On Tuesday morning, the New York Times reported that employees for the St. Louis Cardinals are being investigated by the FBI for hacking into the internal database of the Houston Astros. On the surface, such news seems as though it may be the beginning of a new era in gaining a competitive advantage. Whereas in the past teams have stolen signs, scuffed up baseballs, used various substances to get a better grip, corked bats, and of course, injected themselves with steroids, we now have our first instance of a team hacking another organization’s digital information in order to get ahead.
With the extensive scouting and rapidly evolving statistical analysis in modern baseball, one team gaining access to the troves of information that an entire franchise has been working to compile is a major offense and can lead to a massive competitive advantage. However, upon closer investigation, this first instance of team-on-team hacking appears to be entrenched in much murkier waters than just getting an edge on another organization.
We can reasonably assume that the hacking, which took place last summer and was only recently traced back to the home of undisclosed Cardinals employees, is at least in part related to Astros General Manager Jeff Luhnow’s connection to the St. Louis franchise. Luhnow worked as an executive for the Cardinals from 2003-2011 and many credit his statistics-oriented methods with helping to shape the Cardinals’ successful teams over the past decade, including their World Series Champion squad in 2011. But why would one of Major League Baseball’s most successful franchises of all-time commit an offense worthy of a federal investigation against a former executive who helped them become world champions?
One theory that has been put forward is that Cardinals employees were concerned that Luhnow had used intellectual property from the team’s database to help form a similar system in Houston. This theory, though it is perhaps the most defensible, seeing as the Cardinals could claim to have been protecting their intellectual property, is still a massive overstepping of boundaries and an alarming display of paranoia on the part of these unnamed employees.
Others have pointed to the convenience factor of targeting Luhnow, saying that the Cardinals used old passwords Luhnow had utilized during his time in St. Louis to gain access to the Astros’ database. This seems like the most logical guess to me, if only due to its simplicity. Oh, Luhnow left some passwords here? Let’s use them to gain access to the plethora of information being compiled by one of the smartest front offices in all of baseball!
The third hypothesis being proposed is that Luhnow was a divisive figure in St. Louis, so the hack was primarily an attempt to disrupt his work and sabotage the progress being made in Houston. While few people can speak to exactly what the feeling was surrounding Luhnow during his time with the Cardinals, Luhnow himself denies there being any hard feelings between him and his former co-workers. In fact, in an interview with Sports Illustrated on Wednesday night, the Astros’ GM denied all three of the above theories, saying, “I’m very much aware of intellectual property and the agreements I signed,” and “I’m certainly aware of how important passwords are, and the importance of keeping them updated.”
Whatever the motivation was for the cyber attack, hacking does not appear to have slowed down either team. While the Cardinals have baseball’s best record, Houston sits atop the American League. Even if potentially crucial information was gained from accessing the database, the story will most likely only serve as a minor distraction, as pundits will talk endlessly in circles about what we do and do not know until the FBI concludes its investigation. However, the long-term, big picture implications of a team breaking federal laws to steal secrets from another franchise are not yet clear.
With the media storm that is sure to surround the Cardinals in the coming months, I, as a Patriots fan, would like to offer my support to the Cardinals fans out there worried about the way their favorite team will be viewed by the general public. The Cardinals’ front office is confident that the controversy does not touch the team’s top executives, but if there are more dirty secrets buried beneath the surface of this story, I have a few words of advice: embrace it. People who don’t already hate the Cardinals for being good will start to hate them because they think they are cheaters. Let them think that, and if “the Cardinal way” means the GM is personally hacking into every other team’s databases (which is definitely not happening), then so be it. As long as the Cardinals keep winning, all that talk will just be white noise, noise being made by people on the outside of success, looking in.