Ok, because I am a Patriots fan, I suppose I know the thought process. First, you tend to question whether there was a rule violation if you can. For Spygate, I thought BB's reading of where you can film was a better reading of what the rule at the time said and that the interpretation they got him on was not matching up to the rule. As a lawyer, I felt the league could not make it stick before a neutral judge, therefore Goodell stinks.
The next type of mental gymnastics is the "well, even if it did happen, we still won after that so it made no difference. This is sort of the F.U. Tour. Perfect regular season after the Jets game in the spygate season, trouncing the Colts in the 2d half after the ref grabbed Brady's soft balls. The line about the Astros road record being better than home is like this.
If the lead comes from someone who was inside your team, then there is a villain. Mangino, Floyd Landis. I will guess some folks are thinking this about Fiers.
Doubting the proof is a 4th thing you do. Deflategate? Noble gas law shows that the pressure drop was caused by the temperature change. There wasn't enough time for the guy holding the balls to deflate them in the bathroom. Don't know the Astros equivalent.
There is another aspect of the thought process, which I believe we've heard anonymously from some in the Astros organization or at least from Astros defenders, which is that they were only doing it in response to other teams' doing it. Ironically, this reminded me of Chris Correa, because he alleged that he only illegally accessed the Houston databases because someone from Houston was illegally accessing the St. Louis databases.
It's not quite "everybody does it, so it's no big deal." More, "we only did what we had to do; we had no choice." As an ethicist, I have a general theory that most people do not affirmatively choose to do things they know to be wrong. Rather, they convince themselves that they have no choice, or that others have forced the choice on them. This is part of the appeal of victimology, as it frees you from moral responsibility for your choices, since they aren't really choices.
This also implicates game theory, and can thus draw in the person who would otherwise, given his druthers, choose to do the right thing. There is a principle of positive reciprocity which says you encourage others to do the right thing by setting an example of doing the right thing. But there is also a principle of negative reciprocity which says you discourage others from doing the wrong thing by responding in kind, since otherwise they benefit from their behavior and have no incentive to stop. So there can be a set of thought processes that go from "I choose to do the wrong thing" to "I have no choice but to do the wrong thing" to "It is my duty to do the wrong thing, lest others get away with it." And society circles the toilet bowl on the way down.
On a less serious note, has anyone here seen the video someone made of a Yankees player facing the Astros, which then cut to the footage of Brett Gardner hitting his bat against the dugout roof, and then cut to the Yankee hitting a home run?
