The Houston Astros cheated.
You may have read about that in your local newspaper. They were punished with a fine of $5 million and the loss of a few draft picks. Now, I don’t care too much that they cheated. I think almost every team does some sort of version of what the Astros did. But, there are rules, and they broke them. I actually don’t think they were punished enough for what they did. I don’t think this punishment will do enough to deter other teams from cheating. Here are a few options that I think the MLB should have used.
BAN THE ASTROS. Just for a season. How crazy would that be? The Astros just straight up don’t exist for one season. (I won’t lie, if I were the commissioner of baseball, I would love to announce, “I have the Astros now!”) It would be even funnier if we all had to pretend that we’ve never heard of them.
“Man, I wonder what the Astros will be like next season?”
“Who are these Astros you speak of? Houston is a wonderful city that is home to the Texans, and Rockets, but they’ve never had a pro baseball team.”
Ban the Astros from the playoffs. This seems like a more reasonable punishment. I mean, what better way to prevent cheaters from winning the World Series again than just not allowing them to get there. Again, we could all team up and lie to them about the playoffs. We can all pretend that there just wasn’t enough money in the budget this year for the playoffs to happen.
Make them play Triple-A. This is probably the most extreme, and embarrassing punishment. But wouldn’t this work? It would be very humiliating for all of them. Even more so if the current Triple-A team replaced them in the majors and won the World Series. (This sounds like a fun sports movie.)
Here’s one I literally just thought of: Have them be down by a run at the start of each game. This is more of a subtle punishment, but it kind of seems fair, right? They were gaining an advantage, and now we’ve given their opponents an advantage.
Similar to the last idea, they could make the Astros pitchers have to announce what pitch they are about to throw. This would be really fun for the fans at home and at the game. Oh, here we go. We can have each pitch have its own button, and the pitcher has to press the button to the corresponding pitch he’s about to throw. And then the pitch is put up on the scoreboard at the ballpark. What fun!
We could also do a scarlet letter type of punishment, and just make them wear jerseys that say “Cheaters” on them. I think this is a great merch opportunity for the MLB.
What I’m trying to say is, I need to be the commissioner of baseball. I would have a lot of fun with it. Again, I don’t care too much that the Astros cheated, but there needs to be more creative, and interesting punishments for them if the MLB wants this to stop.
