A sign-stealing segment Joe Girardi did on MLB Network has resurfaced, leaving some wondering if the New York Yankees were illegally stealing signs too?
In a previous piece, I described the Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal as the gift that keeps on giving. It has now converted itself into something of a black hole, anything that crosses its path gets sucked into it. It happened with the Boston Red Sox, who are currently under investigation by MLB. And now, it’s happening with the New York Yankees.
Over the last few days, Twitter was lit abuzz with a suspicious video that has resurfaced from a couple of years ago. In it, former Yankees manager Joe Girardi describes how the Bronx Bombers delivered stolen signs to batters in his time with the team.
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“I was part of a system where came from upstairs, to someone in the dugout, to the guy at second base,” Joe Girardi said before fumbling with his words.
Now, to be fair, this isn’t the trash banging system that the Astros utilized to relay signs to hitters in realtime, but it appears to implicate the Yankees in a scheme that involved a live video feed from somewhere “upstairs.”
This is, however, a far cry from prior reports we have seen in which the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees were both found to have used the replay room to learn the opposing team’s sign-sequences in 2017. Both teams were fined in September 2017 and baseball later implemented stricter rules against the practice.
Ultimately, all of these allegations amount to one conclusion I feel we can all agree on: Rob Manfred has to broaden the scope of their investigation to include all ball clubs. The way the Astros scandal was handled has made it so that no team can escape suspicion and at the end of the day, that’s bad for the game.