NEW YORK — After years of legal wrangling, the infamous Yankee Letter from Rob Manfred to Brian Cashman is now public, with a few redactions. Much of the text of the letter was published by SNY on Tuesday, after the Yankees lost a court ruling aiming to keep it sealed. It was set to be released later this week.
Most of the information in the letter has been widely reported since Manfred wrote it in 2017: The Yankees illegally used a phone to transmit information about signs from the replay room to the dugout in 2015 and 2016. (The replay phone is only supposed to be used to discuss challenging calls.)
In a lengthy statement, the Yankees took pains to say they were never punished for anything but the phone violation, and that sign stealing enforcement only really started in September 2017.
“As the facts of the letters again show, the Yankees were not penalized for sign stealing but were penalized for improper use of the telephone,” the team said. “At that point in time, sign stealing was utilized as a competitive tool by numerous teams ... and only became illegal after the Commissioner’s specific delineation of the rules on September 15, 2017.”
MLB said as much. “The Yankees did not violate MLB’s rules at the time governing sign stealing,” the league said in a statement. “At that time, use of the replay room to decode signs was not expressly prohibited as long as the information was not communicated electronically to the dugout ... MLB clarified the rules regarding the use of electronic equipment on September 15, 2017.”
Unmentioned in both statements is what happened after Sept. 15, 2017: The Astros kept cheating and won a World Series.
Daily fantasy bettors had sued after the Astros scandal, claiming they were cheated out of winnings. The suit was dismissed in 2020, but the battle over the letter continued for two more years.
Was it worth the lengthy court fight the Yankees put up to keep it sealed? You judge for yourself:
"During our investigation into the Red Sox’s misconduct, [Redacted] informed the Department of Investigations that the Yankees used a similar scheme to that of the Red Sox to decode opposing Clubs’ signs and relay them to the batter when a runner was on second base. [Redacted] — who initially noticed that the Red Sox were using a smartwatch to pass information to their players — admitted to the Department of Investigations that during the 2015 season and the first half of the 2016 season, [Redacted], provided information about opposing Club’s signs to players and members of the coaching staff in the replay room at Yankee Stadium, who then physically relayed the information to the Yankees’ dugout. [Redacted] also admitted that during that same time period, in certain stadiums on the road where the video room was not proximate to the dugout, used the phone line in the replay room to orally provide real-time information about opposing Club’s signs to Yankee coaches on the bench.
"The Yankees’ use of the dugout phone to relay information about an opposing Club’s signs during the 2015 season, and part of the 2016 season, constitutes a material violation of the Replay Review Regulations. By using the phone in the video review room to instantaneously transmit information regarding signs to the dugout in violation of the Regulations, the Yankees were able to provide real-time information to their players regarding an opposing Club’s sign sequence — the same objective of the Red Sox’s scheme that was the subject of the Yankees’ complaint." — SNY reporting of Rob Manfred's letter to Brian Cashman.
The Yankees illegally used a phone to pass catcher’s signs to runners on second base in 2015 and 2016. That sounds bad, and the Yankees spent years paying expensive lawyers to argue that releasing the letter would cause the team “significant and irreparable reputational harm.” Cashman, for his part, has nursed an intense grudge against the Astros for years. His gripes that the Yankees would have made the World Series if not for Houston’s cheating strongly imply that he feels that the Yankees, unlike the Astros, were not engaged in an illegal sign-stealing scheme.
The letter, then, is just another reminder of what’s been known all along: The Yankees were engaged in gray-area cheating, but nothing as brazen (doing it after 2017) or creative (the trash can banging) as what the Astros were up to.
With how much was already known about the Yankees’ replay room shenanigans, it’s hard to see how the letter, which contains very little new information, causes “irreparable harm” to the Yankees. And indeed, SNY reported Tuesday that “some of the team’s baseball operations employees” felt like the irreparable harm argument “overstated their actual deeds.” Either way, the argument didn’t fly in a court of law, maybe because it was really making the case that releasing it would be violating one of baseball’s unwritten rules: Everyone has to act like the Astros were not just the biggest, baddest cheaters, but the only ones.
