John Steigerwald: Small-market teams should steal Astros' tactics - TribLIVE

Spare me the outrage.

People in and out of MLB are being whipped into a frenzy again over the Houston Astros’ stealing signs on their way to a 2017 World Series win.

Jared Diamond of the Wall Street Journal reported this week MLB’s claim the plan was “entirely player-driven” is not true, and that has everybody riled up.

Diamond reported then-Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, who was suspended for a year by MLB and then fired by Houston, was shown — by an intern, of all people — a program called “Codebreaker” in 2016 that could be used for decoding the opposing catcher’s signs.

We know now that’s what the Astros did.

Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred has said the Astros front office wasn’t involved in any cheating and whatever cheating that did take place happened only at home.

Internal memos and emails uncovered by Diamond show both to be lies.

Manfred and MLB were trying to blame it on the players, and Diamond writes Manfred knew about the Astros front office’s knowledge of the system and decided not to mention it.

Why? Who knows?

The national baseball media is understandably outraged over news a team or teams gained an unfair competitive advantage because they know a league that allows that to happen has no legitimacy.

But, for some reason, the vast majority of those same media have accepted and/or apologized for MLB’s ridiculous economics and the lack of a salary cap for 40 years.

Most of them will be happy to give you examples of small-market teams such as the Kansas City Royals that have proven the ridiculous advantage mega-market teams have can be overcome.

Of course, those same apologists never would consider telling the teams that weren’t stealing signs to shut up and deal with it.

But how would allowing some teams to steal signs be any more anti-league than allowing some teams to use their $150 million to $250 million local TV contracts as an insurmountable advantage over smaller-market teams with TV deals less than half that size?

Electronically stealing signs is gaining an unfair advantage, but being able to employ better players because you play in a bigger city is not?

Pittsburgh Pirates owner Bob Nutting is the most hated man in Western Pennsylvania because he refuses to raise his payroll to a level that would please the fans and the media.

Maybe instead of insisting on telling him how he should spend his money for all these years, they should have been encouraging him to steal signs.

Within the structure of MLB and its stupid economics, teams like the Pirates shouldn’t be criticized for stealing signs or bugging the visitor’s dugout and locker room in an attempt to level their league’s uneven playing field.

Those teams should be looking for every way possible to overcome the built-in economic disadvantage that actually is tougher to overcome than having their catchers’ signs stolen.

Pirates fans would have been much better served if it had been Nutting’s intern who had shown him “Codebreaker.”

XFL rules intriguing

How can you not like most of the XFL’s new rules?

The best one might be the 25-second play clock. How is it an XFL offense and a Canadian Football League offense can get a play off in 25 seconds but an NFL offense needs 40?

The XFL kickoff is strange but it’s a thousand times better than an NFL touchback, which is what you get on most NFL kickoffs.

In the XFL, the receiving team lines 10 men up on its own 30-yard line. The kicking team puts 10 players 5 yards away on the 35. One man back to return the kick. The kicker lines up on his 30. If the kick doesn’t make it past the return team’s 20-yard line, the return team is given the ball at the kicking team’s 45.

A little convoluted? Maybe. But the NFL should adopt it immediately.

John Steigerwald is a Tribune-Review contributing writer.