Writer Claims Insider Info on Yankees' Alleged 2017 Sign-Stealing and the Supposed Details Are Juicy
By Sam Dunn
The baseball world awoke to a proper brouhaha Saturday after a report from Evan Drellich in The Athletic suggested that a court judge had ordered the unsealing of a 2017 letter understood to contain evidence that the Yankees stole opponents' signs that season, and that Major League Baseball kept it quiet. The story was especially prescient given that the Bronx Bombers were one of the chief victims of the world champion Astros in '17 who were later found to have cheated significantly.
We don't know exactly what's in this letter, nor do we know what the Yankees did or didn't do. But one baseball writer. Joe Rivera of The Sporting News, now says he heard last year from a source that the 2017 Yankees used outfield cameras to read pitching signs straight from opposing catchers.
A source told me late last year that the Yankees allegedly had three different cameras set up in the outfield in 2017 — left, right and center — trained on the catcher's mitt to steal signs.
— Joe (@JoeRiveraSN) June 13, 2020
Well, that would be a no-no. Remember, the Astros were specifically taken to task for using electronic devices as part of their cheating system.
According to the source, the Yankees have "four guys" who strictly go over signs during a game, revealing signs to players, live, in moment, during an AB. When a player made it to second, the signs would be relayed to the hitter.
— Joe (@JoeRiveraSN) June 13, 2020
That sounds like a protracted process. You can't do all of this in the span of a single at-bat, right? It would seem to be impossible.
Either way, Rivera's source suggests an intricate process.
I'd like to point out: this is ONE source who told me these things, and I've had a fair level of difficulty verifying some of the finer details of the sign-stealing coming from New York. But, from what I gather, it's much more widespread than we believe/MLB would have you think.
— Joe (@JoeRiveraSN) June 13, 2020
Ah, yes, the caveat! That's why we're not prepared to call this a "report."
But still, it's juicy.
Before any fanbases take a victory lap, consider this from a separate source earlier in the year.
— Joe (@JoeRiveraSN) June 13, 2020
Sign-stealing in MLB had become so widespread that, "they’d have to suspend half the league" if all of the sign-stealing stuff came to light.
That's perhaps the biggest takeaway here -- that singling out any MLB team on an individual basis for stealing signs, even with the assistance of technology, misses the point. I was clearly a widespread trend inside the league, at least up until 2017.
That doesn't make these purported, unverified details any less of a bombshell if they turn out to be true, of course.