Rob Manfred: MLB Will Not Strip Astros, Red Sox of World Series Titles

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred went on the Fox Business Network on Wednesday morning in his first public interview since he dropped the hammer on the Houston Astros for the sign-stealing scandal that has dominated baseball discourse for the better part of this offseason.

He was asked about the Los Angeles City Council resolution calling for MLB to award the 2017 and 2018 World Series championships to the Dodgers, and discussed the issues that would come along with stripping the teams of their titles in favor of awarding them to the losing side, confirming the two franchises would be keeping their championship banners:

"“Whatever the impact of the sign stealing was, it could have changed who was in the World Series. It’s absolutely unclear that the Dodgers would have been the World Series champion. I think there's a long tradition in baseball of not trying to change what happened. I think the answer from our perspective is to be transparent about what the investigation showed and let our fans make their own decision about what happened.""

- Rob Manfred

Yeah, sounds about right. While the cheating scandals did irrevocably change the course of two playoff seasons, there's no way to rectify that now. Nobody can know for sure that the Dodgers would have beaten the Yankees in 2017. Stripping the teams of their titles alone would have been a controversial decision, given there isn't a quantifiable way to measure how big of an impact the cheating had, much less if they were retroactively rewarded to the Dodgers.