Rob Manfred is on the clock. Literally. He wants to speed up the game, and one of the elements slowing it down is paranoia about illegal sign stealing.

So the commissioner has a strong ulterior motivation to severely punish the Astros, their personnel and any other teams and people that come out dirty from his Department of Investigations’ examination into electronic in-game cheating.

The biggest reason, though, that the commissioner needs to be draconian is not pace of game, but the integrity of this sport. Because this wrongdoing has the whiff of two previous, devastating scandals — the 1919 Black Sox and the Steroid Era.

If the Astros cheated to the extent that is alleged, then they impacted the outcome of games, seasons, statistics and employment. They are not going to be stripped of their 2017 title, just in the way that Barry Bonds remains in the record book as the all-time homer champ and the 1919 Reds are the World Series winner regardless of what the White Sox were doing.

But this is a blight, and it is a blight that the commissioner’s office should do all within its power to make sure does not occur again. And it would be folly to think that teams aren’t going to keep trying to push the limits. In recent days I have had scouts and executives talk to me about a variety of methods they think have been or could be employed, such as a realistic-looking electronic bandage placed on a player’s body that buzzes in real time to signal what is coming — one buzz for a fastball, for example — if the surveillance determines what type of pitching is coming. One person I spoke to has ties to the Astros and said he already had spoken to MLB’s investigators.

Thus, Manfred has to make a statement here with major — MAJOR — sanctions that hit all the way up the food chain and cost the livelihood of those who knew better and orchestrated this kind of cheating anyway. Of course, that is if such cheating can be proven. Which leads back to the commissioner’s office and its willingness to let the investigation go where it is going to go and if that leads all the way to, say, the top of the Astros hierarchy, then there must be punishment of one of the owners who employs Manfred.

The office, after all, was created in the wake of the 1919 scandal because the game’s integrity was in doubt and a single person with unfettered powers to act in “the best of interest of baseball” was viewed as vital. This is a dangerous game for a commissioner. Bart Giamatti banned George Steinbrenner in the early 1990s, initiating an avalanche that would lead to the ouster of Fay Vincent — Giammati’s successor — and the elevation of an owner, Bud Selig, as commissioner.

Still, Manfred needs an iron hand and stomach here. To this point, he has hit a tank of a problem with feather-duster punishment: the Red Sox for the Apple Watch issue in 2017 and the Astros for having an employee train a camera on the Indians and Red Sox dugouts during the 2018 postseason for what was ruled defensive purposes. Both received fines, which is a deterrent like having Zach Galifianakis as your NFL middle linebacker.

Ban a GM, suspend an owner, strip a series of first-round picks and that will get attention. Because you can see the ludicrous steroid defense arguments already lining up to explain away known wrongdoing.

First, deny involvement, even if the plausibility of that denial looks (and sounds) ridiculous with some of the overt bang-the-garbage-can video/audio that has surfaced to incriminate the Astros. When that doesn’t work, talk about it being a loosey-goosey era — a footnote to Alex Rodriguez’s ludicrous defense on steroid use — when the rules were not clearly spelled out. But Ben Johnson was the biggest story in the world in 1988 when he failed a steroid test and had his 100-meter Olympic gold medal stripped, and as early as 1991, Vincent circulated a memo that illegal performance enhancers were verboten in the majors. No one did the drugs out in the open or admitted use. You know why? Because they knew it was wrong.

Just like the electronic cheating. Everyone has known it is wrong. And if we want to draw a line in the sand, Manfred put a statement out on Sept. 15, 2017 — in conjunction with his Apple Watch ruling — that, “All 30 clubs have been notified that future violations of this type will be subject to more serious sanctions.” Thus, if the Astros are found to have cheated during the 2017 postseason — one month later — they had been warned. And certainly if the cheating persisted into 2018 and 2019, all the worse, especially because in spring training of 2019, a more detailed MLB memo was issued defining what is cheating and how severe the penalties can be.

So this time fines will not be fine. The whole sport’s power base acted too slowly on the steroid issue and let the continuing malfeasance leave a smear that will never be fully cleansed. Thus, on this, the commissioner must empower his investigators to go to the limit to learn what they can learn and punish harshly the wrongdoers regardless of title — or how many teams beyond the Astros also are implicated. That would be in the best of interest of the game.