The Houston Astros make for delicious villains. The perpetrators of baseball’s biggest cheating scandal in a century inadvertently made certain it stuck. First, they used a very memorable method to steal signs back in 2017 — relaying the upcoming pitch by making noise with trash cans, a method commissioner Rob Manfred dubbed “the banging scheme.” They won the World Series that season, which added the whole specter of ill-begotten gains.
Between employing the scheme in 2017 and getting found out after the 2019 season, the Astros victimized two of the largest, loudest fan bases in baseball — the Dodgers and Yankees — and signed two recognizable star hitters — Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman — to long-term extensions.