Sox, Dodgers still tied to sign-stealing case
The 2023 Red Sox look almost nothing like their most recent championship team.
Heading into their fifth season since winning a franchise-record 108 regular-season games and their fourth World Series this century, only three members of that historic campaign remain on this year’s roster: Rafael Devers, Chris Sale, and Ryan Brasier.
And since the 2018 World Series, several Red Sox and Dodgers have switched sides.
Alex Verdugo and Connor Wong (from the 2020 Mookie Betts trade), Kiké Hernández, Justin Turner, and Kenley Jansen are with
Boston, while the Dodgers have Betts and JD Martinez (one-year deal). Joe Kelly, David Price, and Craig Kimbrel also played for the Dodgers after facing them in 2018.
The Dodgers have also hired J.T. Watkins, the employee suspended for the 2020 season after MLB’S investigation into whether the Red Sox electronically stole signs in 2018. This week, Betts told the LA Times that Red Sox players donated money to Watkins when he was on his unpaid suspension.
Betts also confirmed he’d been aware of the sign-stealing while it was going on. “Everybody was,” he said. But he also maintained that it was infrequent and that the Red Sox didn’t cheat during the World Series. Doing so would have been difficult, as MLB placed officials in teams’ video rooms during the postseason.
Betts then tried to downplay what he’d just admitted. “People are trying to make it like we’re cheating,” he said, “Give us credit. We had a good team. Give us some credit. We had Cy Young winners. We had MVPS. We had Gold Glove winners. We had Silver Sluggers. We had all that. Take that into account.”
That year, he became the first player in MLB history to win a Gold Glove, Silver Slugger, batting title, MVP award, and World Series in the same season.
The question is, how much did the Red Sox, individually and collectively, benefit from electronic signstealing?
Interviewed for the same story, Clayton Kershaw wanted to make something clear. “No matter what enhancements technology had back then, there needs to be a clear distinction between what the Astros did and what everybody else did,” he said.
However, the Dodgers were also called out earlier this month in former Herald reporter Evan Drellich’s new book, “Winning Fixes Everything.”
In the exposé, an anonymous Red Sox source called the Dodgers “the biggest cheaters in the whole industry,” going on to allege, “They were caught doing it against us in the ’ 18 World
Series. They got caught by Major League Baseball and Major League Baseball did nothing.”
Josh Reddick, who played for the Red Sox (2009-11) and Astros (2017-20), liked several tweets about the Dodgers cheating, including from Justin Verlander’s younger brother, Ben.
Tom Verducci’s article from the week after the 2018 World Series resurfaced online. At the time, he wrote about “the proliferation of electronic surveillance,” and that “many clubs now have as many as six high magnification cameras installed in their home ballpark specifically designed to steal signs from opponents.” He also cited an anonymous Dodgers source, who claimed “a small army of 20-something analysts in polo shirts and slacks over video from the in-house cameras, like the security room at a Vegas casino.”
The Red Sox and Astros alone wouldn’t qualify as “many clubs.” In one of Drellich’s first articles blowing the whistle on electronic sign- stealing, the Yankees were mentioned dozens of times, but at least publicly, only Houston and Boston were investigated.
Last week, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, who became a Red Sox legend with his stolen base in the 2004 ALCS, denied that his team illegally stole signs in 2017 and 2018. He told the LA Times that MLB investigated “a bunch” of teams but found “nothing” on the Dodgers.