Former Astros GM Jeff Luhnow: I deleted photos of wife giving birth, not incriminating data

Former Astros GM Jeff Luhnow allegedly deleted call logs and emails, among other data, from his phone before it was searched by MLB as part of the sign-stealing investigation against Houston.

The revelation, which was first reported by The Athletic’s Evan Drellich in an excerpt from his upcoming book “Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess,” also includes that Luhnow told members of the organization that MLB was confiscating phones so they would be “comfortable” with the contents of their devices.

“I had pictures on my phone of my wife giving birth to our son, and I deleted those at her request prior to handing over my phone,” Luhnow told Drellich in a statement. “When asked by the investigators, I told them about this. Not one work related item was deleted and every email and text I ever sent was available to MLB and the Astros through my work computer.”

Still, MLB investigators reportedly found that Luhnow’s phone didn’t have standard call logs, nor could they find email exchanges that were on the devices of others. He reportedly told the league that he didn’t trust MLB, thus deleted data.

“In addition to submitting to two interviews by the Commissioner’s Office, the Astros and MLB had complete unfettered access to every text message I sent or received during the relevant time period,” Luhnow said. “MLB never identified a single text that suggested I had any involvement in the matter — and the League had plenty of texts to make its case. In fact, the investigation uncovered 22,000 text messages from the alleged actual participants in the sign stealing. The alleged participants openly texted in real time about sign stealing activity — and not a single communication implicated me, directly or indirectly, in any way, shape or form. I was not mentioned in these contemporaneous texts because I was not party to sign stealing activities.”

The reporting at hand, though, suggests that Luhnow is — at best — stretching the truth. MLB apparently found traces of nine messages between Luhnow and Tom Koch-Weiser, the Astros’ director of advance information at the time, between March and August of 2019 that it could not recover on either person’s device.

In a letter on Jan. 2, 2020, commissioner Rob Manfred wrote that Luhnow — who was later fired after a full-season suspension — that he had damaged his credibility in the investigation.

“Your credibility is further impacted by the fact that you permanently deleted information from your phone and its backups in anticipation that my investigators would seek to search your phone,” Manfred wrote. “You did not tell my investigators that you had done this until they confronted you about it in your second interview. While you explained that you were simply deleting sensitive personal photographs, I have no way to confirm that you did not delete incriminating evidence.”