Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred makes error in not banning players who cheated | Bob Ford

If the plan of Major League Baseball was for the uproar surrounding the cheating scandal involving the Houston Astros and Boston Red Sox to quietly subside as one news cycle spins into the next, that plan isn’t going so well.

In fact, as commissioner Rob “Kenesaw Molehill” Manfred scurries from one spring-training outpost to the next, he is only stirring the flames higher and higher. Over the weekend, he defended the game’s decision on who should be punished, and his only truly strong statements were made to protect the culprits from any retaliation.

To quickly review, the Astros used a system of electronic sign-stealing beginning in 2017, when they won the World Series, and some form of that same system was also used by the Red Sox during 2018, when they won the Series, with former Houston bench coach Alex Cora as their manager.

That something was a little fishy was apparently common knowledge among other teams, which went to great lengths to disguise their signs, but executives in baseball’s upper management claim this was all news to them when the story broke late last year. If you listen closely, it sounds a lot like Bud Selig’s befuddlement as he learned about steroids.

Baseball did an investigation, and suspended Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch, both of whom were then fired by Houston. The Red Sox fired Cora, and the New York Mets fired recently hired manager Carlos Beltran, who had been a player for the Astros.

That was the extent of baseball’s official action, and actually only Luhnow and Hinch were punished by the commissioner’s office. The investigation into who might be considered for punishment in Boston has not been completed.

Manfred stopped short of disciplining individual players involved in the cheating, indicating that their shame was sufficient punishment.

“Yeah, I understand. I understand people's desire to have the players pay a price for what went on here,” Manfred said in an interview with ESPN. “I think if you watch the players, watch their faces when they have to deal with this issue publicly, they have paid a price.

“To think they’re skipping down the road into spring training, happy, that’s just a [false] characterization of where we are. Having said that, the desire to have actual discipline imposed on them, I understand it, and in a perfect world it would have happened.”

Well, in a perfect world, Arnold Rothstein wouldn’t have fixed the 1919 World Series, either, and Joe Jackson would be in the Hall of Fame. In a perfect world, the Astros wouldn’t have been beating on a trash can in the dugout tunnel to signal whether the next pitch was a fastball or a breaking ball.

This just in, Mr. Commissioner: It isn’t a perfect world, and for actions there are reactions, and for the unveiling of unpleasant truths there are consequences. The players on other teams, some of whom felt directly cheated by the actions of the Astros, waited for the game to punish the cheaters. When that didn’t happen, they vowed to levy punishment themselves. This doesn’t sit well with Manfred, but he has no one to blame but himself.

His weak excuse is that the Players Association would have fought the punishments, because Astros management hadn’t disseminated to its players an MLB memorandum prohibiting electronic sign-stealing.

“The memorandum went to the general manager, and then nothing was done from the GM down,” Manfred told ESPN. “So we knew if we had disciplined the players in all likelihood we were going to have grievances and grievances that we were going to lose on the basis that we never properly informed them of the rules.”

Yeah, that would have bothered Judge Landis, too.

But that’s what Manfred actually said. That players couldn’t have possible known it was wrong to film the opposing catcher from center field and then relay the signal by beating on a trash can? How in the world could they have known that was wrong without a memorandum?

I’m sorry, and it seems cold, but there should be some players who are out of baseball. I don’t know which ones — that’s why there are real investigations instead of sham investigations — but if you took part, you’re done.

This, or something similar, will happen again because the commissioner doesn’t have the spine to make an example of the perpetrators. In the absence of that, some pitchers have announced their intention to enforce their own justice by plunking the batters who stole from them.

Manfred is in a lather over that, but the potential eye-for-an-eye reprisals are only the result of his toothless actions. The commissioner promises more memorandums, however, since those have worked so well.

This issue isn’t going away, and it has grown to such proportions because baseball was willfully asleep at the switch on policing this kind of espionage, just as it was asleep at the switch on performance-enhancing drugs.

The game’s response to both crises was to keep its involvement low and away when, like the on-field retribution on the near horizon, it should have been high and tight and harsh.