What is not getting talked about much is how this is hurting the reputation of the teams who don't cheat. I keep hearing the defense that everybody cheats. No not everybody is cheating, there is no evidence of that. Is it possible there are other teams that do it? maybe, maybe not but to make those accusations with no evidence at all is hurting those out there that play the game clean and fair.
No evidence...yet. But we keep forgetting or choosing to overlook the fact that the original article that exposed Houston clearly has these quotes: "Illegal sign stealing, particularly through advanced technology, is everywhere"; "it's an issue that permates through the whole league" one major league manager said, "electronic sign stealing is not a single team issue", and so on.
There have been accusations going back five years with various teams. The Athletic only went to press with Houston because they had hard information from Fiers. Maybe not everyone is cheating, but it's clear that things like this have been going on. It's disappointing to me that a) MLB didn't give more concrete facts on the Houston thing, i.e. which games or which postseason plays were the result of illegal sign stealing. If they had, I'd be more on board with the title-removing crowd or penalties for individual players. and b) that MLB isn't pushing harder to dig up what else might be out there. It will take the next Fiers to come forward and talk, and someone will, at some point.
I take great pride that my team in 2005 won a clean title, at the end of the steroid era, with teams like NY having multiple confirmed users and winning multiple titles on the backs of those players. Or in 2004 with Boston having guys like Ortiz heavily suspected. Players on the Sox like Konerko and Frank Thomas were also very outspoken against their fellow players who were using, risking the same kind of backlash that Fiers is getting to some degree. There were no reputation issues or anything like that.
Honestly this issue has gotten tiresome, I'm pretty much done commenting on it. I hope this season is a good one and isn't marred by stupid brawls every night or every Houston win or homer being analyzed for an hour on ESPN or the MLB network. I hope baseball does the right thing and finds out who else was doing this, give them similar punishments, sets much harsher punishments for future incidents, and do what they can to make sure this doesn't happen anymore.