I apologize for missing these articles from earlier this week. Sports Illustrated wrote on the Dodgers connection to the grand jury investigation into corruption of the recruitment of foreign players. The current Dodgers front office took steps to find out where that corruption existed in their organization:

?One particularly remarkable document shows that Dodgers executives in 2015 went so far as to develop a database that measured the perceived “level of egregious behavior” displayed by 15 of their own employees in Latin America. That is, using a scale of 1 to 5—“innocent bystander” to “criminal”—front-office executives assessed their own staff’s level of corruption. Five employees garnered a “criminal” rating.

A view of the database is in the article without names. Sheryl Ring at FanGraphs analyzes the legal ramifications of the article:

One possibility is that involved members of the Dodgers’ international scouting department who were terminated in 2015, a year after president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman assumed command. That shakeup was fairly comprehensive: the team fired vice president Bob Engle, scouting coordinators Patrick Guerrero and Franklin Taveras, and several others. But even if that’s true, Friedman may very well still be on the hook if he (a) was aware of the activity but (b) didn’t immediately notify authorities. There’s also the fact that these employees were present for a full year after Friedman took over, and I doubt a prosecutor will be sympathetic to the argument that it was necessary to retain the services of known criminals in order to sign some free agents. Plus, the Dodgers’ internal communications cited in the SI story regarding illegal activity were from 2015 and 2016, after the Dodgers cleaned house.

In other words, for current and former Dodgers employees — including people like Gabe Kapler (who ran the Dodgers’ player development system from 2014 through 2016) and Friedman — getting banned from baseball may end up being a best-case scenario depending on the extent of their involvement and whether they knew or should have known about the illegality going on in their operations.

Stay tuned.