I’ve been a Dodgers fan my entire life. The greatest moment of my sports viewing history happened when I was 10 years old. The Dodgers won the 1988 World Series in a most unexpected way, immortalized forever in fist pump.
I’ve never had as much optimism about one of “my teams” as I had in the 2017 Dodgers. They won 104 games that year. Cody Bellinger won the Rookie of the Year, Seager had a great follow up to his 2016 ROY, Justin Turner hit everything, Chase Utley was the quintessential veteran leader, Kershaw was Cy Young runner up. They swept the Dbacks in the divisional series, gave the Cubbies a bare-bottom spanking in the NLCS, and advanced to the World Series for the first time since I was 10.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month then you know what happened next. The Astros and their banging trash cans beat the Dodgers in 7.
As a Dodgers fan living in North Carolina I’m the only Dodgers fan many people know, so everyone wants to talk to me about the Astros. Anger, for sure. Proud that my team didn’t cheat (and took the best team in the AL who was cheating to 7 games). But here is my overwhelming conviction:
Keep the trophy!
Every talking head in the sports world is saying that MLB didn’t go far enough in punishing the Astros. I say the punishment is built-in. There is no greater punishment than shame. No, MLB should not give the trophy to the Dodgers. Who’s to say the Yankees wouldn’t have beaten the Dodgers had they not been cheated out of the ALCS. You can’t have a parade 2.5 years later. It doesn’t work like that. That celebration was robbed from my sons and I in our living room and millions of Dodgers fans around the world that October of ‘17. Keep the banner. Keep the trophy. Keep the rings. And here is what will happen for the rest of history; dads will take their sons to Houston to a ball game and they will tell their sons about the banner in the rafters and that they cheated to get it. Many years from now hardcore baseball fans will be talking about Aaron Judge’s 2 MVP awards and it will always be followed with “but he should have had 3 but for the one Altuve cheated from him.” And my hope against hope is that by the end of their careers these Astros will never win another title. After Carlos Correa has retired, and he is at a swanky function dressed to the nines, and is wearing his World Series ring to impress everyone, people at that function will look at that gaudy ring on his finger and they will all think it, and maybe some of them will even say it, “2017 eh? Wasn’t that the year...?”
Keep ‘em all, boys. I don’t want MLB to take them away, I want the Astros to keep them forever; the banner in the rafters as a constant reminder, the trophy in the case that the whole world now views with an asterisk, and those rings in their fingers as emblems of shame.
