Astros and Red Sox fans have had May 31 marked on their calendars for quite some time.
Houston welcomes Boston to Minute Maid Park for a four-game set beginning Memorial Day, and it's the first time Alex Cora returns to his old stadium in front of fans after the sign-stealing allegations from 2017.
You know the story by now: the Astros were accused of stealing signs by banging on trash cans and using illegal cameras. Cora was the team's bench coach and Houston went on to the win the World Series. Cora was suspended for the 2020 Major League Baseball after he and the Red Sox mutually agreed to part ways.
And even though Cora was vilified for his part in the 2017 allegations, he still remembers that 2017 squad as a "good baseball team."
"How do I see it? It's still a good baseball team, and people are gonna judge us for what we did, but at the end it was still a good baseball team," he told reporters Monday over Zoom. "I think we were a complete team, we had pitching, we had a good offense, we had good pitching. And people are gonna ask why we did it, and I don't know, man. We just did it, we just did it. And we put ourselves in a bad situation, you know? And people are going to always talk about (the) 2017 Astros for what we did instead of actually the talent that we had over there."
There's no denying the talent the Astros boasted in 2017, but as Cora noted, when fans talk about the 2017 Astros, the trash can scandal likely always will be brought up.
