Astros

The Chron headline is blaring, but I kind of think we already knew most of this stuff.

Major League Baseball fined the New York Yankees $100,000 in 2017 for using their replay room and dugout phone to steal their opponent’s signs during the 2015 and 2016 seasons in what commissioner Rob Manfred described as a “material violation” of rules governing the replay room.

The ruling was in a letter that Manfred sent to Yankees general manager Brian Cashman on Sept. 14, 2017.

[…]

The two-page document provided few specifics and rehashed much of what Manfred already acknowledged in a Sept. 15, 2017 statement, one in which he disciplined the Red Sox for using their replay room to decode signs and warned “future violations of this type will be subject to more serious sanctions, including the possible loss of draft picks.”

The Astros continued to use their electronic sign-stealing scheme and trashcan banging at Minute Maid Park despite the warnings. Owner Jim Crane fired manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow after the system became public in Jan. 2020. The league also fined the franchise $5 million and took away its first and second-round draft picks in 2020 and 2021.

Manfred’s letter to Cashman helped to reinforce two long-held beliefs: electronic sign-stealing predated the Astros’ infamous trashcan banging scheme and ran rampant throughout the sport before stricter enforcement arrived in Sept. 2017. Multiple players across baseball have acknowledged it since the Astros’ punishments were levied and they became pariahs. No other publicly known sign-stealing schemes — including the one detailed in Manfred’s letter to Cashman — approach the severity of Houston’s trashcan banging scheme.

[…]

According to the letter, a Yankees baseball operations assistant admitted to league investigators that he provided information about opponent’s signs to members of the team’s replay room during the 2015 and 2016 seasons.

The staffer’s name is redacted in the letter. The Boston player, who had played for the Yankees earlier in his career, is also not named.

The staff in the replay room “physically relayed the information” to the Yankees dugout, but the letter did not specify how it happened. The team also tried its tactics during road games, according to the letter. At ballparks where the dugout was farther from the replay room, the Yankees sometimes used a dugout phone line to “orally provide real-time information” about the opponent’s signs, the letter said.

Manfred wrote that the Yankees’ wrongdoing “constitutes a material violation of the replay review regulations” and had “the same objective of the Red Sox’s scheme that was the subject of the Yankees complaint.”

In his public statement on Sept. 15, 2017, Manfred acknowledged that the Yankees “had violated a rule governing the use of the dugout phone” during a season prior to 2017.

“The substance of the communications that took place on the dugout phone was not a violation of any rule or regulation in and of itself,” Manfred said in that announcement. “Rather, the violation occurred because the dugout phone technically cannot be used for such a communication.”

Both the 2017 Astros and 2018 Red Sox were cited for sign-stealing schemes that originated in the team’s replay room. The Astros ran a far more egregious operation: positioning a camera in center field at Minute Maid Park, pointing it at the catcher and banging trashcans to relay the signs he flashed to Houston hitters.

Manfred’s letter to Cashman mentioned nothing about cameras. It also does not accuse the Yankees of illicit activity after Sept. 15, 2017 — the day Manfred promised harsher punishment for sign-stealing.

The 2018 Red Sox scheme was “far more limited in scope and impact” than the Astros’ 2017 actions, according to the league’s findings. Alex Cora, Boston’s manager that season, incurred a one-year suspension for only his actions as the Astros’ bench coach in 2017.

See here for the previous update. Going back through my archives, the first mention of this letter was from 2020, and most of what happened since then was related to the Yankees’ efforts to keep it under wraps. I don’t see any specific mention of the Yankees being accused of some form of sign stealing, but there was definitely the assumption all along that multiple teams had at least dipped a toe in those waters, with more than a little suspicion thrown at New York. The key thing, which we did know from the beginning, was Manfred’s warning to teams in 2017 that any further violations will be treated more harshly. Which is what happened to the Astros and to a lesser degree to the Red Sox.

So if you’re an Astros fan and you want to feel smug about this and go on about Yankee hypocrisy, go for it. You’ve got all the evidence you need. Just know that some of the dunking I’ve seen on Facebook has largely boiled down to “we cheated better than you did!” which really isn’t all that compelling if you ask me. I’m sure you can do better than that. If you’re a Yankees fan, the best response is along the line of “yeah, but when MLB said ‘no, seriously, cut it out’, we did and you didn’t”. And then we can go on hating each other as usual, which is the natural order of things in sports. Everybody wins!

Time to give up and move on, y’all.

The New York Yankees keep taking losses in court.

A federal appeals court has denied the team’s latest attempt to keep a 2017 letter from Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred detailing alleged sign-stealing by the Yankees.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit turned down the Yankees’ request for an en banc hearing of an earlier court decision affirming a U.S. District Court Judge’s ruling that the letter be unsealed.

En banc hearings, which are rarely granted, ask the circuit court’s 13 active judges to rehear the case. The appellate court’s March 21 ruling was made by a three-judge panel.

NJ.com reported Thursday the letter could be unsealed in a week. The Yankees’ only legal recourse at this point would be to seek a Supreme Court review.

“We’re disappointed in the Court of Appeals’ decision, but we respect it,” Yankees president Randy Levine told NJ.com. “But I believe that it’s going to lead to a lot of unfair results down the road.”

The Yankees have claimed making the letter public would result in “severe reputational damage.”

See here and here for the background. I follow a lot of dumb stories on this blog, and this is one I’m ready to stop following. I don’t know what could possibly be in that letter the team has fought so hard to keep under wraps, but at this point if one was inclined to believe it must be something terrible, I’d be hard pressed to argue against you. Either there really is something damaging in there, or they have a greatly over-inflated sense of their own importance. Possibly both. Can we please just rip this band-aid off and get on with our lives? Thanks.

I mean, it can’t hurt to ask.

The New York Yankees plan to continue to fight the unsealing of a letter from MLB detailing alleged sign-stealing by the organization.

The Athletic, citing a source with knowledge of the team’s plans, reported Friday the Yankees will appeal the release of the 2017 letter from commissioner Rob Manfred. A federal appeals court on March 21 had affirmed a U.S. District Court judge’s June 2020 order to unseal the letter.

Friday’s report said the Yankees plan to file a petition either later in the day or Monday, the deadline for submission, for an en banc hearing with the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals. That appeal would ask the circuit court’s 13 active judges to rehear the case. The appellate court’s previous ruling was made by a three-judge panel.

Historically, en banc reviews have been rarities in the Second Circuit.

The Yankees have claimed making the letter public would result in “severe reputational damange.”

See here for the background. I can’t imagine they’d continue on to SCOTUS if they lose again, but at this point who can say? As ol’ Jack Burton once said, you never know till you try.

Look, if you’re going to follow a weird story, you’ve got to stay committed to following that weird story.

A September 2017 letter from Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred detailing alleged sign-stealing by the New York Yankees should be unsealed, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a June 2020 ruling by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ordering “a minimally redacted version” of the letter to be unsealed.

Per NJ.com, it may be two weeks or more before the court releases the letter.

Rakoff’s order had been stayed pending an appeal by the Yankees and MLB. The Yankees claimed making it public would result in in “severe reputational damage.”

But in Monday’s decision that also upheld the dismissal of a $5 million lawsuit filed by daily fantasy sports player Kristopher Olson and 100-plus other plaintiffs seeking damages from MLB, the Astros and Boston Red Sox over illegal sign-stealing operations of recent seasons, the appeals court upheld Rakoff’s ruling regarding the letter.

“In light of plaintiffs’ attempted use of the letter in their proposed Second Amended Complaint and the district court’s discussion of the letter in explaining its decision to deny plaintiffs’ request for leave to amend in their reconsideration motion, and because MLB disclosed a substantial portion of the substance of the letter in its press release about the investigation, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in unsealing the letter, subject to redacting the names of certain individuals,” the appeals court’s ruling said.

The sealed letter to the Yankees had been obtained during the discovery phase of the class-action lawsuit, which claimed MLB and the Astros and Red Sox for liable for any money lost during games in which either team cheated.

The plaintiffs had argued that a Manfred press release in 2017 had been an “actionable misrepresentation” of the facts laid out in the letter, with the plaintiffs claming that “the investigation had in fact found that the Yankees engaged in a more serious, sign-stealing scheme.”

On Sept. 15, 2017, MLB issued a statement from Manfred concluding the investigation into the Red Sox’s illegal use of an Apple Watch, which had been prompted by a complaint lodged by the Yankees. As a part of that investigation, Manfred discovered the Yankees’ illegal use of their dugout phone and fined them a “lesser, undisclosed amount” than he levied the Red Sox.

“No club complained about the conduct in question at the time and, without prompting from another club or my office, the Yankees halted the conduct in question,” Manfred wrote. “Moreover, the substance of the communications that took place on the dugout phone was not a violation of any rule or regulation in and of itself. Rather, the violation occurred because the dugout phone technically cannot be used for such a communication.”

In that same ruling, Manfred said he found “insufficient evidence” to substantiate a claim from the Red Sox that the Yankees illegally used the YES Network to steal Boston’s signs.

See here, here, and here for the argument. A copy of the appellate court’s ruling is in the Chron story. The affirmation of the DraftKings lawsuit is likely the more substantial matter, but who knows? I still think this letter is probably no big deal, but if it is then the lessons are clearly 1) don’t do things that you’ll be embarrassed about later if people find out about it, and 2) better hope no one writes down the details of your embarrassing stuff. NJ.com has more.