Astros: The men of steal

There is something about the baseball sign-stealing scandal that is at once curious and remarkable and therapeutic, as well as halfway ridiculous.

The outrage over the drum-bat-on-the-garbage-can alert system crafted by the Houston Astros is genuine, that’s for sure.

When the culprits — those 2017 World Series champion Astros — show up for spring-training games at away fields the blizzard of boos and taunts that greet them now are enough to snow under the Grapefruit League.

Little Jose Altuve, the 2017 American League MVP, a three-time batting champion and six-time All Star, gets trashed by opposing fans in a way only someone who was once passionately beloved and then betrayed his lovers can be.

In his first appearance of the preseason against the Tigers in Lakeland, Florida, Altuve and his mates Alex Bregman, Carlos Correa, and Yuli Gurriel were lustily booed and called cheaters and worse every time they stepped to the plate. Second baseman Altuve was given sarcastic cheers when he committed an error in the field. He was even nicked by a pitch from Tigers reliever Nick Ramirez, which may or may not have been intentional.

Time will tell if the heckling and animosity will get worse during this shortened 60-game season as the Astros make the rounds to foreign fields, in front of crowds who feel much was stolen from them by a team that went, well, just a little too far in its strategy to get ahead. Maybe way too far.

Which is where this gets weird.

Remember, much of baseball is guessing, deceiving, fooling, tricking, outsmarting, etc. Call it near-cheating.

Consider that one of the most important statistical categories is stealing.

When a pitcher strikes out a batter at a critical moment, he often will acknowledge — proudly — that he totally fooled the hitter.

Crafty, valued catchers falsely ‘‘frame’’ pitches to lure umpires into calling a ball a strike. Infielders trick baserunners by pretending to have the ball by smacking their gloves or faking as if a throw is coming in. The old “hidden ball’’ stunt is considered brilliant, if you can pull it off.

Infield coaches and center fielders and baserunners always are trying to steal the signs between the pitcher and catcher, or decipher when a hit-and-run or suicide squeeze or other key play might be called by a bench coach or manager.

In truth, sign-stealing of the sort the Astros displayed is only illegal because of the technology used — an outfield camera and a monitor near the dugout, in this case.

Do it the ‘‘old-fashioned way,’’ whatever that might be discerned to be — Are binoculars high-tech? An Apple Watch? Really strong glasses? Hearing aids? — and it’s just part of the game.

But fans and opposing players are rightly outraged by this matter, even if the sins of the Astros are only a matter of degree and not category.

Think about it. With new, clearer imagery for all cameras just part of our ceaseless techno advancement, and teams now able to challenge calls — thus mandating the need for managers to review video replay and camera angles in real time during games — the vagueness of sign-stealing is the odd part that means, well, OK, just don’t go too far.

It’s interesting that former Astro Carlos Beltran, considered the main instigator of the cheating, reportedly chastised his new club at some point in the 2017 season, his first with the team, as being ‘‘behind the times.’’

League officials, according to the New York Post’s Joel Sherman, ‘‘likened those teams [such as the Yankees and other clubs in the near past who were messing with the new replay monitors] as essentially going 65 mph in a 60-mph zone as compared to the 100-plus mph of the 2017 Astros.’’

That’s reckless driving, not a garden-variety ticket.

And so there were death threats for some Astros. And the man who is considered the whistleblower in the scandal, former Astros pitcher Mike Fiers, now with the Athletics, is considered to be in enough danger of on-field retaliation that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred declared, “We will take every possible step to protect Mike Fiers, wherever he is playing.’’

Fiers shrugged off the concern. “I can defend myself,’’ he said.

What’s curious here is how this scandal has seemed to vehemently tick off large groups of people, whereas the steroid-taking scandal of the late 1990s and early-2000s never gained any traction like that. Then-commissioner Bud Selig downplayed the performance-enhancing drug taking when it first reared its swollen head. Selig denied it was occurring as home-run numbers were soaring and never really did much at all once guys like Jose Canseco — the Typhoid Mary of ’Roid-ville — were kissing their massive biceps and smirking at folks who thought it was all just from extra work in the weight room.

There is currently a groundswell movement to vote obvious dopers such as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens into the Hall of Fame after years of them being shunned for their sins. Hey, goes the justifying refrain, they were good even before they cheated. Which is kind of like saying a thief doesn’t need punishment because he was wealthy even before he robbed that bank.

Steroids for some reason don’t do much for our outrage meter. I don’t know why.

In the NFL I could argue nobody really gives much of a damn about doping at all. You get busted for steroids, you get suspended (briefly), then come on back into fans’ open arms and knock some foe’s head off. Yaay!

One huge difference between the doping race in baseball and this sign-stealing mess is that active players have come out uniformly and screamed in disgust and anger about this scandal. Not so with steroids. Trying to get anybody in baseball to say anything about all the swollen muscle freaks surrounding them in the 1990s until, well, even today, has been like trying to get wallflowers to talk about their shyness.

And yet, all those home runs and all those blazing fastballs had a real-world effect on players who didn’t cheat. Why didn’t they care? Why didn’t they cry out?

Now players like Aaron Judge of the Yankees, who finished second to Altuve in the 2017 MVP race and whose team was beaten out by the Astros in the 2017 ALCS, say the sign-stealing scheme made him “sick to my stomach.’’

It is almost chuckle-worthy to me, at least, that NBA superstar LeBron James felt the need to rip the Astros on Twitter: “I know if someone cheated me out of winning a title and I found out about it I would be F*^king irate.’’

So how about current Cubs pitcher Yu Darvish, who started two games for the Dodgers in their 2017 World Series loss to the Astros? Darvish came out of that fray with two losses, an ERA of 21.60, and the reputation as a soft, big-game wuss who choked when the going got tough.

Did the sign-stealing affect him? Can anybody prove it didn’t?

Which brings up the question of how much difference it makes to a hitter if he knows what a pitcher is going to throw. To be certain a low and outside 78-mph breaking pitch is coming and not a 92-mph fastball down the pipe might be the difference between a hit and an out. Hard to say. Even in home-run derbies, with their own pitchers throwing mushballs across the plate, hitters don’t always go deep.

One thing is for sure. The Cubs were able to acquire Darvish at least partly because he was considered weak-willed and undependable. Opponent cheating likely did some of that to him.

The Astros don’t play the Cubs or White Sox in this shortened 60-game season.

Lots of penalties have been laid on the Astros by the league, including executive firings, fines, and loss of draft choices. But they get to keep that 2017 World Series trophy.

What does that tell us?

This world is getting meaner and less civil, it seems to say to this old scribe. And I will always wonder why my sportswriting career was flowered with cheaters and cheating scandals the way a meadow path can be laced with sawgrass and stinging nettles.

Ben Johnson, Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, C.J. Hunter, Michelle Smith, Lance Armstrong, Floyd Landis, Dion Lee, Dennis Lundy, Rick Pitino, John Calipari, Reggie Bush, Shawne Merriman, Ken Caminiti, Danny Almonte, Bill Belichick, Brian Cushing, so many Olympics stars I don’t know where to start, Jason Giambi, Manny Ramirez, Rafael Palmeiro, Mark McGwire, Bonds, Clemens, on and on.

Signifying what?

This.

Athletes and coaches want to win, and they will cheat to do it.

Moral reasoning and sportsmanship are way down the list of qualities champion athletes display. Thus, they are human. They are flawed. They are weak. They are, yes, sometimes evil.

It’s been my journalistic and life lesson. It probably should be all of ours. Yet sometimes those champions are glorious, transcendent, inspiring. That goodness they can display is true, too.

We can’t lose faith in mankind, because we can always strive to understand what moves us and what is the right thing to do.

And we can decide what winning is worth. We should do that. And what cheating destroys.