Major League Baseball has finally come down on a ruling for the Boston Red Sox's illegal sign stealing in 2018.
According to Evan Drellich of The Athletic, the league has decided that they will be suspending the operator J.T. Watkins, and docked the Red Sox a second-round pick in the 2020 draft. They have also suspended Cora through the end of the 2020 draft. They also have suspended Cora through the 2020 post season for his role in the Astros sign stealing scandal when he was the bench coach.
“The evidence uncovered during the investigation is insufficient to conclude that the (Red Sox) conduct continued in the 2018 Postseason or 2019 regular season,” the commissioner’s statement reads.
MLB’s investigation determined that Watkins at times during the 2018 season used the game feeds in the replay “in in violation of MLB regulations, to revise sign sequence information that he had permissibly provided to players prior to the game.”
Compared to the Astros in which Houston players communicated to batters in real time from the dugout what type of pitch was going to be thrown, Watkins’ information was limited to when Boston had a runner on second, according to MLB’s findings. MLB also found that Watkins used the decoded information “only a small percentage of those occurrences.”
MLB opened its investigation in mid-January after the Red Sox were accused of using a video replay room to illegally relay signs to hitters during the 2018 season.
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