When the game is in doubt from every direction, baseball suddenly faces an existential crisis. There are so many opportunities to cheat; we all know it. Those who chose to play straight and respect the effort to maintain fair play, whether player or organization — and the actions taken to respond to the subversion of fair play — are what gives the game its moral clarity. Of course mistakes have always been made, both accidental and intentional, and the past isn’t perfect — performance-enhancing drugs, gambling, the list goes on. But cheating has ultimately been framed and isolated as the outlier, carried out by bad actors. Scandals like this one, involving entire organizations, sadly make us all wonder whether the good actors are the outliers.

Yet I doubt that the Astros were alone. Given the stakes, the hyper-competitive environment and the rapid escalation of the use of technology, it would be naïve to assume that ethical lapses would occur in isolation. Ones that can be conveniently framed as pushing the envelope. Sometimes these innovations are completely in bounds: shifting defenses, cut fastballs, openers, instant replay. But they will also blur the line between innovation and anarchy, the difference between being a step ahead of an opponent and stealing fairness from the arena. Teams and players cross the line, and at times their only plan is to hope those lines get redrawn to justify their misdeeds; maybe the Astros’ leaders hoped that tech-enhanced sign stealing would be normalized before it was outed.

The cost can be steep when team obsession obscures the importance of the means of realizing that dream. When it is bought and stolen, hacked and spied upon, the trophy loses its shine, hopefully reminding us that at this level, there is only a blurry sliver of daylight between fair competition and unfair advantage.

Yet that’s precisely why baseball needs rules that are deliberate in slowing down or at least aligning with the tidal wave of technology. The rules that the Astros violated were written precisely because, as in every other aspect of our lives, technology is taking over. Calling signs with fingers when there are hundreds of cameras trained on you seems archaic. Yet it is traditional, and the collision of technology and tradition needs a bridge if we want to preserve aspects of the past that are the signature of the game’s heartbeat. The real consequence of the Astros scandal may be to stoke the feeling of helplessness we all feel with technology at times, always a step behind, dismissive of the finger-wagging dinosaur who is lecturing about the past, arrogantly pushing in the new era.

Maybe the values behind the rules, the “love of the game,” are naïve. That it is idealistic to dream of a World Series ring won through pure team and individual effort; maybe we should have realized the temptation of cutting corners for spoils that can more easily be acquired with money, drugs and better technology. A rocket arm, a quick bat, a big heart, a blessing from divine sources or humility are diminished in such a world. What you came with is not enough naturally. If we do not respond by fighting for what we claim to value in fair play, such a scandal makes us beholden to the notion that the prerequisites of success are simply deeper pockets, a better pharmacist and a unethical hacker. And in such a world, humanity is marginalized and no game remains. Just video.

So maybe the top isn’t that shiny simply because it is the top. Maybe the top is just resting high on an ice cream cake, doomed to melt from the heat of “do whatever it takes” ethics.

Still, it has to be about more than the bling. It has to matter how you get there, how you respected the road that was paved before you arrived and how you lay down a foundation for a future game. The pinnacle is meant to be a temporary space because of the spirit of competition and the revolving door of time, but it only is human when you prioritize the importance of ensuring that the game’s greatest achievements can only be acquired through fair play.