Tim Benz: Hard to find sympathy for ‘cheated’ Astros rivals who stood silent

For the past week, the news cycle surrounding the Houston Astros sign-stealing controversy has been constant.

And so has the bloodletting.

Manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow have been fired.

Because they were formerly members of the Astros, Red Sox manager Alex Cora and Mets manager Carlos Beltran were both fired from their jobs in new cities as well.

Now some are calling for the Astros players to be fined and suspended on top of that. Or, at the very least, asking why the players aren’t taking more accountability for their roles in the sign stealing.

Be that banging trash cans or alleged buzzing wires.

I’m not in that group. I’m not interested in seeing a quest to get specific players on that 2017 Astros club suspended or fined.

Well, unless that wire thing is proven. If you tape something electric to your body to get an advantage, you aren’t just part of a team-executed scheme.

If someone else bangs a trash can in the hallway, you can’t stop your ears from hearing it. When you start taping electrodes under your jersey, that’s worse.

I’m more than suspicious the Astros were doing that. You have to be, based on the video of Jose Altuve coming down the third base line after his ALCS Game 7 home run against Yankees’ Aroldis Chapman, begging his teammates to avoid tearing off his jersey during the ensuing celebration.

Altuve making sure he keeps that jersey on (via r/nyyankees) pic.twitter.com/OO32FVFxTi

— Kenny Ducey (@KennyDucey) January 16, 2020

It’s not like that franchise deserves benefit-of-the-doubt points.

However — for whatever reason — Major League Baseball has found “no evidence” against Astros players regarding the wires. It’s possible some of this scuttlebutt could encourage them to reopen that investigation.

I’d be all for it.

Saving that, however, what can MLB do? Retroactively ban every Astros hitter from 2017 in 2020 for the trash-can thing? How about the pitchers? Was the trash can ever hit while they were batting? Does that matter? Or did they benefit enough from just pitching behind an offense that was cheating since it knew what pitches were coming?

Do we want a year’s worth of lawsuits and courtroom drama from a roster’s worth of batters insisting they asked for no trash-can banging while they were hitting?

Whether those claims would be true or not.

It’d be a never-ending quagmire.

Let’s forget about the impracticality of such an attempt to mete out punishment player by player. Let’s put aside that such an attempt would essentially be opening a can of worms for 40 individual cases of “DeflateGate.”

Instead, let’s ask this question: Why would MLB be suspending those players? Is it because their actions were unfair to other players on opposing teams?

You’d assume so, right?

Well, I guess they weren’t so unfair that players were coming out of the woodwork to inform the league of what was happening. It’s not like the whole 2017 Astros team stayed together between the end of that season and word of the investigation breaking in November 2019.

Why was Mike Fiers the only former player to come forward and play the role of whistleblower? Why is Trevor Bauer just now tweeting about what players thought they knew about the wires, when suspicions about the garbage cans have been known for three months?

Former Pirates pitcher Charlie Morton went from the Astros to the Tampa Bay Rays. His old team beat his new team in the playoffs last October. I never heard Morton make any reference to sign-stealing malfeasance.

So if a vanquished playoff opponent didn’t see the need to expose how his former club operates, why should I feel sorry for anyone else and act like the suspension body count needs to be higher?

When the Yankees thumped the Red Sox for 29 runs during a weekend series in London last summer, Cora (manager of the Sox at the time) intimated his former Astros colleague Beltran (a special advisor for the Yankees at the time) knew sign-stealing methods from their days together.

Here’s video of the Alex Cora soundbite we just played on @WFANmornings. This was following the Yankees’ sweep of Boston in the 2019 London Series. Check out the wink after he brings up Carlos Beltran’s name around :27 and unprovoked usage of the word “devices.” (h/t @Pacmangrig) pic.twitter.com/HgkglIoB7O

— Chris Lopresti (@CLoprestiWFAN) January 15, 2020

So if it was such a big joke to everybody then — especially those who are significant American League competitors of the Astros — why should we all act morally offended now and pretend like our delicate baseball sensibilities have been compromised?

Other players in the league weren’t. Until it became convenient over the last week or so.

Kevan Smith — Tampa Bay catcher and former Seneca Valley star — told us last Friday that the silence may happen because players fear a “domino effect.”

Translation: If any accusation is made against a team, another will be made against another team. And so on. And so on.

Well, if that’s true, and every other team has dirt on them just waiting to be exposed, we should save the pearl clutching for another scandal.

I’m sure there will be another one soon enough.

But as far as this one goes, I’m all out of moral outrage. Especially if the alleged victims across the American League couldn’t muster up any of their own before the media and the commissioner’s office did the dirty work to start the conversation.