Yankees: Judge Criticizes New York for Appealing Decision to Unseal 2017 Letter

The New York judge who ruled the 2017 sign-stealing letter be unsealed just called out the Yankees.

As Yankee fans well know, a New York judge ordered a 2017 letter detailing the Bombers’ sign-stealing “scandal” from that season to be opened and made public. It’s been suggested the Yankees took part in a more serious operation than was previously documented and that the contents of the letter would “harm the organization’s reputation.”

However, there are a multitude of other aspects to consider before this letter is unsealed. The first is, whatever infractions the Yankees committed came before Major League Baseball imposed strict and clear rules against electronic sign-stealing (which came after the 2017 regular season).

The second, and perhaps more important, is the fact the Houston Astros and Boston Red Sox, both of whom were found guilty of cheating AFTER the league’s new mandates, are also being protected by sealed court documents that further describe their cheating operations. So why are we rushing to open a letter detailing what the Yankees did in ~August of 2017?

The Yankees, as expected, appealed the decision, and the judge who made the ruling called them out shortly after.

“Although the MLB defendants had earlier argued that the letter was wholly in accord with the Commissioner’s public statement, and now argued that release of the letter would harm the Yankees’s reputation, these mutually inconsistent arguments, as well as other arguments offered by the MLB defendants and the Yankees, were unpersuasive,” U.S. District Court judge Jed S. Rakoff wrote. “Indeed, one might be tempted to conclude that there is no justification for keeping the letter sealed.”

This, by the way, is the same judge that twice tossed out a lawsuit against the Astros and Red Sox on behalf of a DraftKings bettor who argued the two teams should be liable for the wager losses amid their cheating scandals.

So, as we’ve argued tirelessly since this all happened on Saturday, there is absolutely no reason the courts should order any documentation on the Yankees’ behalf to be unsealed without the same going for the Astros and Red Sox. And there’s really not much else to argue here.