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user-inactivated  ·  3604 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Tag of the Week: Baseball!

It's looking more and more like ... no one knows anything yet. Speculation tends to be wrong. It is vastly more probable that it was some low-level idiots than anything else. Caught using your own IP address? Come the fuck on. The scandal is, at least, so far less significant than Pete Rose's betting, or (I think) the owners' collusion in the '70s. [EDIT: and, uh, steroids.]

It's not clear to me why the episode happened at all, actually. There is no information the Astros have that the Cardinals could not obtain legitimately if they wanted to. Thus I will believe until told otherwise that this is probably not some sort of organization-sanctioned attack, because that's insane. Anyway, as long as we come out of it with our only essential employee unscathed (Mozeliak), I don't really care what happens to the rest of them. Toss 'em in jail. We'll see in a few days, I imagine.

As for the team's punishment ... that will depend on how complicit the organization as a whole was (my guess: not very). Fines, draft picks, some sort of postseason ban: as far as I know the latter two have never been done in the modern era, but fines don't really hurt a successful baseball team. So who knows.

For now, we're still five games better than the second-best team in baseball. That's fucked. I'll take it and be content.