Watching Mookie Betts and the Boston Red Sox power their way to a World Series championship was a thrill, not of vicarious victory, because I knew I did nothing to share in that astounding performance, but simply a bliss of wonder that players could perform so magically.
Now all that has gone to ashes.
I am actually in a position to understand how exactly this form of cheating poisons the achievement, invalidates it, actually.
I played little league baseball, but never in high school nor college but as an adult I played for nearly 20 years and I was addicted to batting cages, still am, actually.
Most batting cages have an 85 mph fast ball cage and this I (or anyone really) can learn to hit and drive consistently. It's a challenge, but you can be trained.
But I once found a cage where you could program a 90 mph fastball and you could program 3, 90 mph fastballs, then an 80 mph curve then a 90 mph fastball, then a 75 mph slider and so on.
I found I could hit a 90 mph fast ball about half the time if I set up 10 in a row, but I could hit this only half the time, even when I knew it was coming and never hit it on the nose. What really killed me was seeing a 90 mph fastball after an 80 mph pitch. The 90 mph fast ball looked like 120 mph and I never could come close to even making contact.
This showed me the importance of "mixing speeds" and why older pitchers who could no longer throw 95 mph fastballs could still be successful by "keeping the batters off balance" which really means, by completely destroying the batter's timing and brain cells by mixing speeds.
So now the scandal: The Houston Astros got a software program which allowed them to steal the catchers' signals to the pitchers and teamates in the dugout could see these translated signals and hit a trash can: one for a fastball, two for off speed, and the batter in the batter's box then knew what was coming and had a huge advantage.
Of course, the batter still had to hit the ball, but as I discovered in my high tech cage, even an amateur stood a good change of laying bat on ball if he knew it was a fastball coming.
It's been argued: Well, baseball players have been stealing signs since the game began, but no.
Everyone knew, when there was a runner who reached second base, he would look in to the catcher and see the signals and try to relay this to his teammate at the plate. But the thing is, the catcher and pitcher knew this was going to happen and changed up signals, and this was never a very effective play for the batter.
What Houston did, and it won a World Series doing this, was radically different and more successful and the performance of Houston batters was demonstrably so much better when they were cheating, there is no doubt the cheating made the difference between victory and defeat.
And then, apparently, Alex Cora took the system from Houston to Boston and lo and behold: Red Sox players like Mookie had hitting success light years better than what they had ever done before.
I think this is true. I'll have to Google Mookie before and after Alex Cora arrived with the software. I'd love to believe Mookie was great even without the software cheat.
But what I've seen so far suggests Mookie and all the Red Sox got suddenly, significantly better with the software.
So far all I've found is that in 2017 before the software arrived Mookie batted .264 and hit 24 home runs. The next year Alex brought the cheat, and Mookie batted .364 and hit 32 home runs.
Unlike the fabled Chicago White Sox scandal, every Houston player and later, every Boston player was in on it--except for the Boston pitchers who did not bat, or even sit in the dugouts.
So Mookie's fabulous year was a cheat, a sort of lie. Same for every other player.
Talk about conspiracy theories--here's an actual conspiracy which altered outcomes.
To baseball's credit, the powers that be investigated and publicly disclosed the crime.
But, really, I don't think I'll be able to watch major league baseball again.
At least not the Red Sox or the Astros.
It will be interesting to see if Mookie can hit as well in LA, without the cheat, as he did in Boston.
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