The Free Press, Mankato
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

“If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying” — a quip that (probably) originated with stock-car legend Richard Petty — remains a core, and colorful, piece of the “ethics” of professional sports. The goal of winning justifies bending, or breaking, the rules, and it’s up to somebody other than the athletes to police it. Or as another ungrammatical phrase puts it, “It ain’t cheating if you don’t get caught.”

For the 2017 Houston Astros, getting caught didn’t come for more than two years after the event, but we now know they cheated on their way to 101 regular season wins and a World Series title. The Astros set up an elaborate system of using replay monitors to steal pitch signals in real time that season, a system expressly forbidden by major league rules, and continued to use it until the 2018 postseason, when MLB started actively policing the replay monitor rooms.

This week Commissioner Rob Manfred essentially decapitated the Astros, suspending both general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch for the 2020 season. (He also banished former assistant general manager Brandon Trautman, fired in October in a separate scandal, indefinitely.) An hour after the Luhnow and Hinch suspensions were announced, Astros owner Jim Crane fired both men.

The next day, Alex Cora — the bench coach for the Astros in 2017, manager of the World Series-winning Boston Red Sox the next season — was out as Boston skipper. The report issued Monday detailing the findings of the Astros’ sign-stealing scheme was particularly damning on Cora’s involvement, and an investigation into a supposed sign-stealing operation by the Red Sox continues. Cora is destined for a suspension at least as heavy as those handed Luhnow and Hinch.

Manfred wants, presumably, to make everybody else afraid to try the same thing. It is far from obvious that he’s accomplished that.

The penalties levied on the Astros beyond the suspensions are chump change. Fined $5 million? Most contending teams spend more than that on players who aren’t on their roster. Lose their two top draft picks each of the next two years? The Astros would be drafting late anyway, and may well have surrendered those picks to sign free agents.

No, for this to intimidate other teams, the suspensions have to be career-ending, and there is already a budding consensus that Hinch in particular will be back in a major-league dugout in short order.

Winning a World Series — or a Super Bowl, a Stanley Cup or an NBA title — is a powerful incentive, and a lot of the highly competitive people in professional sports would gladly sacrifice their future reputations for today’s championship.

And many fans would agree with that. It’s an interesting thought experiment: Would Vikings fans be content with a Super Bowl win if it meant the coach and general manager were disgraced a few years later? We suspect the answer is yes. And when winning is all that matters, ethics go by the wayside.