Baseball Fans Should Send A Message To Cheaters By Boycotting 2020 Season

If MLB Can’t Punish Itself, Then The Fans Should Punish The Players & Teams

By Kevin Wilkerson, PubClub.com Sports Blogger

Sometimes, you have to take things into your own hands.

If Major League Baseball can’t punish itself in the wake of the Houston Astros cheating scandal, then fans should step up and punish the teams and players. They can do this by boycotting the the 2020 season.

By boycotting, I mean tuning out baseball. Don’t watch any games and don’t go to any games. Don’t go to websites or social media to read about the teams or the players. In place of cheering, yawn instead.

This is better than booing guilty players when they get up to bat. That doesn’t affect them. In fact, sometimes athletes thrive off of negative fan reactions to them.

What will affect them is if they are playing in empty stadiums. Seeing seats instead of people when they step out of the dugout. Being able to hear the echoes of the sounds of the organ bouncing off vacant seats.

The fans have already struck out twice when they had the opportunity to do this, and that’s why MLB knows it can get away with this gross violation of the game. Fans came back after the  the World Series was canceled in 1994 – that’s when I bailed, by the way – through the steroids era and juiced baseballs.

They cheered for Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa in their home run duel of 1988, which was fueled by ‘roids.

So what’s a little cheating scandal to them? Oh, sure they are ticked now but it’s the offseason. Once the games begin, they will trudge through the turnstiles and worry about winning.

When the scandal broke, Dodger fans and columnists vented, saying and writing that the team should be awarded the World Series title instead of Houston. But they quickly moved on from that and are now focused on the Mookie Betts trade.

What incentive does MLB have to correct things when fans don’t stand up to the league? It’s like getting beat up by the bully at school – you can bitch to your friends about it but when push comes to shove (literally) you back down and get beat up again.

If the fans are truly ticked and want to send a message that cheating will not be tolerated and that more punishment needs to be handed out to the teams (stripping Houston of its World Series title would be a nice place to start) and the players (banning them, without pay, for a season should do the trick) they they will boycott the 2020 season.

Of course, that won’t happen and by the Opening Day pitches on March 26, fans will be settled back into their seats, beer in hand saying “play ball!”

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