Doug Gottlieb: “The Astros were a ‘WIN AT ALL COSTS’ organization. Think about the acquisitions they made, the lengths they went through to cheat, and how they’ve now admitted it. They took away the guys in charge, but nothing to the players?? Those guys took away from the Dodgers possibly winning their first World Series, they changed how we look at Kenley Jansen, Clayton Kershaw, and Dave Roberts, and there are teams from the American League who could have won the World Series if the Astros didn’t know what pitches were coming and banged on a trash can because it was an off-speed pitch… I don’t understand why baseball couldn’t simply say ‘THE ASTROS ARE NO LONGER WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS IN 2017’ for the detriment that it’s done to Major League Baseball, and to protect the game. Even though Rob Manfred has done a lot of good things, I think he came up short here.” (Full Video Above)
Listen to Doug Gottlieb explain why he thinks Major League Baseball dropped the ball handling one of the most egregious episodes of cheating in sports history, hours after the league instituted unprecedented penalties against the Houston Astros that many around the sport believed were actually too light.
Despite the draconian punishments that led to one-year bans of Astros manager AJ Hinch and General Manager Jeff Luhnow, that was soon followed by their firings from the team altogether, Gottlieb thinks even the losses of jobs and the forfeiture of draft picks was not good enough in punishing an uncanny form of deception that literally had players banging on trash cans that were picked up and heard clearly in network broadcasts.
Check out the video above as Gottlieb details why the MLB needed to strip the Astros of their 2017 World Series, since the championship will forever be branded as the most bush league title ever won in the history of the game anyway.