The Houston Chronicle interviews Evan Drellich about his new book on the Astros Cheating Scandal, “Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess”. At one point, Drellich criticizes MLB for helping to create the environment that led to the scandal (emphasis added):

The commissioner’s office made a lot of mistakes here—in the way they approached the institution of instant replay and the video rooms they gave to every single team, in their policing effort, in their lack of recognition of the problem as it was growing or that it would grow. There’s an irony that the commissioner was a point person for the league on PEDs and steroids, and seemingly forgot that players and teams have this great, competitive drive. If you give them new tools, they’re going to try to find a way to exploit those new tools.

Chron.com

One would hope that MLB, and other organizations as well, would game the rules and regulations they put in place. In a way they have started doing this by testing rule changes at the minor league level. One would hope that the commissioner’s office observed how minor league players might have tried to game the pitch clock, the shift rules, and the electronic umpire. The flaw here is that winning at the minor league level is less important than at the major league level, as the minors are more about developing talent than winning trophies.