Houston (and Boston)....You Have A Problem

Major League Baseball handed down their penalty on Monday to the Houston Astros for the sign stealing scandal.

- Astros fined $5 million, the maximum allowed under MLB's constitution.

- GM Jeff Luhnow suspended for one year.

- Manager A.J. Hinch suspended for one year.

- Former assistant GM Brandon Taubman suspended for one year.

- Astros forfeit their first and second round draft picks for the next two years.

I applaud Major League Baseball for the way they handled the scandal and the punishment of the Astros organization.  It took one hour, for Astros owner, Jim Crane to say, "hold my beer."

Jim Crane called a press conference to address the punishment given to his organization by MLB.

In the press conference he said, "I have higher standards for the city and the franchise and I'm going above and beyond MLB's penalty.  Today, I have made the decision to dismiss A.J. Hinch and Jeff Luhnow.  We need to move forward with a clean slate, and the Astros will become stronger; a stronger organization because of this today.  You can be confident that we will always do the right thing and will not have this happen again on my watch."

"I felt that what came out in the report, they both had responsibilites.  Jeff, running the baseball operation and overseeing AJ and all of those people associated with that and AJ on the bench and was aware.  If you read the report, it's pretty clear AJ didn't endorse it and neither did Jeff.  Neither one of them started this, but neither one of them did anything about it and that's how we came to the conclusion."

I applaud Jim Crane for dropping the hammer.  If I had been in his shoes, I would have done the same thing.  His organization's name has been embarassed and drug through the mud.  I don't think Mr. Crane is done cleaning house yet.  I'm sure there are others still with his organization that had a hand in all of this.

We know MLB is not done with the sign stealing scandal.  The attention of the baseball world now turns to Boston to see what MLB does with Alex Cora (a member of the 2017 Astros staff) and the Red Sox organization, after it was discovered Cora took the sign stealing from Houston to Boston for their 2018 World Series run.

As a Red Sox fan, I am disgusted that Cora took this route to win the World Series.  It makes me question if they could have won the title without the sign stealing.  The Red Sox have already fired Dave Dombrowski, who was the GM in 2018 and hired Alex Cora.  Which means that if owner John Henry wanted to clean house like Jim Crane did, he wouldn't have to hire another GM.

Like the Astros , it makes me wonder how far into the Red Sox the cheating went.