Dave Roberts Says 2018 Dodgers Didn’t Illegally Steal Signs
Roberts made the comments after a new book alleged that the team engaged in sign-stealing in 2018.
On Wednesday, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters at the team’s spring training facility that MLB investigated the team after allegations of sign-stealing in 2018, but found no evidence of any wrongdoing.
Roberts’s comments came after a new book, Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess, written by The Athletic‘s Evan Drellich. The book focuses on the Astros’ cheating scandal from 2017, but includes an allegation from a source within the Red Sox that insists the Dodgers stole signs in ’18, but the league did nothing about it.
Roberts denied that assertion, and said MLB looked into the matter and “came away with nothing.”
“I’m not going to go there with that,” Roberts said, per The Athletic‘s Fabian Ardaya. “All the things that went down, punishments and all that stuff, MLB did a great job of being thorough. That’s not my job to be the judge and jury.”
In the book, a source from the Dodgers told Drellich that the team used a system in which someone in the video room decoded signs for someone else in the dugout, who would then relay them to a runners on base.
The Red Sox source, though, painted a different picture about the Dodgers’ employment of sign-stealing tactics.
Los Angeles won 92 games in 2018 and reached the World Series, where it faced off with Boston. The AL Champions won 4–1, but apparently still took issue with the Dodgers’ attempts to read signs.
“The Dodgers have always been the thing that bothers me the most. Because they’re the biggest cheaters in the whole [expletive] industry,” the source said. “They were doing it against us in the ’18 World Series. They got caught by Major League Baseball and Major League Baseball did nothing.”
Roberts didn’t deny that his team attempted to steal signs, just that players have used methods that are widely accepted as being above board.
“That’s part of having smart baseball players and looking for every advantage. If you can’t give good sequences then that’s your problem,” Roberts said. “If you can’t disguise them well enough, that’s on you. I think that sometimes people can’t differentiate between a competitive advantage and using your baseball acumen—talking about sign stealing—within the scope of the nature of the way the game was created versus cheating.”