The Astros and Red Sox Have Moved Past Scandal. Has the Rest of MLB?

On Friday, the Red Sox and Astros will come together for Game 1 of the ALCS. Apart from the two teams’ partisan supporters, no one is particularly happy about it. Once Boston advanced past the Rays on Tuesday, the baseball world grew so desperate for a good guy that it talked itself into rooting for a team managed by Tony La Russa.

It didn’t work. The Astros now are in their fifth straight ALCS, a remarkable achievement that also carries an unfortunate tendency toward boredom. If variety is the spice of life, the 2021 Astros are about as well-seasoned as your grandmother’s cauliflower puree. Which is not to say the Red Sox are much more novel; they’ve faced the Astros in the playoffs twice over the past five years, and in our generally over-Afflecked culture, the last thing most people want is more Boston sports success.

While this matchup brings numerous positive story lines—from Dusty Baker chasing an elusive World Series ring as manager to “Dancing on My Own” emerging as a sports anthem to Rafael Devers becoming a postseason legend—they pale in comparison to the resentment that most fans feel toward these two clubs. That’s because this ALCS is, and can only be, about one thing.

There’s an old joke about a man sitting at a bar, complaining to anyone who will listen about the lifetime of disrespect he’s suffered. The man is a stonemason—and a good one at that—but people know him only for what he’s done outside of work.

“All my life I’ve built walls,” he says. “I built the walls of the town hall, the wall around the churchyard, the wall in front of this very bar. But nobody calls me ‘Tom the Wallbuilder.’ I’ve built walls for half the people I pass on the street, but nobody says, ‘Hey, there goes Tom the Wallbuilder.’” The man takes a sip of his beer and continues his lament. “People like my work, they rely on my work, but that’s not what they know me for. You can spend 20 years building walls and people still might not call you ‘Tom the Wallbuilder.’

“But you fuck one goat … ”

Welcome to the Series of the Sign-Stealing Scandal, a reunion of the two teams at the center of baseball’s biggest scandal of the past 10 years.

The scandal’s ghosts are all over the diamond, in the walls, in your TV. Even story lines that aren’t about the sign-stealing scandal are somehow about the sign-stealing scandal. Carlos Correa, a Houston franchise icon, is potentially entering his final few weeks with the team. How will he perform? But also, how did he become a franchise icon in the first place, and how did he handle himself when the scandal came to light?

Boston’s Alex Cora is establishing himself as an all-time great postseason manager; his 15-4 playoff record gives him a better winning percentage than any MLB manager since Gil Hodges. But how did he win three playoff series so easily in 2018, and wasn’t he given the Red Sox job behind the strength of his success as Astros bench coach—in which capacity he was the ringleader to the trash-can-banging enterprise?

For as much as these two teams and their disciples would like everyone to focus on the present, the question of Why…