What led Houston Astros to sully baseball with cheating? The answer lies in a movie

Arlington is one of the few privileged cities in the country that is host to a major league baseball team.

That means the city and its team have a special interest whenever there is any kind of dishonesty that threatens the integrity of the game.

The other Texas team has brought us to that day.

Since the Houston Astros set a franchise record with 111 losses in 2013, fans everywhere marveled at their comeback to win the 2017 World Series. Struggling Astros hitters had emerged as some of the game’s best in just four years.

An investigation led by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred has discovered part of how they accomplished such a feat. The team will now be forever known for cheating at the highest level in the national game’s storied history.

The Astros took the deployment of technology in baseball to an illegal level when they developed a scheme to steal the hidden signs from the catcher-pitcher batteries of opposing teams.

The result not only helped the Astros hit, it also fed their arrogance and cockiness because they knew they had found an advantage.

Never mind the morally corrupt character that accompanied their rise to fame, they did it anyway, ushering in one of the greatest scandals to besmirch the game’s 150-year legacy as a symbol of American culture.

As documentarian Ken Burns points out in his nine-part, Emmy-winning PBS television series on the sport, cheating at some level has been an anathema throughout the game’s long history. Some of it has been tolerated, but what the Astros have done must be condemned and trust restored.

Anything less could turn fans away because the fairness of a level playing field is essential to our continued devotion.

In all of the national reporting on the scheme, I haven’t seen an answer to the question of why players would ever try to cheat.

Allow me to offer that response.

Of all the great baseball movies that Hollywood has produced, there is a definitive scene in the 1992 film, A League of Their Own – the story of women taking the place of men across baseball during World War II.

The star player on the contending team, headed to the World Series, had decided to quit. When confronted by the team manager, she declared she was leaving because “it just got too hard.”

Incensed, his reply nailed the reason the greatest game ever devised endures: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.”

Absolutely. The hard is what makes the game so great.

It’s the toughest sport of them all to master. So tough that only a few men in the entire world can play it at the major league level. And, even the best among those few succeed just three times out of ten when stepping up to bat.

If that level of performance can be sustained over an entire career, such a player likely winds up in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. No other game, or any other of life’s endeavors, rewards anyone for that level of achievement.

Even gifted with talent so rare that they can consistently get on base and help their team win, every player is looking for an edge. As long as he finds it within the rules, we can celebrate his career forever.

None of the current Astros players will be able to enjoy such a legacy. They are cheaters and will be recorded as such in the annals of baseball history. Their shame is of their own doing.