You can rank the 2017 Astros among the best postseason runs of the last decade. You just don't get to do it with a straight face unless the word "cheated" lands in the same sentence as "champions."
Every few weeks somebody publishes "every team's best October of the decade," and Houston's 2017 title sits there looking exactly like everybody else's: a banner and a trophy, box scores that look just as clean. It shouldn't look that clean. Houston ran a sign-stealing scheme through that run, and no amount of time makes those two World Series titles, 2017 and 2022, blend quietly into the furniture.
So pick a lane. One lane erases 2017 and pretends the Astros never happened. That's rewriting history so people feel better, and it's dishonest: the pitches were real and the outs counted. The other lane ranks the run and says nothing about how it was built. That's lying by omission, and it's the version these feel-good lists keep choosing because an asterisk ruins the clean aesthetic. Both are cowardly. The honest option is the ugly one: list the run, and never let it appear without the scandal bolted to it.
The scandal was investigated and punished years ago, and the games stand. I'm not asking anyone to hand Houston's pennant to the Dodgers in retrospect. I want "documented cheating" to travel with the achievement the way "first title since 1908" travels with the Cubs. Context is just the truth about how the thing came to be. You wouldn't write up the 2016 Cubs beating Cleveland without mentioning 1908. Don't write up 2017 Houston without mentioning the trash can.
The blame shouldn't get smeared across "the Astros" as some faceless orange logo. It belongs to the people who built and blessed the thing: the front office that engineered the operation, the manager who knew and didn't kill it, the veteran players who helped install it in the room, and above all Rob Manfred, who handed the players blanket immunity and let every ring stay on every finger. That decision is the reason this argument is still alive a decade later. Nobody who benefited ever had to give a single thing back, so there's nothing to point to and say "they paid for it." They didn't. Manfred guaranteed the stain would never set by refusing to let anyone actually bleed.
These lists are genuinely fun without the whitewashing. One decade produced an absurd amount of October drama. The Cubs ended more than a century of heartbreak, Ben Zobrist's go-ahead double in the 10th of a wild 8-7 Game 7. The Rays keep reaching the World Series and keep leaving empty-handed, three trips to the World Series across their history and nothing to show. The Rockies' high point is a single 2018 wild card win over the Cubs, and they haven't been back to the playoffs since. The Angels spent six seasons with Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani on the same roster and never made the postseason once, going 194-211 over that stretch. That's a comedy and a tragedy, no asterisk needed, just a moment of silence.
Milwaukee just gave the genre its freshest entry, winning the first World Series in the franchise's 57-year history. Nobody has to annotate that one. It's clean and earned, exactly what these rankings are supposed to celebrate.
The clean ones get to stand on their own. The dirty ones don't. Rank what happened on the field, because the field is the only history anyone can actually verify. But every time Houston turns up on one of these lists, put "2017 sign-stealing scandal" right next to "World Series champions," and leave it there. It's just accuracy, and the only people who find it unfair are the ones Manfred already let off the hook.
