about what pitch was coming to your hitters and relay it to the batters in real time?

The thing about the Cardinals is that the people who were responsible stood up for what they did and took their punishment without complaint. Even when those accused suggested that they were hacking into the Astros’ computer database because they suspected Houston was stealing information from St. Louis and they were looking for proof. The MLB investigators never even looked into those allegations, which suddenly seemed a lot more credible when we saw to what extent the ‘Stros were willing to bend the rules in order to try to win. Nearly a year after he was busted, Luhnow is still shirking responsibility for his actions.

“I didn’t know we were cheating,” Luhnow told KPRC in Houston. “I had no idea. I wasn’t involved. And it felt like, on that day, that I was getting punished for something that I didn’t do. And it didn’t feel right.”

Cry me a river.

You’re in charge of players and support personnel for a professional sports franchise and you had no idea that your team was cheating so elaborately? If that’s somehow true, Luhnow certainly should have made it his business to have some clue about what was going on in his own clubhouse.

Players are always going to look for an edge. It’s up for management to make sure that the rules are being followed by all the members of an organization on there is virtually no chance of the game being on the level. The general manager and the manager must make it their business to be sure the organization is following the rules not like college football and basketball teams. It’s not the players who are ultimately punished when rules violations are found, it’s the schools that lose eligibility for bowl games and to offer scholarships.

The teams protect the integrity of the game, not the players who are basically independent contractors who work for themselves.

There has been some scuttlebutt about the managers tied to the scandal -- AJ Hinch of the Astros and both Carlos Beltran of the New York Mets and Alex Cora of the Boston Red Sox who moved on to new teams after the 2017 World Series -- being reinstated in baseball in 2021. If they’ve done their time and can be trusted to uphold the integrity of baseball, then that’s fine. But Luhnow should never be allowed to be a part of a major league team until he can at least admit what he did wrong and acknowledge that he won’t do it again.

The old saying is that “no one is above the game.” But it sure seems like Luhnow doesn’t think the rules that apply to everyone else apply to him.