And according to the owner of another Miami sports clinic, MLB's detectives went as far as illegally hacking his websites to get information and scare off his clients.
Those are the allegations made by Neiman Nix, a former big-league pitcher who ran a clinic called DNA Sports Lab in South Beach. In a federal lawsuit filed in New York today, Nix accuses MLB of killing his business and hacking his accounts because it suspected him of running a shadow operation similar to Biogenesis.
"As a result of MLB's unjust investigation, DNA Sports Lab and Nix suffered irreparable harm to their reputations, lost many clients and... lost many prospective clients," Nix's suit says.
This isn't the first time Nix has made similar allegations. New Times wrote about him and his beef with MLB in 2014, and he later filed a lawsuit in Miami-Dade Civil Court making similar claims against MLB. That suit was dismissed in April 2015.
But Nix's new federal lawsuit includes some new juice — specifically his claims about MLB's hacking. He says he hired a computer expert who traced attacks on his YouTube page (a major source of new clientele) and his Facebook page to an IP address in New York "where MLB is located," his suit notes.
Nix also cites information from Ed Dominguez, a former MLB investigator, and claims that Neil Boland — currently MLB's vice president of information security — personally directed the hacking attack.
MLB hasn't responded to the new lawsuit, but when Nix filed his initial case in Florida, a spokesman said they would have "no comment on what we regard to be baseless litigation."
