I was hoping for their name to be stricken from all records, Minute Maid Park to be razed and salt sown where it once stood, and the women and children of the entire organization be sold in bondage in Egypt. After first crucifying every male member of the organization alongside I-10 downtown.
This is totally unrealistic.
I-69 is way closer to Minute Maid Park. Do the crucifying alongside there.
Actually, I-10, I-69, and I-45 could all be used. There would thus be a ring of crucifees around the salt field.
Yeah, almost immediately upon things going public. That was one of the mini-controversies at the time - management took most of the heat and the players had no repercussions, though it was primarily organized by the players. And, of course, nothing happened to ownership.
The GM Luhnow (and much of the front office) got fired and isn’t going to get another job in baseball. Alex Cora had already gone to the Red Sox by that point (where he started up something similar - again the players there suffered no consequences). AJ Hinch was fired as well. He was publicly contrite, so, unlike Luhnow, as soon as his 1 year suspension was up, Detroit was waiting with open arms to make him their manager. Luhnow’s suspension may have actually been unfair and made a whipping boy - he probably didn’t really know what was happening since he was mainly the GM and not really involved on the field or the players on a daily basis.
The only player to see any repercussions was Carlos Beltran (more or less the ringleader), but he was retired at that point so not an active player. His punishment was losing the Mets gig before he managed a single game.
His name is one of several I’ve seen thrown about to replace Mike Matheney as manager of the Royals. He was the AL Rookie of the Year in 1999 while with KC.
And, potentially (if an unofficial punishment), being delayed in being voted into the Hall of Fame, if not left out entirely.
They really should have done something about the players at the time. By now, they’re all over the place. Marwin Gonzalez was even on the ALDS roster for the Yankees.
AJ Hinch should have had more of a backbone about putting his foot down but it really was more on the players.
I don’t even know what Boston was thinking, letting Alex Cora come back after his 1 year suspension. Whatever happened in Houston, he instituted a similar system up there, for goodness sake! He should have been outright fired, but I guess a World Series win speaks louder in Boston than in Houston.
The players were given immunity so they could testify to the MLB.
I mean, you gotta admit, we’d get a LOT more murders solved if we offered immunity to murderers on the condition that they gave all the details of what they did.
It would revolutionize homicide investigation for sure.
(In all seriousness, the players’ union is strong. Not so much the managers. So you knew who was gonna take the fall.)
It wasn’t much of a fall. One year off.
I don’t think Beltran had a great chance to start with.
I can’t say that I followed his career closely, so I’m not educated enough to opine too much. Looking at some of the “Hall of Fame Monitor” figures in his Baseball Reference profile, it seems like, stats-wise, he might compare reasonably well to other HOF center fielders.
Moreover, the White Sox are eternally cursed and condemned to damnation because members of the 1919 team responsible for throwing the World Series were not broken on the wheel and disemboweled.*
*the chickens have at last come home to roost for Tony La Russa. 
Just came across a startling fact: with Brantley on the IL, there will be zero African-American players in this World Series.
Wow, when’s the last time that happened?
Not sure on when the last time that happened is, but there will still be players we would consider ‘Black’ though foreign born.
That’s another interesting question: what percentage of World Series players are foreign born and how has that percentage trended these last few decades? For the league at large, it’s somewhere near 30%, which is about where Phillies are more or less, but it’s over half for Houston’s WS roster.
Today is the anniversary of the Florida Marlins winning the World Series.
They proceeded to dismantle that team in one of the worst fire sales I’ve ever seen in the modern era.
1950, which is not surprising in the least, considering that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier just three years earlier.
Nolan Ryan and the Astros are battling Pete Rose and the Phillies in the 1980 LCS on MLB TV.
I hope this year’s World Series is half as entertaining*
*But without Howard Cosell, what are the chances?
and so the off-season begins
That’s a terrible headline by Yahoo. There will be Black players in the World Series. You don’t have to be American to be Black.
Yes, the correct term in this instance is African-American. Also, while we might call an Afro-Caribbean ‘black’ they don’t necessarily self-identify as such.