Victory Through Cheating

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Cheat to Win a World Series and You’re Fired. Cheat to Win a Presidential Election and the GOP Will Hold You Harmless. With the Senate’s trial of Donald Trump beginning today, this may be a good time to reflect on the wages of victory through cheating.

Over the past two weeks, Major League Baseball suspended both the Houston Astros’ general manager and their field manager for one year—effectively compelling the club to fire them both—for picking up their rival catcher’s signs to his pitchers and cluing their batters in on the next pitch, thereby enabling the Astros to defeat the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 2017 World Series. The pilfering took place at the Astros’ home field during Games 3, 4, and 5 of the series, where the Astros had TV cameras placed so they could see the Dodger catcher’s signs and signal their batter as to the next pitch by banging on a trash can. (High-tech meets low-tech, and it worked.) The previously unhittable Dodger pitchers, Clayton Kershaw and Yu Darvish, were then clobbered by the Houston batters.

For suddenly paranoid Dodger fans like me, the fact that the Houston coach who set this system up, Alex Cora, went on to manage the Boston Red Sox the following year also raises suspicions about the Sox defeat of those same Dodgers in the 2018 World Series. Major League Baseball is examining whether the Sox used a similar system to steal the Dodgers’ signs, and following the Houston revelations, and Cora’s role in that year’s sign-stealing, the Sox also let Cora go.

So: Cheat to win the World Series and you’ll be shown the door.

But what about presidential elections? What about asking Russia to go after your Democratic opponent, a request with which Russia complied, and then some? Any consequences for that? Or for conditioning aid to a beleaguered nation unless it went after your prospective opponent in the 2020 presidential election?

In other words, do Republican senators think presidential elections are as important as a World Series? Not likely, but we’ll see soon enough.

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