MLB: The cheaters don’t always prosper
By Jeff Kallman
Baseball will survive the current Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal just as it survived lots of old scandals, including the PED era.
Little by little, MLB players weighed into assorted extents regarding the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal (aka “Astrogate”) and its ramifications after the commissioner’s report and the suspensions and executions to follow. I’m not going to suggest I have a particular favorite, but San Francisco Giants third baseman Evan Longoria’s seemed to blink in neon and with light bulbs framing it to me:
“What happened to the term ‘cheaters never prosper’?”
Clearly the 2017-2018 Houston Astros (back-to-back American League West title; AL pennant and World Series conquest in 2017) and the 2018 Red Sox (AL East title; AL pennant and World Series) prospered well enough. The problem with Longoria’s question is that the term “cheaters never prosper” is usually answered by a wry and not always approving reply that cheating is probably sports’ oldest profession.
It’s tempting to send Longoria a copy of Paul Dickson’s The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign-Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime, whose second edition was published last year. But Longoria can relax. The cheaters don’t always prosper. The 2017 Astros and the 1948 Cleveland Indians (stealing signs by way of a telescope observer inside the Municipal Stadium scoreboard down the stretch, then winning the 1948 World Series, though Tribe first baseman Eddie Robinson swore in his memoir they didn’t do it in the Series) to the contrary, the evidence includes: