The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to ask Major League Baseball to remove the 2017 and 2018 World Series titles from the Houston Astros and Boston Red Sox and award them to the Dodgers in the wake of the sign-stealing scandal that rocked the MLB.
The vote to pass the resolution, introduced by Councilmembers Gil Cedillo and Paul Koretz, was unanimous, Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times reported.
“The cheating that occurred in both the 2017 and 2018 World Series games would have unacceptable 100 years ago, and it is unacceptable today,” Koretz said during a news conference prior to the vote.
“At a minimum, those stolen titles should be stripped. The history books need to reflect that the Houston ‘Asterisks’ and the Boston ‘Black Sox’ each lost their World Series for cheating,” Koretz said, referring to the Astros and Red Sox.
Council members acknowledged that the vote was purely symbolic. The goal was to send a message that cheating shouldn’t be tolerated, Cedillo said.
“It’s important for us to raise our voice and to say that this is not the new normal, that this is not acceptable and that the Houston Astros were not the champions nor the best team that year,” Cedillo said.
The vote comes on the heels of MLB announcing penalties against the Astros and Red Sox for illegally creating a system that decoded and communicated the opposing teams’ pitching signs during their championship runs.
The Astros were told they would have to forfeit their first- and second-round selections in 2020 and 2021 drafts and pay a $5 million fine.
Manager A.J. Hinch and General Manager Jeff Luhnow were both suspended for one year without pay and were subsequently let go by the Astros.
An investigation into the Red Sox is still underway, but the club has already parted ways with manager Alex Cora.
Cora, a former Dodger, was apparently the mastermind of the sign-stealing system when he was a coach with the Astros in 2017.
He was then hired as manager of the Red Sox in 2018, a year in which the team led MLB in batting average and runs scored before going on to win the World Series.
Last week, the New York Mets parted ways with rookie manager Carlos Beltran, a player on the Astros in 2017 who also was linked to the scandal.
The Dodgers, who won back-to-back National League pennants only to lose in the World Series each year, are likely the biggest victims of the cheating scandal.
The team has been ordered by MLB not to comment on the investigation or the punishments handed down.
Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified former Red Sox Manager Alex Cora. The post has been updated.