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Ban the Astros for a year from the big leagues.
Cutting immunity deals with cheating players while firing the Astros' manager AJ Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow doesn't quite send the proper message. It's just public relations.
And if baseball cared about the integrity of the game, it would not let the Astros keep their World Series title.
But the Astros apparently will keep their championship, as if it means anything.
A yearlong ban would send the right message. Every fan and owner would hear it.
Just cancel their schedule and scatter the players to the minor leagues for a year. Let them listen to the wind in those small-town ballparks for a long summer.
Astros owner Jim Crane could listen to the sounds of silence in an empty Minute Maid Park.
He could rent the park out to circuses and those old man baseball fantasy camps. They could sell souvenirs, like miniature trash cans, replicas of the one that was pounded near the Astros' dugout to let their hitters know what was coming.
Now that the infection has spread to the Boston Red Sox it will get worse. It's already worse than the juicing scandal of years ago, worse than the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
The Black Sox threw their series to gamblers, and players were banned for life. The Astros cheated to win the Series. And they'll keep playing, but for what? The love of the game?
A yearlong ban of the Astros would be the clear message baseball could send. But it won't.
I know it won't happen. You don't have to tell me I'm crazy. I know. It was a crazy idea.
It's not for the love of the game that Major League Baseball is frantically engaged in crisis management.
It's the money.
And not only millions in ticket sales for the owner and contracts for the players and TV and endorsement deals.
What about sports betting?
Baseball is a betting game, like all professional sports. It has been since the beginning. And who wants to bet on a rigged game?
What Major League Baseball is doing, whether it wants to admit it or not, is sending a message that the game has been cleaned up so you feel the wager you make on games remains a fair bet.
If you can't bet on it, is it still a sport worthy of sports sections and sports talk and entire networks devoted to endlessly analyzing weaknesses and point spreads and odds?
Sports betting was once the province of bookies and wiseguys, but now the states are getting in on the action, to squeeze more revenue from the people to pay for government.
And all those fans at all those parks, staring at their phones with the betting apps — wagering on all the numbers baseball offers — will be encouraged to keep on spending money.
This is the sporting life. This is what the sporting life means. Betting.
It's in baseball now and football — why else release injury reports? Why is there talk of point spreads?
And what's the point of fantasy leagues if there's no payoff?
It's about betting, and all the others too, including prizefighting. Let's not lie about it.
And of all of them, at least prizefighting is honest about what it is.
I happen to like prizefighting. There's a smarmy quality, yes, but ultimately, prizefighting is honest about what it is about.
It is about putting two men matched by weight and experience into a squared circle, where they beat each other, often with brutality but sometimes with great skill, cunning and courage.
Sometimes you'll see a rare quality prizefight between great champions, walking out there on the edge of death, becoming mythic, their memory eternal.
And others bet on the outcome.
Organized team professional sports are all about betting, but there is sport elsewhere, great sport, without odds or fantasy leagues.
A man I know takes off for a few days in the fall and spring, drives north and takes a tent with him. He goes by himself and finds a stream. He assembles his fishing rod.
He doesn't talk about it later. He doesn't tell fish stories. He's just out there until he returns.
Or that woman riding a mountain bike? She's not seeking an endorsement deal. She's alone on the mountain searching for something else.
And the golfer alone on a course at dusk. He gets lost in it, playing against himself. Later, over a good single malt scotch, he might give silent thanks to Walker Percy for becoming a writer.
Or the hunter out with the dogs. The falconer in a farmer's field trying to kick up rabbits. The solo rock climber.
There was a guy on a river up north. Those who know still talk about it, years later.
He walked down to the river one raw morning in early March with his fly rod. He stood on that wet bank and made a cast. He wasn't wearing waders. He was wearing jeans and a fleece. On his feet were slippers.
He landed a giant steelhead as long as your leg on a fly rod from that bank. And he didn't even get his socks wet.
That's the stuff of sport legend.
There isn't a Hall of Fame for him, no flashy World Series rings, no commissioner talking about love of the game.
Just a man alone on a bank, fighting a giant steelhead in his slippers.
There was no one to cheat but himself. And he didn't.
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John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.