Dodger nation is not taking very kindly to their own cheating allegation.
So the Houston Astros got into serious trouble a few years ago due to a cheating scandal. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the scenario. It involved trashcans? Anyway, the Astros have been widely ridiculed since that time by every fanbase throughout baseball.
Perhaps no fanbase has been as vocal about Houston’s nefarious history as the Los Angeles Dodgers. This is no doubt due to the fact that LA was the team that Houston defeated in 2017 for the World Championship, and 2017 was also the season in which Houston was accused of cheating.
I’m not coming in here hot and decrying the whole process, although I think Jose Altuve takes a lot more heat for this than he should. After all, there’s a lot of evidence suggesting that Altuve was not a fan of the process and refused to use it to get ahead. I can’t explain it any better than Baseball Doesn’t Exist, which is maybe the best YouTube baseball content outside of Jon Bois’ forays into the weird and inexplicable.
Anyway, to bring you up to speed on more recent developments, former Astro and Dodger Josh Reddick has recently gone on record as saying the Dodgers have also cheated.
Reddick, who has recently joined the independent Savannah Bananas, has not been forthcoming with specific details. Despite that, Dodger fans are up in arms due to the unsubstantiated allegations.
It’s long been held that most teams cheat. It is a poorly kept secret in baseball that any little bit that one team can get just a sliver of positive impact could make the difference between winning and losing. After all, this is a game where a difference of inches can spell the thrill of victory instead of the agony of defeat.
I can’t really grasp the pathos involved in being a Dodgers fan right now, confronting these claims that remain unexplained. Most fans deny any wrongdoing (as if they would have a better idea than Reddick), going on the record as saying that Reddick is a liar. Most of that denial is linked to Reddick’s poor performance in his very short time with Los Angeles. After all, how could someone who is playing for a cheating team ever have a bad few weeks at the plate?
Every comment here seems waaaaaay overly defensive, although I can appreciate the rare insult “Ruby lipped knobgobbler.” Reddick’s only crime at present is his candor.
Anyone can have a worse-than-average season in baseball, and Reddick hit .256 while with LA, just six points lower than his career average. The “evidence,” Dodgers Nation will say, lay in Reddick’s above-average showing for the Astros through 2017. To wit, Reddick’s slash line ballooned to .314./363/.484/.847 for his 2017 season with the Astros, easily the best showing of his career. I’m not in the least bit sold that the positive results were caused by the aforementioned trashcan-related incident. After all, anyone can have a better-than-average season in baseball.
I’m sure that every team is cheating (or has cheated) to some degree, even now. The main problem with cheaters isn’t getting ahead, it’s getting caught. I’m not excusing it, I’m saying it’s a fact of life in baseball. Some teams are just better at it than others. What one person calls cheating, another calls ingenuity. The Astros problem in 2017 is that they were doing something that was so clearly trackable by even the most pedestrian of cheating investigations that it bordered on disingenuous.
I guess the takeaway here is that the Dodgers are better at cheating than Houston. After all, the Astros got caught.
Maybe you agree and maybe you don’t, but I think that LA’s fanbase may be protesting a little too loudly.
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