Daily Duce: MLB drops the hammer on the Astros, Josh Donaldson finally gets hits big contract, and more!

The big news of the week came in the form of Major League Baseball dropping the hammer on the Houston Astros for their whole sign-stealing saga…

So, to be honest, calling that a dropping of the hammer is a bit hyperbolic. It’s really just a slap on the wrist. At the end of the day, the Astros still have their World Series. The draft picks really don’t matter because that banner is still going to fly and the fine is inconsequential in the gazillion-dollar world of professional baseball. The organization probably made that much money in World Series merchandise the night Houston won it all back in 2017.

The only ones this punishment is really harsh on are the two staffers involved, Luhnow and Hinch. From the perspective of owner Jim Crane, he gets away pretty much Scott free as those two were effectively his fall men.

But still, it’s easy to sit back and criticize Major League Baseball for this punishment, but it’s incredibly difficult to say how they should have handled it otherwise. Should they have taken away Houston’s World Series from the records? We see this kind of thing happen in NCAA sports, but does it really mean anything? Would that heal the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers fans’ and players’ wounds for losing to the Astros along the way? Would anybody actually view as the 2017 Astros as anything other than World Series Champs?

I mean, what are you going to do, show up to Minute Maid Park and rip the banner down? Show up to each player’s house and wrestle their ring away from them? It happened. There’s no way around it. And it’s ugly.

In my mind, this is much, much worse than the steroid scandal. Like, when a chunk of guys were on ‘roids, it gave them an unfair advantage over other players, but at least it was fun, right? Watching Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire go neck-and-neck hitting everything out of the park was wild. Seeing Barry Bonds hit 76 bombs was madness. But this? No, watching Clayton Kershaw put up great performances at home and get randomly shelled on the road out of the blue in the World Series isn’t fun and exciting.

It further cements our powerless nature as fans. We invest so much time and energy and emotion into this goddamn sport with absolutely zero agency over the outcome but one thing that keeps us coming back is the advent of hope. Baseball might not be totally fair, because, like life, it isn’t a meritocracy, but there exists a standard that ensures teams are treated equally on the field. There are rules that allow the billion-dollar Yankees to exist in the same realm as the ten-dollar Florida Marlins.

But when you find out that there’s a team doing this it’s hard to have that hope. It’s hard to accept that the Dodgers put together this outrageously good team with a combination of an unlimited budget and good drafting and developing and still couldn’t get over the hump because some other team figured out a behind-the-back way to exist outside of the parameters created to ensure a level playing field on the diamond.

It’s also wildly disturbing that the guy catching the most flack, it seems, is Mike Fiers, the “whistleblower” who stood up and exposed this whole load of bullshit. It was him who broke the code apparently, not the guys who needed to know which pitch Kershaw was going to throw in order to put their bat on the ball. If players are this outraged at Fiers being a snitch, what the hell else are they hiding?!

The whole thing is gross. It makes it kinda hard to be a fan.

Anyways! Enough of that, on to other stuff, like Josh Donaldson finally getting his big, multi-year contract…

The deal at its base is worth $92 million over four years, but it can reach $104 million with the option for a fifth year. That’s $21 million annually for those first four years, which is a pretty nice deal for the Twins. As we know with Donaldson, at his age and with his crash-and-bang playing style, there’s certainly a risk here for Minnesota, but it’s a worthwhile one given how he bounced back last year in Atlanta. The Twins set an all-time record for home runs last season and they’ll be adding a guy who smashed 37 bombs to the mix last year, so we should expect to see that record broken again.

Speaking of Atlanta, it seems curious that Alex Anthopolous missed out here, given that the cash it required to keep his former MVP around wasn’t that big. Knowing what we know about AA, he’ll swoop out of nowhere and acquire Nolan Arenado or Kris Bryant or something.