 Boy, this thing gets more devious and deep-seated by the day. First, let me read you a tweet by the former Oriole, now Cincinnati Red, Kevin Gosman. He tweeted this out earlier today. This astro thing is bad, three exclamation points. Guys lost jobs, got sent down, missed service time because of how they were hitting Houston. Does anyone really think they only did this in 17? Hashtag, get real. Well, the new information that surfaced today. Talk to me. Which really has ramifications throughout the game is that the athletic which has been at the forefront of this story furthered the story today and said that the three main people that were involved in this and helped to engineer it were AJ Hinch, the astro manager, Alex Cora. Now, the Red Sox manager was the bench coach for the Astros in 2017 and Carlos Beltran. They say that Beltran and Cora actually were the ones who came up and designed the entire situation. Camera in center, decoding, banging the garbage can. Now, the thing that jumps out at you is that Beltran denied yesterday before this came out, he denied to Ken Rosenthal and the New York Post Joel Sherman, we never did anything like that, he said. He said, we just had simple, straight sign stealing from the bench. There was never anything else involved. Well, Mike Fires is on record as saying there was a camera installed in center field. There was a monitor in the runway. They saw that what the pitch was. They banged the can. If it was a breaking ball or a changeup, so it's Mike Fires on the record, by the way, against guys that are trying to protect their rear end. Now, I'll go a little further. Rob Manfred, the commissioner of baseball, who probably, when he wakes up in the morning, said, I really needed this nonsense. Because this is on his watch right now. Bob Manfred. So Manfred was speaking at a conference at the Pele Center for Media today. And a friend of mine happened to be in the audience. Now, we're not telling tales out of school. He said it publicly. He said that if the investigation shows the Astros cheated, the punishment will make sure it doesn't happen again. He was answering a question from the audience. He was there talking about new technology and MLB, mostly dealing with YouTube's relationship with them. He said the punishment will need to be prophylactic enough to prevent it from happening again if it did happen. So there's so many layers to this. So what's enough? Well, it would have to be a heavy suspension. It would have to be a tremendous fine to the organization. And then you wonder if the athletic is right. The lieutenants in this, do they go down? Does Alex Korra, the manager of the Red Sox, get suspended for a year? Does A.J. Hinge get suspended for a year? And I think that the real delicate one is Carlos Beltran. Because Carlos Beltran, in 2017, was a player who will be strenuously defended by the player's union. Because he was a player then. He fell under union leadership. Now he's the manager of the Mets. He doesn't. So there's kind of that sketchy relationship. But if you're the commissioner of baseball, you can't swoop in and suspend a player for a year unless there's a pre-existing rule. Well, if you're involved, I don't think there's anything on the books. Now, there is a rule that says you cannot electronically steal signs. And also, do we know how Beltran was involved? Do we know if Jeff Luna, the GM, went down to them and said, OK, I want something designed like this and Beltran said, well, this is the best way to do it. Maybe he wasn't the mastermind. Maybe he helped plan it. I don't know where the guilt falls, Don. I'm not quite sure what you do. Now, the only thing we have to compare it is what happened with Spygate. Now, that was not during games, but it was cheating. And Belichick got banged for a $500,000 fine. Patriots got a $250,000 fine. And they lost their first round pick. But get this, if they had missed the playoffs, they would have lost their second and third round pick. Not addition to the first round pick, the first round pick would have became a second or third round pick. So it was almost like lottery protected. Yeah, it's exactly what it was. There really wasn't a lot there. So does Major League Baseball now take the opportunity to say, we're going to do even more? Because I'm not really sure what the Patriots got. Is it deterrent? Not for the information that they garnered. They continued to win. Belichick is a rich guy. And I wouldn't be surprised if Kraft probably picked up a lot of that $500,000. $250,000 is ashtray money to the New England Patriots as an organization. And the picks, that's a first round pick in 2008, which in 2008 would have been, what, when they went 11 and 5, so it was the 2008 draft. So this is one coming off the Super Bowl. So they would have been picking 33rd, 31st. Yeah, 32nd, yeah. Because they lost to the Giants. So what is that? So I think the first thing that has to happen, I think it begins with a million dollar fine to the Astros. Probably more. Maybe even more than that. Because remember the Red Sox with the Apple Watch thing? And this happened, this edict from Manfred came down eight days before the video that showed Farquhar knew that they were cheating. He said $500,000 and the next time it happens, it's going to be far greater and far more punitive. So they knew at that point that you were not allowed to electronically steal signs. But whatever it is, $2, $3 million, whatever you decide it should be. Again, that's probably ashtray money to the Astros, but it's pretty significant. Then you start to get to takeaway picks. Maybe you take away the first round pick for the next five years. And then you take away international bonus money. So they can't sign any fine players. Then, all right, that takes care of the organization. The Astros being culpable because it happened on their watch. Now you have to do an investigation to find out who are the real culprits here. Because now it gets a little dicey. Because are the players that participated in it, are they subject to being suspended? Because a lot of them aren't on the Astros anymore. So is that fair to a player that wasn't on the Astros? Because the fires, he was there. He didn't say a peep when he was there. Now he's not with the organization. Is he subject to being suspended? But let's just go by the report. If we find out that the brain trust of this, Hinch, Cora, Beltran, I think they have to be disciplined. And I think it has to be games. Now what becomes dicey is those are games that the Mets and Red Sox have to suffer through. Because is it fair to the Mets, if they decide we're gonna suspend Carlos Beltran for 81 games, is it fair to the Mets get punished losing their manager for half a season? Is it fair to the Red Sox can lose their manager for half a season? A.J. Hinch, I get it. He's the manager of the Astros now. He's the manager of the Astros then. So maybe do you ban him for a year? That's what Sean Payton got in New Orleans. And he wasn't really the guy. It was Greg Williams, but it happened on his watch. So I think Hinch has to go for a year. I think he has to be banged for a year. Question is what happens to Cora and Beltran? And again, I think Beltran will be protected fiercely by the Players Union because he was a player at the time. I think that the thing that will upset Major League Baseball and Carlos probably should have not talked with Rosenthal and Sherman because if it comes out that he was involved then he blatantly lied. And the Carlos Beltran, I know, I'd be surprised if he lied and maybe he doesn't even view it the way it's being viewed right now. And I think therein lies the rub in all of this. And I don't want to implicate everybody, but I think that everybody in some way, shape or form is really pushing the envelope. Because what's the old saying in sports? If you're not cheating, you're not trying. And that's terrible for young kids that are in the car with their parents listening. We don't advocate that, but this is a big business. Wins get you paid. But you know what? If you're not cheating, you're not trying. To me, that always fell more onto the gamesmanship part of things. Like we talked about the other day, having your foot a little bit out or kind of just cheating. Great Carlos having super balls in the bat. That's cheating. That's absolutely cheating. Putting nails in the bat is cheating. But is taking air out of football cheating? I guess to a certain extent it is. I mean, I always made this argument. People always got so mad when I said it, but if you look at the amount of times that the Patriots put the ball on the ground on running plays, the year when they were supposedly taking air out of the balls, they weren't putting the ball on the ground. It had an effect. Well, Tom Brady got suspended for 25% of the season. Right. But at the same time, we still don't look at those championships any differently. And I don't think we'll look at the Astros championship. Oh, they're not going to take your championship away. That's... I mean, listen, it'll be... The Astros championship in 2017 will be debated like the Patriots' championships of the past. Some will look at them as tainted, some won't. It'll be in the eye of the beholder, but nobody's taking the championship away. Sorry, the Astros now fall into Patriot territory of they're going to be hated and they're going to be looked upon as cheaters. But... Makes that Nats victory even sweeter, though, doesn't it? Right. It shows you that it can be overcome and that there's no locks, right? There's no locks to anything, even when you do have an advantage. But when you hear Rob Manfred say, we have to... It's got to be prophylactic. We've got to be able to protect the people that are being cheated upon. We have to be able to make it a deterrent so that it doesn't happen again. Well, I'm sorry. What the NFL did to Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots is not discouraging enough. MLB's got a chance here to really lay the hammer down. Don't take the championship away, but really punish people. But where it becomes dicey is, how do you punish players? How do you punish assistant coaches that are no longer there? That's why I think Hinge is easy, Michael. Bang, year, you're done. But is that there that because Korra and Beltran are no longer there, they escape punishment? But is it also fair that they be punished and the organizations that have them that had nothing to do with this end up getting punished? Now, our very own Jeff Passon writes, according to a source of his, Major League Baseball's investigation into illegal sign stealing is expected to expand beyond the 2017 Astros and look into whether other teams, including the 2019 Astros, use technology to aid hitters. Now, to compare it again to Spygate, and if I'm wrong, guys, you can come up with another analogy, but to me, this seems like the easiest one, right? It's recent and it's a form of cheating. Even more so than Bounty Gate. This is like cheating. When that story was out, Michael, if you remember, there were a lot of people that defended Belichick because so many other teams were doing it too. And that if you remember, Eric Mangini who blew the whistle was looked upon as a pariah, like what are you blowing the whistle for, Eric? You know darn well, half the league's doing this. If not all the league is doing it. Is that the feeling here that the Astros are just the team that got caught? That this is prevalent around Major League Baseball to the point it was with the Patriots? Because if it is, then maybe nothing will happen, Michael, because what team is gonna cry foul when they're probably doing it themselves?