They cheated at pitching, too. The Astros were the ones who came up with the Spider tack stuff on the hands first. It’s why Verlander’s career took off when he came over from Detroit, and Cole’s when he came from Pittsburgh.

All teams steal signals, and I have no problem if the players are doing it themselves on the field or even from the dugout if they can pick something up. The Astros were using video from non-players and relaying it, through players in the dugout, to the hitters. Cora, currently managing the Red Sox, was apparently the brains of the operation.

What’s more, the Astros, (primarily Correa), have gone full heel, claiming that no one knows the full story, while at the same time refusing to disclose what they knew, or what they did. So when everyone, (correctly), shits on them as the devious, beady-eyed cheaters that they are, they cry and whine “unfair” and point to other teams while never providing any actual proof.

And no, I don’t find it hard to believe that Cora’s teams were the only ones doing it. The Red Sox are a legacy team with a huge, if ill-bred, uneducated, and poorly washed following, and the Astros were an exciting team filled with young, (and largely Latin/Hispanic) players in, and I can’t emphasize this enough, the 4th-largest metropolitan area in the US. MLB gains nothing, nothing, by punishing those teams and letting others go free. If Manfred came down hard on, like, Pittsburgh or Kansas City, while ignoring the Yankees and Dodgers, then I’d concede the point. But it doesn’t work in this scenario, and it’s a tired point that Astros fans cling to with their fat, sweaty, thieving little fingers as though it were some morsel of fat-laden brisket that they couldn’t wait to get back to their oil-stinking hovel and shove down their remorseless gullets.

What I’m saying is that the Astros can fuck all the way off.