We noted this years ago: Boston is a second-fiddle city that had to cheat in professional sports in order to meet its fans need for something to crow about when hanging with people from New York.

Everyone knows the New England Patriots are cheaters, even if the NFL doesn’t do anything significant about it. And generally, most people already knew the Boston Red Sox were cheaters, even if MLB didn’t care about PED use when profits were involved (thanks, Bud Selig).

Now, it’s out there the Red Sox, like the Houston Astros, were using video technology to cheat their way to the 2018 World Series title. Is anyone really surprised?!

Baseball is a joke, and it has been for many decades now, due to PED abuse, cheating, monetary inequity, and a host of other issues that have disintegrated the ethical and moral standing of America’s pastime.

Boston fans don’t care if their teams had to cheat to win; neither do fans in Houston or San Francisco, for that matter. It’s a sad commentary on the nature of sports and 21st-century fandom when you will look the other way on legality in order to celebrate and claim “superiority” for your “home” city.

Yet the leagues involved in such cheating enablement are doing it for profit, since the fans in “winning” cities don’t care and spend money by the bushel on their teams. Never mind the fans in smaller cities that suffer as a result of their teams being honest, because in the end, there are more fans in bigger cities to exploit than there are fans in small cities who will never watch the sport again.

(This idea works for college football, too, of course. No need to re-hash that here.)

Fraud is everywhere, and the U.S. has made it clear that profiting from it at the expense of everyone is okay. As a fictionalized character in the true story of the late 2000s housing crisis stated, “We live in an era of fraud in America, not just in banking, but in government, education, religion, food … even baseball. What bothers me isn’t that fraud is not nice, or that fraud is mean. For fifteen thousand years, fraud and short-sighted thinking have never, ever worked. Not once. Eventually you get caught; things go south. When the hell did we forget all that? I thought we were better than this, I really did.”

You have a choice, sports fans. Accept it or don’t.