May we all keep following this, all the other news about baseball is terrible.
The Yankees and Major League Baseball on Monday asked the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals to prevent public release of a 2017 letter from MLB commissioner Rob Manfred to the Yankees that disgruntled fantasy league players say may contain evidence about cheating violations by the ballclub.
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff last week granted a request to unseal the letter by attorneys representing a group of DraftKings daily fantasy players who sued MLB over the impact of the Astros’ and Red Sox’ electronic sign-stealing scandals of 2017-18.
The letter from Manfred to the Yankees was included in discovery materials handed over during the fantasy players’ lawsuit, which was filed in the southern district of New York. It was sealed from public view because the Yankees said that making the letter public would cause “severe reputational injury.”
Attorneys for the fantasy players, however, say the letter may provide evidence that the Yankees were involved in a “more serious, sign-stealing scheme” than the ballclub’s technical violations cited by Manfred in 2017.
See here for the background. Judge Rakoff has since put his original ruling on hold pending appeal, so who knows how long this could take, and for something that may ultimately be about not very much that’s new. But until then, we all get to speculate and post stuff on Twitter. That counts as entertainment in these troubled times. CBS Sports and NJ.com have more.