MLB’s investigation into the Red Sox’s sign-stealing during their 2018 championship season lasted more than three months, covered 65 witnesses and hundreds of thousands of emails, texts and videos to determine that …
The video-replay system operator did it.
The only way it could have been more anticlimactic is if commissioner Rob Manfred had ruled it was Mr. Plum, with a candlestick, in the parlor.
Manfred and his investigators determined that the 2018 Red Sox were not the 2017 champion Astros when it came to illegal sign-stealing. Not in coordination, scope or sheer audacity. So the punishments announced Wednesday amounted to a wrist slapped unless you were J.T. Watkins or believe the loss of a second-round pick — whenever this year’s draft is held — is crippling.
Watkins, Boston’s video-replay operator in 2018 and an advanced scouting assistant now, was suspended for the rest of a season that might not be played due to the coronavirus pandemic. The commissioner’s report determined that Watkins, at times during the 2018 season, used the game feeds in the replay room “in violation of MLB regulations, to revise sign sequence information that he had permissibly provided to players prior to the game.”
The investigation found that as opposed to the Astros scheme that alerted hitters from the dugout in real time what type of pitch was coming hundreds of times — remember the trash can banging? — the Red Sox’s chicanery occurred only when a runner was on second base and could relay signs to the hitter and was not done frequently or with wide cooperation and buy-in. Thus, no player, member of the staff nor front office personnel was penalized.
Alex Cora, though, was officially suspended Wednesday through the rest of this season for his role as the Astros bench coach in 2017, not anything he did as Red Sox manager in 2018. MLB had held off announcing his punishment with the rest of the Astros personnel because of his potential involvement with the Red Sox. Near the outset of the investigation into the Red Sox in January, Cora stepped down as manager. Boston will now take the interim tag off of manager Ron Roenicke.
The Astros punishments were one-year suspensions for GM Jeff Luhnow and A.J. Hinch (who were both subsequently fired), a $5 million fine and loss of first- and second-round picks in both 2020 and 2021.
While Houston’s cheating, according to the commissioner’s investigation, continued into the 2017 postseason and the start of the 2018 season, Manfred’s statement on the Red Sox said, “The evidence uncovered during the investigation is insufficient to conclude that the [Red Sox] conduct continued in the 2018 Postseason or 2019 regular season.”
MLB also found that Watkins used the decoded information “only a small percentage of those occurrences. … Communication of these violations was episodic and isolated to Watkins and a limited number of Red Sox players only.”
Besides his suspension without pay, Watkins is banned from serving as a replay-room operator for the 2021 season as well.
As for players, the statement read: “Although the Commissioner’s Office agreed not to discipline players who were truthful in their interviews, based on the findings of the investigation, this is not a case in which I would have otherwise considered imposing discipline on players.”
The Commissioner’s Office and the MLB Players Association agreed that, in return for cooperation and honesty during their interviews, current and former Red Sox players would not be subject to discipline based on the investigation, and that the names of the current and former Red Sox players who cooperated with the investigation would be kept confidential and not publicly disclosed.
The statement says that 65 witnesses, including current and former Red Sox players, were interviewed by MLB’s Department of Investigation — a few of them multiple times. Thirty of the 44 players (34 interviewed in person and an additional 10 players through the union providing a proffer on what they would have testified) told MLB they had no knowledge whether Watkins was revising pregame decoding reports (legal) with in-game updates from the video room (illegal).
“However, a smaller number of players said that on at least some occasions, they suspected or had indications that Watkins may have revised the sign sequence information that he had provided to players prior to the game through his review of the game feed in the replay room.”
Watkins, a 2012 10th-round Red Sox draft pick out of West Point, “vehemently denies utilizing the replay system during the game to decode signs,” according to MLB’s statement.
Manfred nevertheless decided to levy a strong penalty on Watkins, in part the statement reads, because he also was a “key participant” in the 2017 Apple Watch incident, in which the Red Sox were using that device to relay signs in real time.