Are you over 2017?  I can tell you that I’m not.  I thought I was getting close, but then Tuesday’s Ken Rosenthal/Evan Drellich piece in The Athletic (subscription required) stabbed another fork in my blue-bleeding heart.

If you haven’t heard by now, during their championship season of 2017, the Houston Astros had an electronic system in place to steal signs, and it has been confirmed by former Astros and a few Houston organization sources.

The 2017 World Series is one I believe the Dodgers should have won hands down.  So many “what ifs” that ended up on the down-side for us.  I won’t get into them.  It was two years ago.  I believe the best team lost.  And now as I read that the Astros were electronically relaying signs to their hitters, it makes me believe that small competitive edge by way of cheating was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

How close was that series? A lot closer than many of us remember.  Astros won it in seven games but it was 34 runs to 34 runs to be exact.  We all heard the stories of sign stealing and pitch tipping with regard to former Dodgers pitcher Yu Darvish.  Now this.  The Astros stole one right out of the playbook of the ‘51 Giants.

It makes it more understandable why Clayton Kershaw coughed up a 4 run lead and 3 run lead in Game-5, or that Kenta Maeda and (now) former Dodger Brandon Morrow were setting balls on a tee for the Astros after having stellar performances in previous games.  Darvish was shelled in game three, even though he appeared to have good stuff.  It doesn’t take much, a pitch here or there and the whole game changes.  When it’s pitch after pitch where you know what’s coming, well that’s almost impossible to overcome.

Call it sour grapes if you want, but I peg an asterisk next to the 2017 World Series title that the Astros won that year.  Kudos to Mike Fiers who called them out.  Interesting comments from the current Oakland A’s pitcher:

“That’s not playing the game the right way.” 

“I just want the game to be cleaned up a little bit because there are guys who are losing their jobs because they’re going in there not knowing.”

“I had to let my team know so that we were prepared when we went to go play them at Minute Maid.”

The Astros cheating scheme involved cameras in centerfield, a TV monitor on a wall outside the home dugout and then banging on a trash can to signal to the batter if the pitch was either off-speed or a breaking ball.  And I have to ask, why our management didn’t notice the trash can bangs that were used to let Astros batters know that off-speed pitches were coming?  Only our coaches or advanced scouts can answer that, but when you consider all that goes into preparation for a World Series game, was it realistic for Dodger coaches to believe that the opposition would cheat at the highest level in the most important games of the year?

There’s a lot going on during the Fall Classic and perhaps with all the noise from the crowd, a simple thing like trash can banging could not be noticed.  I haven’t gone back and watched any tape yet, but I certainly will try to see if it can be noticed.

What next?  Sanctions?  An MLB investigation?  Astros officials are clamming up.  Unidentified officials are stating that the sign stealing wasn’t used in the Fall Classic or that most hitters didn’t want to know.  All I have to say is “bullpucky,” and Bobby Thomsen didn’t know what Ralph Branca was serving up to him either.

Speaking of sour grapes.  Did Fiers have a case of them after the Astros didn’t resign him after the ’17 Series?  It certainly is possible, but as a competitor, if you know of a cheating scheme that your opponent is using, you’d be foolish not to share the information with your teammates.

I totally understand the gamesmanship in stealing signs from second base or in noticing a pitching tipping pitches.  That is outsmarting the opponent.  But where zoom lenses and cameras and video feeds are used, a line has been crossed.

So there will be those that say we should stop whining because the sign-stealing took place at Minute Maid Park and the Dodgers lost the series at home.  To that, I say there would have never been a game seven had the Dodgers taken game three or five in Houston.  These allegations are huge and Houston should pay a heavy price for tarnishing the game in their trek to the Championship.  What an embarrassment!  If I were to venture a guess, MLB will sweep this under the rug, but the integrity of Houston’s championship of 2017 is definitely now something that this fan will always question.

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Editor’s Note: This video of Game-5 of the 2017 World Series at Minute Maid Park was posted on Twitter (via Reddit) by @FutureDodgers late Tuesday night. On it you can hear whistling prior to several of Kershaw’s curveballs, clearly proving that the Astros did, in fact, employ their sign-stealing tactics during the 2017 World Series, despite claims to the contrary:

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