Shank's National Pasttime

... is kicking a team when they're down:

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Baseball’s cheating scandal just keeps getting worse. And the Red Sox have it hanging over their heads as they go to work on a season made more difficult by the salary dump of Mookie Betts and David Price.

The cheating Houston Astros — who have shot past the Patriots as the most hated team in America — conducted a hideous press conference in West Palm Beach Thursday that left more questions than answers.

Astros owner Jim Crane spoke, as did new manager Dusty Baker, and we listened to brief prepared statements from Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve, two of the cheatin’ ’Stros who won a World Series in 2017 while employing an electronic sign-stealing system that regularly allowed their hitters to know what pitch was coming.