Rob Manfred Pretty Much Thinks The Astros Players Shouldn't Be Punished Because The Public Shame Has Hurt Their Feelings Enough
Earlier today ESPN published Karl Ravech's interview with Commissioner Rob Manfred as he tried to defend his "punishments" of the Houston Astros. He later held a press conference to further back up his comments. MLB Network chose to air 'Bull Durham' for the 10,000th time over the press conference which makes total sense. If you didn't find the Youtube link on Twitter you had no way of watching. MLB tried to sweep this under the rug because they knew what a shit show it would be. Alright let's get into the article and presser shall we?
When asked about the fans and players desire for Astros players to be suspended he insisted the public shame has "hurt" the players. He thinks if you watch the players faces in these interviews that it's enough of a punishment rather than actually missing games. What does that even mean? You couldn't come up with a good punishment of your own so it's up to us to shame them? They don't care about that. This isn't high school. We're talking about feelings getting hurt?
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"Yeah, I understand. I understand people's desire to have the players pay a price for what went on here," Manfred said. "I think if you watch the players, watch their faces when they have to deal with this issue publicly, they have paid a price. To think they're skipping down the road into spring training, happy, that's just a mischaracterization of where we are. Having said that, the desire to have actual discipline imposed on them, I understand it and in a perfect world it would have happened. We ended up where we ended up in pursuit of really, I think, the most important goal of getting the facts and getting them out there for people to know it."
What he doesn't understand is that these players aren't remorseful for what they did. They're sorry they got caught. They'd still be doing this shit if Mike Fiers didn't blow the whistle. You think Alex Bregman has actually lost sleep over this? No chance. He has his World Series ring and he'll have it forever thanks to Manfred's incompetence. Manfred says in a perfect world they would have been punished. Well, then just make it a perfect world! In his press conference he says the immunity given to the players was under the promise of truthful accounts and information. I'm sure you can find plenty of lies in those interviews to break that immunity if you tried hard enough.
Now that all of the "facts" are out there let's see how the fans and players (more importantly) are receiving all of the news lately. I'm sure they're all accepting of the Commissioner's words and actions.
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Everything's fine. Everyone is thrilled that the Astros players didn't get punished. The fans being mean to them is enough of a consequence. Fuck off dude.
In Manfred's press conference he said he thought about stripping the title from Houston and debated it for some time. He says the reason he opted not to was because there was no precedent and that he wanted the public to judge the facts for themselves. Well Rob you want to take a look at Twitter these days? Everyone wants the title stripped. No one thinks the punishment you gave was anywhere close to enough. You fined a team $5 million, docked a few draft picks and suspended the manager and GM. That's nothing given how absurd this scandal was. What's to stop another team from doing anything like this if that's all you're going to come down with?
And now we're hearing that a memo is being sent out to teams instructing them to not target Astros players during the season. Yeah, good luck with that. So because Manfred cowardly chose to not punish the players he's going to punish anyone who feels it necessary to conduct their own punishment? Yeah that seems like the appropriate move. Ever think if you just punished the players like you should have then no one would feel it necessary to take action like that?
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Manfred was also questioned about the buzzers and said he's not sure if they were using them. Great investigation! Glad we got all of the facts out there.
What a disaster. The whole baseball world is burning and Manfred has no answers for anyone. Every decision he's made here has fallen flat on its face. Have fun dealing with all of the backlash because t's not going to stop, nor should it. We still talk about the Black Sox to this day. We talk about Pete Rose. We talk about the steroid era. The Astros cheating scandal will not be any different.