At a time when Major League Baseball wants fans to look to the promise of the 2020 season, it continues to take a pratfall, tumbling over its recent past.
Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred’s designed path of least resistance in dealing with the sport’s sign-stealing scandal has, instead, become a bonfire that shows little chance of being put out any time soon.
Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner is but the latest, and most fiery, to take aim at Manfred’s fumbling of the punishment of the Houston Astros.
Less than a day after Manfred clumsily defended his decision not to strip the Astros of their 2017 World Series title at his annual spring training press conference Sunday in Florida by describing the championship Commissioner’s Trophy as a “piece of metal,” Turner took a Louisville Slugger to the argument.
“I don’t know if the commissioner has ever won anything in his life. Maybe he hasn’t,” Turner told reporters in the Dodgers’ clubhouse in Arizona, according to the Los Angeles Times. “But the reason every guy’s in this room, the reason every guy is working out all offseason, and showing up to camp early and putting in all the time and effort is specifically for that trophy, which, by the way, is called the Commissioner’s Trophy.
“So for him to devalue it the way he did (Sunday) just tells me how out of touch he is with the players in this game. At this point the only thing devaluing that trophy is that it says ‘commissioner’ on it.”
Last month Manfred suspended Houston’s general manager, Jeff Luhnow, and manager, AJ Hinch, for a year. They were eventually fired by the team. But no action was taken against the players who employed an electronic system to pilfer catchers’ signals and transmit them by banging a din on a dugout trash can. Nor were the Astros required to vacate the tainted trophy.
The Dodgers didn’t win it, but the Astros didn’t deserve it.
“Now anyone who goes forward and cheats to win a World Series, they can live with themselves knowing that, ‘Oh, it’s OK. … We’ll cheat in the World Series and bring the title back to LA. Screw Dave Roberts (the manager) and screw Andrew (Friedman, the GM),” Turner said. “It’s just those guys losing their job. I still get to be called a champion the rest of my life.’ So the precedent was set by (Manfred on Sunday) in this case.”
The reasoning from MLB headquarters in doing nothing was simple, but flawed. Manfred wasn’t about to antagonize one of his bosses, Astros owner Jim Crane, by stripping away the trophy that Crane has so prized. Nor was Manfred going to challenge the Major League Baseball Players Association, one of the most powerful unions in sports, by sanctioning any of the Astros players.
He was just going to hope that it all went away by the time spring training got underway.
Instead, the issue festered until last week, when some “apologies” by the players, ranging from tepid to lacking in contrition, re-ignited it. Crane’s stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the sign stealing had any impact on the Astros getting to or winning the 2017 World Series further inflamed the situation.
“Our opinion is that this didn’t impact the game,” Crane maintained. (Then, why do it in the first place?)
“We had a good team. We won the World Series and we’ll leave it at that,” Crane said.
Except that few fans or players are willing to do that and it has turned it into a growing conflagration that Manfred, by his bumbling, seems unable to put out — or get out of the way of.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
