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Key takeaways from the Red Sox sign-stealing fallout

Maddie Meyer / Getty Images Sport / Getty

Following a months-long investigation, Major League Baseball issued its ruling Wednesday regarding the sign-stealing allegations levied against the Boston Red Sox, having determined that the club's video replay system operator illegally stole opposing teams' sign sequences via real-time feeds during its 2018 championship season.

As punishment, the Red Sox were stripped of their second-round pick in the 2020 draft, while their replay system operator, J.T. Watkins, will be suspended for all of 2020 and banned from performing replay duties during the 2021 campaign. Additionally, Alex Cora, who Boston dismissed as its manager after the league released its report on the Astros' sign-stealing scandal in January, was suspended for the 2020 season expressly for his conduct in 2017, when he was Houston's bench coach.

Ultimately, Manfred concluded, virtually nobody in the Red Sox knew or should have known about Watkins' illegal use of in-game video to decode opposing teams' sign sequences, and the overall scope and impact of Boston's sign-stealing enterprise was much more limited than the Astros' trash-can-banging scheme. Here are some key takeaways from Wednesday's ruling:

You might as well cheat

Despite acknowledging that the club "must be held accountable," Manfred meted out nothing legitimately punitive - losing a second-round pick simply isn't going to hurt the Red Sox - and ultimately did little to disincentive teams from going through with similar schemes moving forward. Players know they won't be punished, while upper-level management can seemingly circumvent the precedent set by Manfred's earlier decision to suspend Astros manager AJ Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow despite their ostensible lack of involvement in the scheme by offering up a scapegoat - in this case, a low-level employee like Watkins, who almost certainly wouldn't have risked his career to break the rules absent explicit support from either the players or someone in a position of considerable power. (Watkins, it should be noted, vehemently denies any wrongdoing.)

At both an institutional and individual level, then, this method of cheating carries little risk. As cynical as it sounds, every team in baseball would trade a second-round pick and a video replay operator for a World Series title. After all, the New York Yankees just forfeited their upcoming second- and fifth-round picks to sign Gerrit Cole.

Alex Cora is some kind of lucky

As the Red Sox awaited Manfred's judgment, it seemed possible - and even probable - that Cora's career in baseball was over. Implicated as a driving force in the Astros' sign-stealing scandal, most presumed that Cora was at least complicit in whatever nefarious scheme Boston perpetrated en route to a championship in 2018, and that his continued disregard for the rules would earn him if not a lifetime ban, then a suspension that amounted to one.

Instead, Cora was improbably exonerated of any complicity or culpability with respect to Boston's sign-stealing scheme, having been granted a remarkable amount of latitude for ignorance by Manfred. Ultimately, it's hard to believe Cora could be entirely oblivious to a scheme so similar to the one he spearheaded in Houston, one revolving around relaying signs from the video room to the dugout, or that he could make it through the entire season without catching wind of it. According to the commissioner, though, he was and he did, a ruling that should resuscitate Cora's career and could even pave the way for his return to Boston's dugout.

The Red Sox still hold him in high regard, after all - the team brass made that abundantly clear when they decided to mutually part ways with Cora in January. Though current manager Ron Roenicke had "interim" stripped from his job title Wednesday, his contract expires following the 2020 season, just like Cora's suspension.

MLB bears responsibility for this

Like the Astros' sign-stealing scandal, this embarrassing episode - centered around the misuse of video replay equipment - can ultimately be attributed to a lack of foresight from MLB itself, which conclusively failed in its implementation of replay review.

In addition to the system's demonstrable inefficiencies, the league failed to anticipate how teams could use their new replay capabilities to undermine the integrity of the game, and thus neglected to devise a set of rules governing the use of replay technology and establish a framework for punishing those who broke those rules.

Jonah Birenbaum is theScore's senior MLB writer. He steams a good ham. You can find him on Twitter @birenball.

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