Baseball is all about “the moment.” If you grew up playing baseball, you know. If you grew up watching baseball, you also know.

2 outs, bottom of the 9th, you’re up to bat. You may have simulated it hundreds of times as a kid in the backyard. You may have watched legends on TV deliver time after time.

Jose Altuve delivered for the Astros in “the moment” on October 19, 2019.

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbDmAPife-s&w=854&h=480]

The walk-off homerun against one of baseball’s dominating closers on baseball’s marquee team sent shockwaves through the league – how did a 5’6, 165-pound man square up an unexpected slider to send it 407 feet to propel the Astros to the World Series? Now we know, he knew exactly what pitch was coming.

MLB completed their investigation of the Astros by sharing details on their sign-stealing escapades. With a camera in center field, a video room behind the dugout and sound effects like beating on a garbage can, it is now a fact that the Astros cheated from at least 2017 to 2019.

But it now appears thanks to twitter sleuths, that the Astros wore electronic buzzers to make it even easier to cheat and know what pitch was coming. Note how Altuve doesn’t allow his jersey to be ripped off in celebration following his epic walkoff.

MLB didn’t include the buzzers in their investigation findings. But it doesn’t matter. In 2020, the same technology that illegally brought the Houston Astros a World Series championship doomed them in the court of public opinion. And it doomed baseball forever too. All of those “moments” we remember through the years, the clutch home runs, the epic walk offs, are forever tarnished. If Altuve and the Astros were cheating (they were), and Major League Baseball can’t be truthful with their findings (they were not), we can never trust a “moment” ever again.

J Dawg co-hosts The Sports Hangover podcast, the flagship podcast on the HANGOVER NETWORK.