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.
Daily fantasy bettors had sued after the Astros cheating 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:
The Yankees illegally used a phone and the replay room 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 or creative as what the Astros were up to. Houston’s banging scheme persisted after the league warned teams to cut it out in 2017. 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.
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