Baseball Fans React To Yankees Facing A Potential Sign Stealing Scandal After Court Ruling

• Baseball fans react to the New York Yankees potentiallly facing a sign stealing scandal after a court ruling on Monday.
• A letter that allegedly shows MLB hid the Yankees’ sign stealing in 2017 was ordered to be unsealed.
• Read more news about Major League Baseball here.

Back in 2019, the Houston Astros were found guilty of illegally stealing signs and cheating their way to a World Series title in 2017.

The Boston Red Sox were also implicated in their own sign stealing scandal that year – illegally using their video replay room in 2018, the year they won the World Series – but that went largely unnoticed by many, for some reason.

Another tidbit related to illegal sign-stealing also went largely unnoticed around that time and it was centered on the New York Yankees.

Back then, one player reported that he and others used the video replay room while they were with the Yankees as far back as 2015.

In June of 2020, a federal judge said he planned to unseal a letter allegedly proving that the New York Yankees engaged in a “more serious, sign-stealing scheme” than MLB revealed publicly.

The Yankees stated that they wanted the letter to remain sealed because it would “cause significant damage to the team’s reputation” and it did.

That, however, may be about to change.

On Monday, Judge Debra Ann Livingston of the U.S. Appeals Court of the Second Circuit ruled that the letter should now be unsealed.

NJ.com reports…

In the opinion, the court also upheld the dismissal of a $5-million lawsuit DraftKings player Kristopher Olson filed with more than 100 other plaintiffs against MLB, the Houston Astros and the Boston Red Sox over the illegal sign-stealing scandal that rocked the sport over the winter of 2019-2020.

A U.S. District Court judge had initially ordered the release of the letter, but the Yankees argued against it. It took the appeals court more than a year to rule against the team.

A judge has ruled a letter to be unsealed that the Yankees argued would “cause significant damage’

“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,” Livingston wrote.

She continued, “Disclosure of the document will allow the public to independently assess MLB’s conclusion regarding the internal investigation (as articulated to the Yankees), and the Yankees are fully capable of disseminating their own views regarding the actual content of the Yankees Letter. In short, any purported distortions regarding the content of the Yankees Letter can be remedied by the widespread availability of the actual content of this judicial document to the public, and the corresponding ability of MLB and the Yankees to publicly comment on it.”

Interestingly, several Yankees players were very publicly angry with the Houston Astros when their sign stealing scandal broke.

https://twitter.com/lindseyadler/status/1227629699930771461

Major League Baseball and the New York Yankees have yet to comment on the court’s ruling, but baseball fans certainly have not held back.

https://twitter.com/Mohr2Marcia/status/1505923856695017475 https://twitter.com/lgychasefor28/status/1505920426525999105

Of that, there is little doubt.