Stealing signs just became so Flannel Era. In its first spectacular scandal of the Digital Age, Major League Baseball now is facing the possibility that one of its most decorated organizations is guilty of stealing proprietary information.
Long ago, hardball met hard drive. But while analytic minds poked and prodded and smartly developed cutting-edge statistics like WAR, never was the security of a club like the Houston Astros threatened.
Now it is the St. Louis Cardinals who are in danger of crashing.
The FBI and U.S. Department of Justice are investigating the Cards for allegedly hacking into the Astros’ computer system, a story first reported by Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times and something that seemingly arrives straight from the pages of your favorite espionage novel.
Remember when hacking in baseball only came in reference to strikeout kings like Dave Kingman? Shoot, even Hack Wilson surely is rolling over in his grave today.
The link between the two organizations is Houston general manager Jeff Luhnow, whom the Cardinals employed from 2003-2011 as the team's scouting director before he went on to become the Astros GM.
Luhnow is a whip-smart baseball geek who formerly worked in the business world (and was an avid fantasy baseball player) until St. Louis owner Bill DeWitt Jr. discovered him and brought him into the baseball world. And the that world breeds a healthy dose of distrust between longtime baseball men coated with infield dust and newbies from elsewhere who some view as not having paid their dues.
So while Luhnow made a career of it, he wasn’t always the most popular guy at the Cardinals’ company picnic, if you get my drift. And no doubt it worked both ways.
When the Cardinals were playing the Dodgers in the 2013 NL Championship Series, the Astros actually issued a formal press release reminding everyone that it was Luhnow who drafted many of the St. Louis players.
That the reminder was accurate and that Luhnow was, in fact, running the scouting department in St. Louis when the Cardinals drafted (among others) third baseman Matt Carpenter, first baseman Matt Adams, starters Shelby Miller and Joe Kelly and closer Trevor Rosenthal was beside the point. It was unseemly and crass for Houston, a club that had been kicked around after former owner Drayton McLane stripped it down and sold it for parts, to push its way into St. Louis’ postseason party uninvited.
So there is history and incest between these two organizations—lots of it.
But talk about reaching back for some extra gas.
A hacking scandal like this is unprecedented in any major sport, even one played by Tom Brady or coached by Bill Belichick. Good thing Bud Selig no longer is commissioner. Famous for not knowing how to use a computer or email, ol’ Bud’s head might have popped just like the casings of those delicious bratwurst in Milwaukee.
A modern scandal deserves a modern commissioner, so all the best to Rob Manfred, who, I assume, probably already has changed all of his passwords three times since the New York Times went to press.
Many facts of the case are still unknown, while others are moving. What the baseball world is dying to know is, if these reports are true, whether this is the work of a single rogue IT guy somewhere in the Cardinals organization or if it rises to Nixonian proportions as a concerted effort by St. Louis to gain access to the brilliant mind of its former employee.
What did DeWitt and Cards senior vice-president and GM John Mozeliak know, and when did they know it?
If any of this can be proved, we’re not talking swiping a catcher’s sign from second base. We’re talking criminal charges.
The best-case scenario for MLB is the Lone IT Guy Theory. Then it can do away with the IT guy, slap the Cards with a window-dressing fine and everyone can move on.
The latter? Wow. It’s difficult to imagine. We’re probably talking a whopping fine in addition to criminal charges and a housecleaning.
In an age when everyone from the federal government to Target to Sony has been hacked, the riveting question isn’t how in the world something like this could have happened in sports, but why it hadn’t already happened. As the sabermetrics folks have shown us, there are a whole lot of people adept with computers already in the game.
New Dodgers president Andrew Friedman, for example, designed Tampa Bay’s proprietary computer system. Could the Dodgers one day go laptop diving into the Rays’ information? You would think that clubs would be pretty good at changing the locks—and passwords—when employees swap teams.
After all, they’ve been doing it on the field for decades. After the Diamondbacks traded catcher Miguel Montero to the Cubs over the winter, you don’t think Arizona’s catchers used the same signs when playing Chicago that Montero used, do you?
And if the Astros are such computer geniuses, why are they keeping everything, up to and including notes on trade discussions, on their computers? Many clubs use paper and pens to keep those particular notes, protecting themselves against just this sort of thing, from sensitive and potentially embarrassing information becoming public.
Heck, clubs fret over a scout leaving their organization for another for this reason, figuring that the scout will take some of their secrets to the new place.
Information is never as confidential as people would like. And it can be worse with computers. You tell your kids to be careful with what they put on social media. Nothing is ever erased. It can come back to haunt you.
What the Astros put into their computers was never meant to be social—or leaked to the media. But it was, and we can't be sure that this will be the last time it happens.
For the Cardinals, a sterling reputation as the game’s model organization hangs in the balance.
For those of you still in school, one word for your future: cybersecurity.
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