MLB: Don’t hold your breath for the ’17 or ’18 World Series being vacated
By Jeff Kallman
Don’t expect MLB to do anything about the 2017 or 2018 World Series titles.
Unless MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has either a change of approach or a heretofore undetected reservoir of cojones none of his predecessors even thought of having, everyone waiting for the Houston Astros’ 2017 World Series title to be vacated has to hurry up and wait.
It isn’t going to happen. Neither will the Boston Red Sox’s in 2018. No matter what the Los Angeles City Council or anyone else says. Individual games have been forfeited—only five since 1970, four for fans running amok and one because Hall of Fame manager Earl Weaver didn’t like the visitors’ bullpen tarp and wouldn’t let his Orioles take the post-rain delay field unless it was changed.
But never a postseason series, World or otherwise. They’ve been delayed for reasons running the gamut from rain to earthquake, but they’ve never had a pennant or Series title vacated because someone or an entire team was caught cheating.
Manfred isn’t allergic to setting or breaking precedents, of course, but it seems he’d rather break the ones that don’t need to be broken (the three-batter minimum) than break the ones that should be broken. And whatever you think about the ’17 Asterisks or the ’18 Reconnaissance Sox, the best you can hope is to see special symbols next to their titles, meaning, “But–.”
Unless, of course, you’re ready to open a few more cans of eau de le pew over a few previous pennants and maybe (big maybe) a couple of pre-Astrosoxgate World Series championships, that is. Thanks to the work of Paul Dickson, in The Hidden Language of Baseball, whose second edition appeared just before Astrogate erupted and exploded, we have a solid idea who went beyond on-field gamesmanship to off-field cheating.
Would you care to vacate the following in retrospect?