You can call yourself “The Baseball Spy” on social media, or you can keep your job in Major League Baseball. Justin Prinstein tried both and got one.
The Los Angeles Angels fired Prinstein earlier this season after he was caught filming members of the Colorado Rockies’ coaching staff with his phone from the scouts’ seating section at Coors Field, according to The Athletic. The incident occurred ahead of an early June series between the two clubs. Prinstein, hired by the Angels in December, was reported to Major League Baseball.
Here’s where the rule book bites: filming from the stands is broadly permitted. Scouts do it constantly. What is not permissible under MLB rules is using technology beyond what’s available in a televised broadcast to steal or decode signs. The distinction matters. A scout pointing a phone at a pitcher’s delivery is doing his job. A scout pointing a phone at the opposing dugout to crack pitch sequences is cheating.
After the league notified the Angels of the violation, then-general manager Perry Minasian fired Prinstein promptly and apologized to the Rockies’ front office, including president of baseball operations Paul DePodesta and general manager Josh Byrnes, The Athletic’s Brittany Ghiroli and Sam Blum reported.
Multiple sources briefed on the matter told the outlet that both organizations believe Prinstein acted on his own initiative. The Angels are not facing any punishment from MLB.
The timing is impossible to separate from the sport’s recent history. MLB tightened its sign-stealing rules in 2020 in the wake of the Houston Astros scandal, when the club used a center-field camera feed to decode opponents’ signs and relayed pitches to hitters by banging a trash can. The reforms, implemented jointly with the players’ union, placed strict limitations on electronic and visual-enhancement devices used to identify a team’s signs. The league’s tolerance for this kind of thing is effectively zero, and the enforcement mechanism is now fast enough that a scout can be gone within weeks of the offense.
Before joining the Angels, Prinstein worked for the Cincinnati Reds and two professional teams in Korea, and he occasionally wrote and podcasted about the sport. His self-applied moniker, “The Baseball Spy,” appeared on his social media accounts — a branding choice that aged about as well as you’d expect once he was caught doing the thing the nickname implied.
The Rockies won two of three during the series in question, which was played in Anaheim. Whatever intelligence Prinstein gathered, if any, did not move the needle.
One fired scout, one apology, zero league punishment, and a nickname that now reads like a confession. The Angels moved on. The Rockies won the series. And “The Baseball Spy” is out of baseball.
