Vacated, reconsidered

It could have been more egregious, one supposes. They could have hacked into one of our spy satellites and surveilled some poor unsuspecting catcher from on high.

The reality, after all, was deliberate and intricate enough, now that further details are coming out about the Houston Astros' sign-stealing scheme.  And where it originated.

It originated from a then-intern in the front office, Derek Vignoa, currently still employed by the Astros as -- I'm not making this up -- their senior manager of team operations. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was an Excel-based application designed to decode opposing catchers' signs, and it was used both at home and on the road throughout 2017 and part of 2018. Dubbed "Codebreaker," it enabled Astros baseball operations staff to log catchers' signs and subsequent  pitches into a spreadsheet, after which "Codebreaker" would correlate the two.

Then the information would be relayed to the batter by a baserunner. and eventually by Astros players banging out their own code on a trashcan. This means everyone knew about and participated in it, from general manager Jeff Luhnow to the front office personnel who ran the scheme to the players who were its delivery system.

Luhnow claims, dubiously, that he thought "Codebreaker" was only going to be used to decipher signs from the previous games, which would have been legal. But director of advance information Tom Koch-Weser (who also still has his job) told Major League Baseball that's a lot of horse pucky, that Luhnow would occasionally drop by the Astros' video room during road games and say, essentially, "So, you guys Codebreaking?"

Which has the Blob sort of rethinking all this Vacated business.

Initially it thought MLB stripping the Astros of their 2017 World Series title would be a meaningless symbolic gesture, because you can't change history and history records that the Astros did, in fact, win the World Series in 2017. Even if they had to cheat their glutes off to do it.

This is still true. But it is also true that sometimes the symbolic gesture is the appropriate gesture.

Now I'm thinking that the Astros' scheme was so brazen, and included individuals who are still employed by the ballclub, that perhaps there is some value to the simple seven-letter word "Vacated." I'm thinking, practical reality aside, removing "Houston Astros" from the official record for 2017 comes perilously close to a moral imperative for commissioner Rob Manfred.

I'm also thinking Henry Aaron might not be wrong with his get-off-my-lawn suggestion of the other day.

Ban 'em all, Henry said. Kick everyone involved out of the game and lock the gates behind them.

Because if you don't, you hand serial scuzzos like Pete Rose a way back into the game. Indeed, Pete is already ramping up his latest reinstatement crusade, using the Astros' scandal as a crowbar. If you're not going to ban the perpetrators of that fraud, after all, how can you continue to justify his ban, even as Pete continues to lie about the extent of his gambling on the game?

It's an excellent question. And one for which Manfred now has no legitimate answer.