All you need to look at for how much this helped the Astros in 2017 is their playoff road/home splits. Altuve and Bergman.. their numbers at home compared to on the road are ridiculous. You can't look at that and say cheating hurt the hitters and didn't help them. Comparing sign stealing from 1979 to 2017 is just silly. Technology has far and away exceeded that time line. Fortunately for the Astros when the Red Sox investigation is complete there will be a new team to talk about.
Anyone who follows baseba knows how talented the Houston Astros line up is. To say they won the world series solely based on cheating is a stretch. But it helped. How much did it help? We will never know. Something tells me these players are not so remorseful about the situation because it is a league wide problem and they are not going to say how sorry they are when they really don't feel that way when everyone was doing it. Who knows.
My biggest problem with this entir situation is Rob Manfred calling the world series trophy a piece of metal.