Whether it's stamping on a striker's feet on the football field to pass interference to loading oneself with steroids on the roads of the Tour De France, athletes have found a way to cheat and cheat again.
They don't care about how they get to the summit, they just care that they ARE on the summit.
In Baseball, they cheat. They try and make lives easier for their players by stealing signs, putting spit on baseballs, corking bats, adding pine tar 'for grip' and just about anything to get ahead.
At times, it's been kind of comical, with players clambering into umpires' rooms to try and retrieve suspicious bats.
The cheating thing came to another furore in January, when it was found that Houston Astros players and management had cheated their way to the World Series victory.
And know this because they admitted that they had done so.
Their crime? Using a video camera in centerfield to relay signs from the catcher to the players, so effectively they knew what pitches were coming.
And while the form of it wasn't particularly interesting, it was exceptionally effective.
More stunningly, Major League Baseball had already said EARLIER THAT SEASON if the teams behaved as badly as the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox in their cheating in 2016 and 2017 respectively (both sides were fined), there would be suspensions and the offending teams would lose their first and second round draft picks, therefore hitting the future of a team where it hurt (not all teams have the trading power of the aforementioned superpowers, but still).
In sporting terms, if in basketball this was a flagrant foul, this was an organisational middle finger.
Opposition players and fans were obviously outraged. The Astros players themselves didn't seem to care until Spring Training early this week, when the apologies flowed but sadly, there were not the crocodile tears as there were in Australia (see Australian cheating scandal when players were caught using sandpaper to rough up the side of a ball to make it move).
Alex Bregman said: "“I am really sorry about the choices that were made by me team, by the organization and by me. I’ve learned from this and I hope to regain the trust of baseball fans.”
Carlos Correa: "We feel bad and we don't want to be remembered as the team that cheated to get a championship....What we did in '17 was wrong....I'm going to be honest with you: When we first started doing it, it almost felt like it was an advantage. ... But it was definitely wrong. It was definitely wrong and we should have stopped it at the time."
Yuli Gurriel had obviously seen his colleagues' press conferences and probably thought that honesty was the best tactic. "No one put a gun to our head....it would be a lie to say that one or two people are responsible."
Jose took the Goldman Sachs investment banker route, going with: "I want to say that the whole Astros organization and the team feels bad about what happened in 2017. We especially feel remorse for the impact on the fans and the game of baseball. And our team is determined to move forward."
The statement doesn't help bearing in mind Altuve has also been accused of wearing wires and buzzers to notify him of what balls were coming and when. When he celebrated his walk-off home run off Aroldis Chapman in Game 6 of the 2019 ALCS, he should be seen yelling at this teammates: "Don't take off the shirt! Don't take off the shirt!" It looked suspicious then, and despite Altuve's stream of denials on the fact that anything was happening, it looks bad now....especially when he changed shirt straight after the bomb and came back to the field.
The fact is that in 2017 that the team went 8-1 during the play-offs at Minute Maid Park. That's sensational work and almost unheard of when the best of the best are clashing.
But it was OK that they said that, because such was the deal with Major League Baseball (as it emerged), they basically were able to blame Hinch and Luhnow and get away without penalty.
For us, this situation's as bad as the Chicago 'Black Sox' scandal of 1919 when the White Sox threw the World Series so they could make gambling money. There's been two films made about it (we preferred "Field Of Dreams", when Kevin Costner acted as Shoeless Joe Jackson's spirtual lawyer in a field of corn). movie - probably starring Ray Liotta as the Astros coach, some angry young dudes as the Astros players, and Jack Nicholson as Tom Crane, the Astros' owner (telling people that they can't handle the truth) - will come out. Probably on Netflix.
But our biggest question is this: Why hasn't Major League Baseball - which is already suffering from falling attendances - done the most honorable thing and.......suspended the players?
As wonderful as it might be for other baseball fans to see every Astro suspended for the 2020 season, it ain't gonna happen. The owners like TV revenues, and Houston - being a mid-market team that they are - could argue that it would mean more green seating, look worse on the eye (Of course, the balls coming to the players didn't look bad on the eye during the play-offs, but still), and hurt the sport.
So here's our recommendation for: Why not go with rolling 30-game suspensions, without pay? We would have loved this scenario: Bregman gets 30 games, then Altuve, then Springer, then Correa, then....then....And if a hitter has moved onto pastures green, he gets 30 games, too.
Unfortunately due to the mishandling of the situation by Major League Baseball, that's not going to happen.
The next best thing they can do? Null and void the World Series of 2017, fine each player their World Series 2017 bonuses and remove Altuve's MVP.
That might not make up for 2017....but it would help.
