In public statements Tuesday, the Yankees and Major League Baseball tried to remind fans that Commissioner Rob Manfred did not find that the 2015-16 Yankees had broken the rules for stealing signs in the sport.
This decision was repeated over and over again by the team and the league – including in court, as they tried and failed to block the release of the Yankees’ letters – as if it were a decision made from heaven. It seemed so obvious that the commissioner could not decide otherwise.
In fact, the commissioner made a crucial choice in 2017. He chose to find that the Yankees (and the Red Sox, which his office was also investigating at the time) did not break the rules of the sport by decoding signs in their video rooms. And since it was a choice, a different outcome was possible.
Players and staff used the video equipment on site for the new challenge system to replay the sport to understand the opponent’s character sequences. The players would then pass this information on to the dugout and the runners, who could then easily break the cat’s code and tell the attacker on the sign what was coming.
But this behavior in itself, Manfred decided, was not illegal.
The letter of the law in 2017 could and should have been more specific; Manfred and his men introduced extended replay in the sport and also had to update the rules before a problem arose. But he and his office did not anticipate the problem (and this lack of foresight, in turn, helped spread the problem).
Nevertheless, a rule was already in the books in 2017. It reads: “The use of electronic equipment during the game is limited. … No equipment may be used for the purpose of stealing signs or transmitting information intended to give the club an advantage. ”
The video playback equipment we last checked is running on electricity. It would not be out of place to say that the Yankees and the Red Sox used electronic equipment far beyond their means and for illicit gain and did so in violation of the rule. It may even have been the obvious, correct assessment.
Instead, Manfred decided that it would be a violation if the information learned in these rooms was subsequently communicated electronically. If a carrier like the one the Red Sox used or a landline phone like the Yankees used was turned on.
“At the time, the use of the replay room to decode characters was not explicitly prohibited by MLB rules, unless the information was communicated electronically to the dugout,” the MLB said in a statement on Tuesday.
But even this specificity was not actually written in the rule then. These are all interpretations that Manfred has chosen.
Now Manfred might think it would be unfair to tell players that some uses of video replay are legal and others are not, without outlining them in advance. But almost any device you imagine would have sensible uses and illegal uses, and it’s hard to think that any device should have been written so specifically some time ago. Just because a rule is broad does not mean it cannot be applied.
Manfred’s worries may have been more practical. It was September 2017 and the playoffs were approaching. Manfred would not want to stop players or staff from one, but two upcoming playoff teams. If he went after players, he would fight the players’ union for penalties. And the Red Sox and Yankees have always been, say, important franchises in the sport.
But do not neglect the convenience of the solution. Avoids precedent. If other teams are caught doing the same by September 2017, Manfred should not punish them. And because Manfred determined that the behavior of the video room was not a ground for punishment, he did not have to tell the public what was going on in those rooms. It may be unclear.
So in his 2017 public statement, Manfred wrote that “the proliferation of technology, especially the technology used in the reproduction process, is making it increasingly difficult to monitor the appropriate and inappropriate use of electronic equipment.”
The commissioner also said that “our investigation has revealed that clubs have used different strategies to decode characters that do not violate our rules.”
This hardly explained the extent of what was happening.
The Yankee letter does not reveal more than the public already knew about what the Yankees did. The Athletic reports on the behavior of the Yankees in the video hall in 2020. But ask another question: How does the letter correspond to what Manfred and MLB had said to the world?
The Commissioner’s public statement in 2017, published at the same time as the letter, did not clarify to almost the same extent what was happening. It was a soup of mixed words that made the reader think of a security phone and tried to suggest that the security phone was just a trivial matter.
“However, in the course of our investigation,” the statement said, “we learned that during an earlier championship season (before 2017), the Yankees violated a rule governing the use of the telephone. No club complained about the behavior in question at the time, and without prompting from another club or my office, the Yankees stopped the behavior. Furthermore, the nature of the communications conducted by telephone for the dugout did not constitute a breach of any rule or regulation per se. Rather, the breach arose because the dugout phone could not technically be used for such communication. “
Think how different it would have sounded if Manfred came out in 2017 and said something similar to what he said in private in the Yankees letter (read in full here) sent to general manager Brian Cashman.
“The Yankees’ use of the telephone bulletin to transmit information about the opposing club’s signs in the 2015 season and part of the 2016 season constitutes a material breach of the Repetition Review Rules,” Manfred wrote in a letter released Tuesday. “Using the phone in the room to watch videos to immediately transmit information about the signs to the dugout in violation of the Rules, the Yankees were able to provide real-time information to their players about the sequence of signs of the opposing club – the same goal of the Red Sox Scheme. which was the subject of the Yankees’ complaint.
Manfred’s goal when he fined the Red Sox and Yankees was to end the behavior, and ultimately this could be the place where his choice to clear the Red Sox and Yankees of using the video room stung him the most.
The players and teams did not take seriously the punishment of Manfred for the Yankees and the Red Sox. The following year, the Red Sox used the video room to decode the characters again after hiring a manager who had come from Houston Astros in 2017. In 2017, these Astros continued to steal characters electronically, even after the Yankees and the Red Sox were fined – and continued to do so in a way that was even more egregious than decoding a video room.
Manfred’s decision-making in September 2017 was an important moment in the history of the sport and creates an interesting what-if: if he finds the Sox and Yankees guilty of using the video rooms and punishing them more aggressively, could he scare other teams? Could Astros even fail him?
Above all, the Yankees’ letter is a reminder of the Commissioner’s trial. Manfred is facing a growing problem for the first time and finds that two teams using their video rooms to decode characters have done so legally. This does not mean that the Commissioner was right.
(Photo by Rob Manfred: Julio Aguilar / Getty Images)
Add Comment