Fernando Tatis Jr. made headlines on Friday after he was suspended 80 games for violating the MLB Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. His excuse was that he used a steroid to treat ringworm and did not know that it contained a banned substance. Regardless of what your opinion may be on the matter, the larger picture of punishments in MLB is confusing at best.

Past Punishments

There's a number of examples to choose from here, big violations and scandals in the history of MLB. Here's a few and their outcomes:

• 1919 Chicago White Sox are accused of throwing the World Series in exchange for money, eight players are banned for life.

• Pete Rose is given a lifetime ban from baseball in 1989 after an investigation proved he bet on baseball games that the Cincinnati Reds, the team he managed, played in.

Those are pretty cut and dried. Big punishments for big violations. Since the steroid era, things have really changed in terms of punishments and who deserves what.

The Steroid Era

The late 90s and early 00s were a great time for baseball, until they weren't. Seven of the top-11 single season home run totals came between 1997 and 2001. We all know now that that was a result of steroids.

Baseball started to really look into this problem due to pressure from the outside and in 2007 the Mitchell Report was released and wreaked havoc on the sport, naming players like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Jason Giambi, Andy Pettitte, and Jose Canseco as having taken performance enhancing drugs. None of the players were suspended. All of the records that were broken by cheaters still stand and are regarded as legitimate.

Since then, there have been a number of suspensions for PEDs in baseball, including big players like Alex Rodriguez who got the longest suspension to date, sitting out the entire 2014 season.

Disproportionate Reactions

Those players that were named in the Mitchell Report have essentially been barred from the Hall of Fame because the voters refuse to let them in, at least there's a little bit of justice. But even now, there is an onus put on steroids when bigger issues are at large in baseball.

In 2017, the Astros committed the most organized cheating effort that baseball has seen, setting up cameras in centerfield, decoding signs and alerting players on field through messages to an Apple Watch in the dugout or beating on trashcans in the tunnel next to the dugout so that the batter knew what was coming. Those efforts won them the World Series, largely because they blatantly cheated. Almost the entire Astros roster was implicated in the scandal and yet, not a single one of them was punished. The team was not stripped of any of their wins or most importantly their ill gotten World Series trophy. All that happened was a couple of executives and the manager were given one year suspensions. Big deal.

The fact that not a single player was punished when they engineered this way of cheating which led to them holding up a trophy is ludicrous. Players like Tatis are automatically given 80-game suspensions and a whole team of players that defrauded the sport of baseball aren't even given a slap on the wrist. They still keep the trophy and all of the awards from the 2017 season. How does that make sense?

The track record persists through this past season where pitchers were doctoring baseballs to execute better. That is cheating. Just as much as the players in the Mitchell Report and the 2017 Astros, and yet, no punishments to go around.

The point of this isn't to get Tatis off the hook, he took steroids and deserves to be punished. But in reality it pales in comparison to an organized cheating ring involving an entire organization. Yet Tatis' suspension is longer than what the entire 2017 Astros roster got, which was nothing.

The disparity of punishments in professional baseball are astounding. Apparently players just need to band together and organize their cheating to avoid any kind of punishment. They can go so far as to win the World Series and MLB won't bat an eye. But if any player even looks in the direction of a PED, the team will lose its entire starting nine for the season and draft picks for the next three years.

Hyperbole, yes, but it illustrates how obsessed MLB is with steroids and doesn't care that blatant cheating is going on around the league. Revenues continue to rise which means that everything is all good until someone creates an uproar and makes them care.

Mound Visit

Saints Sports Network is a Christian group that brings you interesting sports coverage. Our name comes from Ephesians 2:18-21 where it notes that all Christians are saints in God's eyes. Therefore we are saints who write about sports but also want to make sure to share the Gospel. That's where Mound Visit comes into play because we all need a visit to the mound from God in good times and bad to recenter our lives and trust in him. We'll do that by highlighting a Bible verse for you to think and pray about in each newsletter that you receive from us.