CC Sabathia Is Crying About The Astros And Red Sox Cheating The Yankees Out Of Two World Series Titles, Which Is Laughably Incorrect
In the days since the Astros were handed their penalties by Major League Baseball, we’ve seen players in other organizations speak out on the matter, some of them expressing outrage and others doubling down on their own team’s innocence. Perhaps foolishly. CC Sabathia, who’s now retired, feels that the Yankees were possibly cheated out of not one, but two World Series titles by the Houston Astros and Boston Red Sox.
“As everything’s been coming out, and the more facts that we get, it’s getting frustrating…to sit here and know that late in my career I could’ve had a title, maybe (in 2017) or maybe ’18, but we got cheated out (by) a team kind of doing something that’s not within the rules of the game.”
There’s only one problem with all of that, CC. I’ll start with this — it is astounding how many people have an opinion on a story that they only read the headline of. Headline readers just check out the title of an article on Twitter and then off they go with the hot takes. It helps to actually, you know, read the whole story. Because if we’re talking about the Athletic piece with a headline that reads, “MLB’s sign-stealing controversy broadens: Sources say the Red Sox used video replay room illegally in 2018″ then you’d think that the only information we’d be given here would be about the Red Sox cheating. Not so!
By 2017, with rules governing electronic sign stealing still lacking the specificity that would come the next season, the Red Sox, Yankees and Astros were all using their replay rooms to help decode sign sequences in some way, sources said. There are indications other teams did so as well. One National League general manager expressed a feeling that it was fair game.
Come on, CC. How are you going to call out the Astros for cheating in 2017 when the Yankees were cheating in 2017, too? I’ll give you that the Astros’ cheating was more egregious than everybody else’s, but using the video room to decode signs is also against the rules. While the rules were vague in 2017, the Yankees still did it.
The Yankees have skated more than any other team in all of this. They’re not being investigated by the league, despite being named in that Athletic story SEVENTY-ONE TIMES. That’s been Yankee fans’ rally cry throughout the scandal. “We’re not being investigated, therefore we didn’t do anything!” I mean, no. That’s not how that works. The Yankees did do something, and they did it for multiple years. The Astros were investigated because of an Athletic article. The Red Sox are currently being investigated because of an Athletic article. Why are the Yankees not being investigated, despite being implicated in an Athletic article? Because only the Red Sox were named in the headline? Because the Astros and Red Sox won championships? Fuck. That.
It’s mostly because there’s no information on the Yankees doing something like this in 2018 when the rules were tightened up on using the video room to decode signs. Does that mean they just stopped doing it in 2018? Perhaps, but you have information that they were doing it for YEARS, and you’re just going to take their word for it that it stopped? They just get the benefit of the doubt?
There’s also a huge misconception in regards to the Yankees and their cheating. For some reason, people think that using the video room to decode signs wasn’t against the rules in 2017, that it only became illegal in the eyes of the league after Rob Manfred warned teams to stop in late 2017. That’s false. Ken Rosenthal describes using the video room to decode signs prior to 2018 as a “gray area”, as in you could easily see why teams not doing it would find it to be cheating, but teams that were doing it saw it as a way to game the system.
You can’t cry about the Astros cheating in 2017 just because you lost to them in the ALCS when your team was doing something that’s considered to be cheating, too. Let’s move on to the 2018 season when the Red Sox defeated the Yankees in the American League Division Series. Surely the Red Sox cheated to beat the Yankees in that series, right?
Red Sox sources said this system did not appear to be effective or even viable during the 2018 postseason, when the Red Sox went on to win the World Series. Opponents were leery enough of sign stealing — and knowledgeable enough about it — to constantly change their sign sequences. And, for the first time in the sport’s history, MLB instituted in-person monitors in the replay rooms, starting in the playoffs. For the entire regular season, those rooms had been left unguarded.
The Red Sox were not using the video rooms during the postseason to decode signs. Couldn’t happen. Virtually impossible. The league had two officials in the video rooms throughout the entire postseason. You can argue that the Red Sox allegedly doing this during the regular season led to them winning the division title, which gave them home field advantage in this series, but then I’d just remind you that the Red Sox ended the Yankees’ season at Yankee Stadium.
And I’d also like to add that, again, the Athletic story details a LONG history of the Yankees using the video room to decode signs for multiple years. The documented timeline ends in 2017. Did the Yankees just stop doing it, or have we simply not gotten the full story yet? I find it hard to believe that a team that was using the video room to decode signs for multiple years would just stop, especially when the room is not being monitored by anyone from the league up until the 2018 postseason.
The Yankees have ducked public scrutiny because they never won anything during the timeframe of all this alleged cheating. If the Yankees won the World Series between 2015-17, they would be on the front page of every newspaper as big ol’ fat cheaters. But because they didn’t win anything, everyone’s just going to look the other way and focus on those who did win? Fuck that.
As far back as 2015, the Yankees used the video replay room to learn other teams’ sign sequences, multiple sources told The Athletic.
On a somewhat unrelated but kind of related note, the early rumblings are that this MLB investigation into the 2018 Red Sox will not turn up a whole hell of a lot. It doesn’t sound like the league has much, if anything, on the Red Sox and this 2018 story. That doesn’t mean they’ll avoid penalties altogether, though, because it is their second offense, even if not much information is actually gathered. They’ll come at them for any minor infraction just to send a message. But I wouldn’t expect to read anything too damning in the report that comes out from the league.