Many fans and players around baseball are still rightfully worked up over the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal in 2017 and 2018. Especially since the Astros won the World Series at the height of the scheme.
Lucas Giolito has a bit of a tougher time with that line of thinking. And he doesn’t believe Houston winning the World Series against the Philadelphia Phillies this year is required to legitimize the Astros’ previous title run.
Speaking to Chris Rose Rotation show via Jomboy Media, the White Sox starter said he believes every team in the 2017 postseason was cheating—the Astros were just the only ones who got caught red-handed.
“Based on everything I’ve heard, it was like all the teams that were in the postseason that year were doing the same [expletive],” Giolito told Rose. “I think that’s also kinda why the players kinda had that half-apology energy when they were apologizing for all this stuff, because they probably knew like ‘Man we got caught, but everyone was kinda doing this stuff.'”
The 2017 postseason featured the Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, Cubs, Guardians, Diamondbacks and Rockies with the Astros defeating New York in the ALCS before taking down the Dodgers in seven games to claim the World Series.
This is not an entirely new line of thinking from Giolito. In 2017, the Yankees and Red Sox accused each other of using technology to decode and transmit signs. The Brewers accused the Dodgers of doing the same during the 2018 NLCS and former Houston bench coach and Red Sox manager Alex Cora is implicated in commissioner Rob Manfred’s final report on the matter.
Again, Houston has rightfully grabbed the majority of the headlines for its use of sign stealing technology, but it certainly seems as though players around the sport have a bit more trouble determining who the real villains are here.
Whether or not a title in 2022 would legitimize the Astros’ dominance over the last decade almost seems moot. Especially when many of the current roster’s most-exciting players weren’t even around in 2017.
Does that make any of this any easier for fans to process? Probably not. But since when have baseball controversies ever been simple?
