A Piece of Metal

There is a deal between American sport and fans. It's a very simple, basic deal. The deal is this: while sport matters not one whit, we, the fans, out of a desire to be distracted from all of the burdens, challenges, frustrations, and ugliness of the real world, will suspend our disbelief and treat sport like it is desperately important, as long as the competitors and their employers (including our colleges and our universities) will also treat sport like it is desperately important. And the way that this importance must be performed, on both sides, is that winning has to be the most important thing.
We count championships.
College football fans know how many championships Bear Bryant won, and how many Nick Saban has won. Baseball fans know that the Yankees have 27 World Series championships, and that all the rest of our teams are chasing them. Basketball fans know that the Celtics have 17 titles, and the Lakers have 16. A good many know that Michael Jordan won 6 with the Bulls, and nothing else matters to them. It extends to NASCAR, hockey, soccer, the NFL, MLS, the WNBA, truck racing, golf, tennis, and probably tiddlywinks.
We count championships.
Every now and then, something happens that affects championships. The 1919 Chicago White Sox conspired with a gambler named Arnold Rothstein to throw that year's World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, because some White Sox players (and it is still argued exactly which players) hated their employer, Charles Comiskey for the legendary tightness of his fists when it came to money and salaries, and they wanted Rothstein's payoffs.
In the 1950s there was a point shaving scandal in college basketball. The NBA had a crooked referee a few years back. NASCAR engines are frequently found to be arranged in such a way as to provide illegal amounts of power. The New Orleans Saints have been knocked out of the NFL postseason tournament for the last, what, three seasons, by atrocious referee mistakes. Pete Rose had more hits than anyone else who ever played Major League Baseball, but he is still banned from the game for life because he bet on baseball. Shoeless Joe Jackson, identified by no less than Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb as baseball's greatest hitter ever, and the other "Black Sox" players from the 1919 World Series are not eligible for the Hall of Fame because of their bargain with a gambler.
We don't like it when our championships are messed with.
It is now a matter of public record that the Houston Astros cheated en route to their first-ever World Series championship in 2017. Players looked at their opponents' signs on the video equipment that was installed for instant replay appeals, and banged on garbage cans with bats to signal whether the next pitch was a fastball, or a curve, or something else.
If you think that wouldn't make any difference, I can only surmise that you have never tried to hit even a middling, Little League curveball.
The Commissioner of Baseball, Rob Manfred, a very, very bright man, investigated the circumstances, and found the Astros guilty. Manfred, acting within the authority of his office, laid the blame on Astros General Manager Jeff Luhnow, and field manager AJ Hinch. Both men were suspended from Major League Baseball for one year. Within hours of the announcement of their suspensions, Astros owner Jim Crane fired both men.
It seemed that baseball had acted swiftly and decisively.
It was clearly hoped, in the Commissioner's office, and in the Astros' owner's suite, that this action would end the controversy.
Hopes do not always come true.
The Astros defeated other teams en route to winning the World Series. The Astros beat the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees in the American League playoffs that year, and then topped the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. Pitchers for those opposing teams, who had been good enough all year to pitch their teams into the playoffs, were beaten, and some of them were crushed.
As though the Astros' batters knew what pitch was coming.
Which they did!
The players from these losing playoff teams are angry about their losses, and the Astros' cheating. It is hard to blame them for being angry.
There have been calls for the Astros' championship to be vacated. The calls have been widespread enough to have required a response from the Commissioner of Baseball, Rob Manfred, again, a very, very bright man.
Rob Manfred said that taking away "a piece of metal" just wouldn't make that much difference.
The "piece of metal" that Manfred was referring to was the trophy that is awarded annually to the team that wins the World Series.
The trophy, whose actual name is The Commissioner's Trophy.
Rob Manfred, the Commissioner of Baseball, a very, very bright man, screwed up, with those few words, as badly as a human being in his position could ever possibly screw up.
Rob Manfred told us that championships don't matter. Yeah, the Astros cheated, but it's just "a piece of metal."
What's the big deal?
The Big Deal, Mr. Commissioner, is that with those words, you broke the deal. We attend to sport because we conspire with you to pretend that championships matter. And you just told the world that they don't matter. At all. They are just "a piece of metal."
Baseball has set records for the revenue taken in, year after year. Business is great! No matter that attendance has dropped each year for the last four seasons, and the only reason that the dropping streak isn't at seven seasons was a negligible 0.03% increase in 2015. Maury Brown reported these figures in Forbes magazine, and included in his piece that the 2018 and 2019 seasons were the first since 2003 that baseball attendance fell below 70,000,000.
Business is so great, apparently, that Rob Manfred, the Commissioner of Baseball, a very, very bright man, feels comfortable in suspending our suspension of disbelief right at the start of another baseball season, a baseball season that is beginning at a time when it seems to so many of us that our country and our world are just falling apart and we need baseball more than ever to give us a respite from the lies and criminality.
Commissioner Manfred won't strip the championship from the Astros because it is just "a piece of metal." Which shouldn't matter to us, because it doesn't matter to Manfred.
I've just begun rereading Edward Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. In 476, Romulus Augustus sent his imperial regalia to Constantinople after Rome was taken by Odoacer.
I can only suppose that Romulus had concluded that his crown was just "a piece of metal."
A word to the wise. Or, at least, to a very, very bright man.