As the story was corroborated—including by isolating the audio signature from the trash can and confirming its success in predicting the next pitch—MLB launched an investigation. The result, revealed last week, was devastating: The league identified a widespread scheme to break some of its most sacrosanct rules and levied heavy punishments on the Astros. Two team officials, the general manager Jeff Luhnow and the manager A. J. Hinch, were first suspended by MLB and then fired by the team. In the process, the scandal has already started to reshape narratives surrounding not only the Astros’ success, but also a full decade of baseball history.

Read: The case against stripping the Astros of their World Series title

If there was a trend in baseball in the 2010s, chances are the Houston Astros embodied it. In the era of the baseball “superteam,” theirs was arguably the most dominant, winning at least 100 games in three straight years (even if the stretch netted them only one World Series victory). As debates raged about the propriety of “tanking”—losing on purpose to amass draft picks who would lead the team to success down the line—they seemed to tank hardest of all, posting at least 100 losses and placing dead last in MLB every year from 2011 to 2013; the gambit ultimately paid off in a wealth of homegrown stars, including Carlos Correa and Alex Bregman.

The second baseman José Altuve’s 2017 MVP season made him a poster child for the “fly-ball revolution,” in which slap-hitters more known for beating out grounders suddenly started crushing home runs. These players were aided by a “juiced” ball, whose tendency to fly farther than ever before was scrutinized under a literal microscope (and using literal cannons). Houston’s ace pitchers Justin Verlander and Gerrit Cole posted historically great seasons, racking up strikeouts at an unprecedented rate as the league’s overall strikeout rate skyrocketed.

The Astros’ highly trained scouts and “Nerd Cave” of statisticians earned a reputation for identifying, acquiring, and developing players who had slipped under other teams’ radars; pretty soon, other teams caught on, and began hiring away the team’s off-field personnel in hopes of replicating the results. The organization was on the cutting edge of baseball strategy. They were pioneers in “shifting” their defense to better account for opposing batters’ tendencies and teaching pitchers to increase the ball’s spin rate on the way to home plate. Many of the team’s hitters sought out batting coaches to help tweak their swings and maximize their potential.

It wasn’t all rosy, though. By the time their 2019 campaign ended, the Astros had developed a reputation for a cutthroat, win-at-all-costs mentality that sacrificed the human element of the game for marginal gains on the playing field. The mid-2018 decision to trade for the pitcher Roberto Osuna while he was serving a league-mandated suspension for violating MLB’s domestic-violence policy cemented that reputation. The team’s brass struggled to square Osuna’s signing with their previous commitment to a zero-tolerance policy for abuse of any kind.