Astros: Apology done, now time to win and forget critics

Now that the Astros have made their apology for the sign stealing scheme, it’s time to start winning and forget the critics.

Ever since the Astros got slapped by the commissioner’s office for their sign stealing scheme, fans, players and media figures from around the league have called on the team to issue a formal apology for breaking the rules. Now that they’ve done that, you’d think we could all move on.

But alas, it doesn’t seem like many people will be moving on. In fact, many of the cries have only grown louder. For some people, the apology wasn’t enough, or the apology wasn’t good enough or sincere enough. For some, regardless of the apology, the punishment wasn’t enough.

These people will continue to throw stones at the Astros from inside their glass houses in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and everywhere else, regardless of how much time passes or how above-the-board the club operates from here on out. No matter how many other teams are revealed to have stolen signs using technology, these people will always view the Astros as being worse than all the others.

Players like Cody Bellinger will continue to whine about having lost to the Astros, even though there’s no way to know if the outcome would’ve been different without the sign stealing. Mediocre pitchers like Mike Bolsinger and Seth Lugo will continue to blame the Astros for their failed careers, regardless of the fact that they were mediocre against other teams too.

Opposing fans will continue to scream that the 2017 title should be stripped, Astros players should be suspended or banned from the game, Jose Altuve‘s MVP award should be taken away, and Alex Bregman deserves to have fastballs thrown at his head. They’ll also continue to accuse the players of wearing buzzers in 2019, despite the total lack of evidence and the flat-out denials. I won’t even get into the hateful hurricane “jokes.”

Time To Get Arrogant

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These same people are also going to continue to accuse the players and their fans of being arrogant, and nothing anyone can say or do is going to stop this ridiculous nonsense. So if they’re going to hate us no matter what, there’s nothing else to do but wear our fandom like a badge of honor and tell the haters where they can stick their complaints.

Now I’m not saying I’m happy or proud of what the Astros did. I firmly believe that most other teams were stealing signs in some form, and the Yankees and Red Sox are already known to have done it. But what the Astros did with the trash can banging went too far, and they deserved to be punished for that.

I wish they hadn’t done it, but it’s a bit late for that now. It happened, it was wrong, they stopped in 2018, they apologized, and now it’s time to move on. If other people can’t move on, that’s their problem. They’re just letting the Astros live in their heads rent-free.

As for us fans, we still have the 2017 championship, and that’s not being taken away. That banner displayed in Minute Maid Park doesn’t have an asterisk on it, and we’ll always have the memories of how it felt to finally call our Astros champions.

The teams that didn’t get rings will simply have to live with the fact that they lost. They can make all the excuses they want, but our team won and theirs didn’t. And if their fans are going to continue to spew their nonsense like a blackout drunk who’s projectile vomiting, we might as well get to lord it over them.

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So, my fellow Astros fans, I say this. The haters are gonna hate and there’s no way to reason with them. We won, they lost, and they can’t take that away from us. They’re welcome to keep living in the past if they so choose. For us, it’s time to get down to business and give those haters something else to cry about by winning another championship in 2020!

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