Channeling Judge Landis

This is how a commish commishes, Roger Goodell. I trust you took notes.

I trust you were paying close attention when Rob Manfred, stout of heart and steely of spine, brought Kenesaw Mountain Landis' spiritual hammer down on the cheaters in his game, even if it cast a shadow over his game's signature event. What Manfred did was, he asterisked the ethically bereft Houston Asterisk-os, and by extension the 2017 World Asterisk Series. Booted 'em right out there into outer darkness, and didn't bat an eye doing it.

By doing so, he differentiated Major League Baseball from the NFL, which by comparison goes weak in the knees when its most successful franchise gets caught breaking the rules. Throw a few fines at the miscreants who can well afford them, dock them a couple of draft picks (hardly ever first-round picks) and suspend a few people for a handful of games: That's the NFL way.

After which the New England Patriots, after a brief show of contrition, go right back to Spygating their opponents. Because that is also the NFL way.

But MLB?

Well, how about kicking out the Asterisk-os' manager and general manager for an entire season? How about the Asterisk-os' owner then taking all of five minutes to fire both of them? And how about Alex Cora, the architect of the Asterisk-os' brazen sign-stealing scheme, sitting by the phone now up in Boston, where he apparently ran the exact same scheme as manager of the World Series-winning Red Sox in 2018?

Eventually his phone is going to buzz, or chirp, or play a few bars of Metallica, and he'll be gone, too, Likely today.

Because, listen, even if baseball folk have been finding ways around the rules since the game was being played in cow pastures and the like, winking at it (or all but) still corrodes the game. Stealing signs may be a time-honored baseball tradition, but flaunting it as an institutional tenet is another matter entirely. Like Lance Armstrong bullying the riders on his team into juicing as a condition of employment, cheating as policy takes sport to a dark place it simply cannot go.

Then it's no longer vaguely charming, like Gaylord Perry hiding Vasoline beneath the bill of his cap. Then it's the sort of straight-up corruption that destroys a sport, as it nearly destroyed cycling.

And so raise a glass of the good stuff to Manfred, who clearly demonstrated that baseball won't abide that aforementioned dark place. And who showed a measure of restraint at the same time by not simply stripping the Asterisk-os of their 2017 World Series title. 

He could have decreed that Vacated won the Series that year. But he didn't, because he no doubt understood that what he did do made that a practical reality, anyway.

Are you listening, Rog?