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Originally Posted by Haywood
I hear ya. I don't think other teams are innocent. But, I also believe, as in the steroid era, not every player was juicing. MLB definitely wanted to make an example of them because of the blatant disregard of the rules they set back in 2014 about no use of technology to steal signs. After seeing the evidence, it was the fact that the Astros went further than what most teams were doing to steal signs. Now, again, other teams could have done the same thing and we don't know about it, but it seemed pretty bad to the techniques they used.
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Reading Twitter has been interesting lately, I'll say that. Lots of current/former players giving their take on it and from the sound of it (still hearsay, I understand), it is definitely a widespread problem.
Regardless though, it's still frustrating as hell as an Astros fan. It was arrogant, idiotic, and just flat out dumb. Especially since Hinch knew about it but never told anyone. I think that's what pisses me off the most, because it could've been put to bed almost immediately if he had notified Lunhow and Crane about it.
I guess we'll see what happens once the dust settles, but I don't expect Manfred to go so far as to make the league look bad. I'm sure a few examples will be made but I don't hold out any hope of it going past Cora once they hand out his punishment. They'll probably try and sweep it under the rug after that.
Edit: And for what's worth, Manfred's investigation found that the Astros stopped doing it at some point during the 2018 regular season because the players didn't think it was effective and didn't find anything in 2019. Batting averages didn't change too much for 2018 and 2019 compared to 2017 either.