After the U.S. housing market crashed in 2008, taking most of the economy with it, not a single top executive at any of the major financial institutions went to jail. Instead, a lone banker from Credit Suisse was sentenced to 30 months in prison for concealing a fraction of his company's losses.
Wherever that guy is today, he should buy J.T. Watkins a drink.
After an exhaustive — or more accurately, exhausting — investigation into allegations of sign-stealing that dragged out over months, Major League Baseball finally punished the Red Sox on Wednesday in the neatest and tidiest way possible.
They dropped it all on Watkins' head like an Acme anvil.
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Who is J.T. Watkins? He's the team's video replay systems operator, and if you're to believe MLB, he acted entirely alone in decoding and then relaying opposing signals, in game, periodically during the 2018 season.
Manager Alex Cora didn't know. President of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski didn't know. Owner John Henry didn't know. They players didn't know.
This one low-level operator allegedly acted alone and now he is bearing the brunt of the punishment for it. The Red Sox will lose a 2020 second-round pick. Watkins will be suspended for the 2020 season and barred from the video room until 2022.
That is called taking the fall, and it would be akin to Patriots videographer Matt Estrella being blamed for Spygate back in 2007, or the Dorito Dink brothers being found completely liable for Deflategate seven years later. Rarely do functionaries act alone, and it defies credulity to pin whatever happened in the Red Sox video room solely on Watkins.
Boston Red Sox
And yet that is what baseball just did, absolving Cora of any involvement and suspending him for the 2020 season and playoffs, if they even happen. This opens the door for Cora to manage the Red Sox again, should they want him, in 2021, meaning he'll be able to jump back into his old job before Watkins can.
What we're supposed to believe is that after spearheading the sport's most extensive sign-stealing scheme in Houston in 2017 and winning a World Series, Cora took over a Red Sox club vying with those same Astros for American League supremacy and declined to employ any of the measures that had just proven so successful, even though he had no reason to think that Houston would suddenly stop dabbling in the dark arts.
Maybe it's because the Red Sox got busted for the Apple Watch during John Farrell's tenure and couldn't risk being nabbed again, one might counter. Maybe Cora made it clear that games needed to be decided on the up-and-up so there could be not even a hint of impropriety.
Except commissioner Rob Manfred's report notes that Cora "did not effectively communicate to Red Sox players the sign-stealing rules that were in place for the 2018 season." So Cora, who was renowned for stealing signs as a player, and would later be implicated as the effective mastermind behind stealing them as a coach, just stopped cold turkey with the Red Sox because rules are rules, but didn't relay that message to his team?
As one person with the 2018 Red Sox told The Athletic in January, "If you get a lion and a deer, then the lion can really take advantage of the deer. So there's a lot of deer out there that weren't paying attention."
We are supposed to believe that Cora was suddenly OK being a deer, when everything about his persona screamed lion. There's a phrase for this: Rob Manfred to the rescue.
Baseball took such a beating over the Astros that it could not risk a repeat in Boston, even in the midst of a pandemic that may shutter the nation's ballparks until 2021. Baseball envisioned the investigation as a deterrent against future malfeasance.
What it didn't see coming was the trail of dead managers, from Houston's A.J. Hinch to Cora to New York's Carlos Beltran that threatened to rip the game apart. Dropping the Red Sox report in between Rob Gronkowski's return and the NFL draft is MLB's version of a news dump, because it wants this story to go away.
And it's going to get what it wants, because now everyone's life returns to normal. Everyone's except J.T. Watkins', that is. The sport couldn't let the Red Sox off with nothing, and so the West Point grad will take the fall.
"Leave no man behind," doesn't exist in baseball.