Pro sports need dirty, rotten scoundrels like the Houston Astros

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It’s possible there is a more villainous team in sports than the Houston Astros, but you’d be hard-pressed to think of one.

Does Mark Zuckerberg have his own softball team? Is the Red Army still in the hockey business? Because if not, then it’s the Astros by a country mile.

They aren’t just the team that got away with it. They’re the team that continues to rub it in.

After he’d single-handedly won their series against the Oakland Athletics this week, Houston’s Carlos Correa could have won back some friends with a show of humility.

That’s the way this is done in sports. You do something terrible and people hate you for it. Then you do something wonderful on the field of play and people say, “No one who hits/skates/pitches/tackles/throws/shoots that well could be a bad man. Not deep down.”

Afterward, you come out and tell everyone how hard this awful situation you created for yourself has been on you and on your teammates (who are also awful). And then everyone forgives you. It’s right there in the Bible.

But, God bless him, Correa decided to go in the opposite direction.

“I know a lot of people are mad. I know a lot of people don’t want to see us here. But what are they going to say now.”

I don’t know. That you should all have spent the year in Scranton playing for minimum wage? That the franchise ought to have been busted down to the Little League World Series? That I think you’re doing a great job and hope the Astros stay evil forever?

Every institutional part of baseball let Houston off the hook for sign stealing. Because what else were they going to do? Fire everyone? If baseball took a hard stand on cheating, there would be no one left to play the games.

Instead, the punishment phase of this process was shrugged off onto the fans. The Astros were sentenced to slinking through every park in baseball, taking their verbal licks one-by-one in the on-deck circle.

The pandemic ruined that for us.

Shorn of their garbage-can telegraph, the Astros were not quite as good this year as they’d been in the recent past. But everything else lined up in their favour.

No team benefited more from the expanded playoffs. Along with Milwaukee, the Astros became the first team in baseball history – and that’s a while – to make the postseason with a losing record.

They got Minnesota in the first round. The Twins are either the worst good team in history, or they built Target Field on a pet cemetery.

Because there is no mathematical way to explain how Minnesota had lost 16 consecutive playoff games going back nearly two decades. The Astros hip-flipped them in two games, accruing an alarming amount of mojo in the process.

Now they’re into the American League Championship Series, awaiting the winner of Friday’s Yankees/Rays game.

Is this fair? Probably not. The Astros cheated their way into two World Series. Postpunishment, they’re four wins away from another. This feels a little like the guy who robbed the bank being hired to run it.

But is it good? Absolutely. This is the only thing that’s turned out right for baseball all year.

Sports has returned during COVID-19, but you can’t really say sports is back. The action across all the major leagues has been dreary and predictable, and fewer and fewer people seem to care.

You may have watched the Stanley Cup final out of a combination of patriotic duty and ennui, but I doubt you enjoyed it.

Were it not for the uniform colours and the fact that Victor Hedman is as tall as a Stonehenge plinth, the Lightning and the Stars are indistinguishable from one another. Aside from hockey, the only thing either team is good at is deflecting interest.

Same goes for the NBA. The Lakers are going to win a title? What joy. I was beginning to lose faith in capitalism, but now it is restored. In America, you really do get what you pay for.

Viewership of all North American pro sports is down across the board. The NHL and NBA finals hit near-historic lows.

Everybody’s trying to figure out why. The late-summer start? Bad match-ups? Player protests putting off the Red states? The fact that the U.S. election cycle is better viewing entertainment?

How about all those things, to one extent or another.

But I wonder if it’s something more existential – that as real life has begun feeling more real than it has in a generation, sports has as well.

The intro and outro of most game broadcasts have become running reminders of how screwed-up things are in many places, and the United States in particular. It’s not exactly escapist fun.

If sports are going to be constantly reminding their viewers that it’s super-important they focus on real-world issues right now, it stands to reason that some of them are going to do that. Which means skipping the game and turning on CNN.

That decline in interest is neither a good nor a bad thing. It’s just a thing. Sports as a monolith had risen so high in the cultural conversation, it only had one direction to go.

Things may flip again once the world has returned to normal (however you now define “normal”) and fans are back in the building, but I don’t think so. I think we have summited Peak Sports and are now on the way back down the mountain.

If that’s the case, sports will have to work a lot harder in future to grab its piece of the attention economy. Their old business model – show up; make tons of money – won’t work any more. They’ll have to start selling again.

You sell entertainment with stories that feature heroes and villains. Villains, especially.

Everybody in sports wants to be the hero now. It’s exhausting. Can’t we have just one Bobby Knight? A Tonya Harding? Maybe a John McEnroe crossed with a Sonny Liston?

Good guys playing good guys doing good things for good is wonderful for the world, and tedious viewing. If you want to deploy archetypes of good and evil – some very basic Star Wars-type mythmaking – someone is going to have to play Darth Vader.

With that in mind, baseball should be delighted the Astros volunteered for the duty, and that its cheaters are prospering.

Soon enough, every sport is going to want its own Houston Astros. Trouble is, how do you convince someone to take the part?