Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred says he and his office have reviewed 75,000 emails relating to the Houston Astros’ electronic sign-stealing scandal. They have interviewed at least three current major league managers, an untold number of players and dozens of major league personnel overall.

All that gumshoe work may not inform the commissioner’s impending punishment of the Astros than 19 words he put forth on Sept. 15, 2017:

"All 30 Clubs have been notified that future violations of this type will be subject to more serious sanctions."

This proclamation came in the wake of a groundbreaking sign-stealing scandal involving the Red Sox, an Apple Watch and the home video room at Fenway Park.

So when Manfred slapped the Red Sox on the wrist, he accompanied the fine with a missive to every major league club, that sign-stealing is cool but, he reminded, “no such (electronic) equipment may be used for the purpose of stealing signs or conveying information designed to give a Club an advantage.’”

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Yet there went the Astros, just a week after this pointed Manfred memo was circulated, banging away in a relatively meaningless late-September game against the Chicago White Sox, their video camera-laptop-trash can system apparently in midseason form. With any luck, MLB’s investigation will reveal the extent of the Astros’ shenanigans that postseason, when they went 8-1 at Minute Maid Park and won the World Series.

The bill for thumbing their nose at the commissioner is about to come due.

Manfred’s office is soon expected to announce penalties resulting from the Astros’ alleged scheme. It appears the Astros cooperated with the investigation, which is wise, since they say the cover-up is always worse than the crime.

But if there’s anything worse than a cover-up, it is blatantly flouting your czar’s edict handed down just days earlier.

The result may be, at least temporarily, an Astros organization that looks a lot different than it did just 10 weeks ago.

Assistant general manager Brandon Taubman is already gone, fired under pressure from the commissioner’s office after a profane, bizarre and misogynistic diatribe toward media members that the organization initially denied before stumbling through an awkward contrition that spanned most of the World Series.

Now, general manager Jeff Luhnow, architect of the franchise’s teardown and subsequent buildup into a near-dynasty, among the game’s most influential figures by ushering the analytics era into a bolder but also colder stratosphere, is in the cross hairs.

It was the GMs that were targeted in the memo, the most important adults in the room, charged with policing their own. That includes the managers, who should have some idea what’s going in their dugouts, the tunnels and the video room.

It seems impossible for Luhnow or manager A.J. Hinch to emerge unscathed from this. Luhnow either failed to convey the memo’s import, or knew the Astros were running afoul and chose to let it continue as the club marched toward its first championship.

Whether Hinch imparted the message to his players – “Now boys, knock it off!” – or took a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil approach, he is, in fact, the ranking adult in the dugout, the tunnel leading away from it and the clubhouse. Knowing about the Trash Can Timbales and doing nothing, or not knowing about it – the latter seems particularly unlikely – both add up to managerial malfeasance.

And that makes it a near certainty that a commissioner’s office rightfully loaded for bear and badly needing to send a message will suspend both for an extended period.

That it is the Astros who will have their brass disappeared by MLB is somewhat ironic. They were the victims, after all, of a hacking effort by Chris Correa, who as a Cardinals scouting director and former Luhnow cohort in St. Louis, accessed the Astros' database and ended up with a lifetime ban from the game and a 46-month prison sentence.

Legally, Correa’s hack job was a serious offense. Just as Luhnow and Co. may find themselves harshly punished to send a message that electronic sign-stealing won’t be tolerated, Correa bore the brunt of a U.S. Attorney terribly eager to exploit this low-hanging fruit of a cybercrime.

From a baseball perspective, too, Correa ran terribly afoul of the law. Proprietary information is more golden than ever in the game, crucial in procuring and developing talent.

At the same time, some 90% of players acquired don’t pan out. Imagine being one of the few that do, scrapping your way to the major leagues and into the game’s marquee event, only to have the results potentially tilted by a different form of cheating.

Oh, we’re not conflating stolen signs with cyber crime, just as others shouldn’t play the what-about card on the Astros’ behalf, under the guise that “everybody was doing it.”

Take the more recent revelations of the Red Sox’s 2018 cheating, which The Athletic reported involved sussing out sign sequences in the video replay room, returning to the dugout and eventually passing the signs on from the basepaths.

While technically running afoul of Manfred’s edicts issued in 2017 and 2018, it still required a ballplayer reaching base, studying the signs, relaying them to the batter in a manner deemed “ethical” by almost anyone in the game.

The numerous tells among runner and batter provide ample impetus for a pitcher, catcher or pitching coach to change up the signs once they sense something amiss.

Ambush By Invisible Garbage Can offers no such warnings.

Certainly, the Red Sox will be punished by MLB as well – perhaps harshly, given the repeat offender nature of the alleged actions by both franchise and manager Alex Cora, an Astros bench coach in 2017. Their crimes do not match the Astros, who are technically on trial for sign-stealing but also may bear the brunt of a visceral disdain stemming from any number of events, most recently the Taubman debacle.

Above all, though, they are going to go down hard for the most basic of reasons – ignoring a direct order.

Perhaps they even tossed the memo into their favorite garbage can.