Major League Baseball’s report is in, and the Boston Red Sox are being punished lightly for their misdeeds.
On Wednesday afternoon, the league announced its findings in its investigation into the Red Sox stealing signs illegally during the team’s 2018 World Series championship season. While it is legal to steal signs without using technology, the Red Sox used technology to do it.
According to the league’s report, video replay system operator J.T. Watkins used game feeds in the team’s replay room (which is against MLB rules) to “revise sign sequence information that he had permissibly provided to players prior to the game.” In other words, he helped the players cheat.
The league found that because the signs were not relayed using trash cans in real time, as the Astros did, that the only time this could have helped the team was when the Red Sox had a runner on second base. Even then, Watkins only reportedly “communicated sign sequences in a manner that indicated that he had decoded them from the in-game feed in only a small percentage of those occurrences.”
So, unlike the Houston Astros, the Red Sox were not communicating signs to batters by banging on trash cans. One Astros fan calculated that the Astros cheated on 1,143 of the 8,274 pitches in the 2017 season, to give one an idea of how the two situations compare.
MLB punished the Red Sox by taking away their 2020 second-round draft pick. J.T. Watkins is suspended through the 2020 playoffs, and if he is back in 2021, he cannot return to the same position. The team’s former manager, Alex Cora, is suspended for the entire 2020 season — because he was the Astros bench coach during their cheating scandal. The league handed Cora’s punishment down today but said it was for his conduct with the Astros (the Red Sox had already fired Cora anyway).
For the Red Sox, that’s not too bad. They got out of this whole scandal without facing too many major repercussions.
So what did they really lose?
According to Bleacher Report, players drafted in the second round of an MLB Draft have a 49% chance of making it to the big leagues, and an even lower chance of being a regular, big league player. The last second-round draft pick the Red Sox made that spent a full season on the team’s MLB roster was relief pitcher Brandon Workman, who the team drafted in 2010. Yes, there can be trade value to prospects who were picked in the second round, but only first-round picks are more likely than not going to make it to the big leagues.
As for Watkins, that’s an easy one. He cheated. He shouldn’t work in baseball. We should be thankful for his military service, but it’s time for him to find a new career in a new industry. He’s not a big enough name for anyone to justify hiring a cheater. If he were on the same level of impact and talent as fellow cheater and Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, maybe it would be different.
If the league really wanted to punish the Red Sox, they should have hit them with financial penalties. Whether it’s a large fine or forcing the team to stay under a stricter payroll than everyone else, the league could have hurt the big-market club’s strategy. Instead, the team will hire a video replay coordinator in the next few months and won’t have to give a hefty signing bonus to some second-rounder who probably won’t make it to the big leagues anyway.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
