Forgiveness in American society is always on a continuum of who you are, who you belong to, and how much money you can make someone. It’s bizarre how hard the sporting press went out its way to absolve Luke Heimlich, a white guy from the Pacific Northwest who loves Jesus but pleaded guilty when he was 16 years old to one count of molesting a young family member, then just as quickly pivoted to calling for Osuna, a Sinaloan baseball player with halting English, to be expelled from baseball. Heimlich insists he is innocent, done in by an unfair system, and in return Sports Illustrated gave him the cover. Maybe Osuna was too. Or maybe both of them are lying. But the difference in reception for the two men is impossible to ignore.

Nobody demonstrates this better than the “moral national baseball commentary” from Yahoo’s Jeff Passan. He wrote that any decision in favor of signing Heimlich would be filled with “logical landmines” and opined, correctly, that nobody outside of Heimlich (who insists he is innocent) and the young family member (whose mother insists her child told the truth) knows exactly what happened in that case. For Osuna, Passan brought out the cannons, declaring that “anyone with a conscience could not, in good faith, place him on a major league roster.” There is markedly less public information known about Osuna’s case versus Heimlich, which the Oregonian reported in detail, but why let that get in the way of a good column idea?

This is the problem with zero tolerance. It’s never really zero tolerance. It’s public relations. It sounds good. It feels good. But it doesn’t accomplish anything. Nobody is safer. Nobody is healed. Nobody is made whole. They don’t work and are, at best, selectively enforced, usually to the detriment of black and Hispanic men and women. But teams enact them so they can hold themselves up as beacons of morality—until a bargain hits the market, in which case the zero-tolerance policy becomes one of forgiveness, education, and healing. All these policies are garbage because they’re public relations covering up the moral math on which teams run: Can Player X still get us closer to winning minus how much will he cost us and, if the numbers break the right way, the team will pivot to whatever policy gets them to the result its leadership wants.

The Astros never had any morals; they just want to win baseball games. This makes them no better or worse than any other professional sports organization. But that’s not a narrative the baseball press can sell you—imagine hearing from a columnist that America’s pastime has nothing to do with morals and instead is just a billion-dollar enterprise with a questionable antitrust exemption that loves to exploit its workers as much as the next business. Instead baseball writers place their faith in MLB’s investigators and pretend they know what happened that day in May, both groups empowering each other so the status quo can remain: Men in power making up the rules as they go along.

Do you know anything about what happened? Let me know or use our anonymous SecureDrop.