The Staten Island Yankees and Tri-City ValleyCats, the two former minor-league teams suing MLB and their respective ex-mother teams, want over 150,000 documents pertaining to the sweeping reorganization of MiLB that cast aside 40 teams, including them.
But a state court judge on Friday denied the discovery demands, meaning the prospective inside look into how MLB orchestrated the biggest change to minor-league baseball in its history will likely not come to light, at least in this case.
“This doesn’t seem to me to be a case that at this point requires the defendants to produce tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of documents that don’t specifically refer or relate to these plaintiffs,” New York State Supreme Court judge Barry Ostrager said. “I understand your theory from a macro point of view.”
Lawyers for the two former minor-league teams were aiming for much more than that, arguing the overall strategy to slim down MiLB affected these teams, and therefore anything tied to the reorganization should be turned over, not just documents that mentioned the two teams and their parent clubs, the New York Yankees and Houston Astros.
They were asking for any documents that showed bonuses paid to executives tied to the restructuring, ownership data for each of the 160 teams in the old system, analysis or reports produced on the restructuring, the MLB team vote count for the reorder and any internal communications that addressed the MLB-MiLB relationship.
Tri-City and Nostalgic Partners, the holding company for the Staten Island Yankees, argue MLB’s 2020 reorganization wrongfully interfered with their sponsor and venue contracts.
