I'm really not quite sure what to make of the reports that emerged today, informing the world that the FBI (??) was investigating the St. Louis Cardinals (???) for having apparently hacked into the (possibly proprietary?) computer databases and (possibly?) obtained information about players, policies, scouting reports, and, well, I'm not really sure what of the Houston Astros (????). In all seriousness, this report left me in a state of repeatedly saying "wait, what?" over and over again, with increasingly long intervals between the "wait" and the "what?"
Now I don't want to give the impression that I don't understand anything about the story.
The previous post on this blog alluded to the increased use of statistical analysis in baseball in the past few decades. Since the success of the Oakland Athletics in using such analysis to compete with far more moneyed teams, more and more teams have taken up such analysis, either hiring some of the pioneers of analysis (e.g. Bill James to the Red Sox) or developing their own systems and analysts. At this point very few teams don't partake of "moneyball" any more, which makes the business of statistical analysis extremely competitive.
A possible example of this kind of competitiveness occurred a few years ago when the Astros, and aging and run-down team, hired Jeff Luhnow as general manager, prying him away from a front office position with...the Cardinals, of course. Part of Luhnow's appeal was his perceived understanding of and comfort with statistical analysis, or sabermetrics. After one of the worst three-year stretches in major league history, in which players with even marginal value were strip-mined and sold off or traded for potential, the Astros are emerging this year (at least a year early, by most estimations) with a much better record than expected and (even at this early point in the season) a better-than-average chance of making the playoffs in what was supposed to be a tough American League West division.
So obviously there's some connection between the two franchises, and that has led to some speculation that the hack was somehow meant to "get back" at Luhnow for leaving the Cardinals. This is nuts. Front office personnel, particularly when their opportunity for promotion is blocked (as was Luhnow's in St. Louis), change jobs pretty regularly (not unlike in other businesses--more on that point later). That the Cardinals organization would somehow hold it against Luhnow for grabbing a chance to be a general manager would make the Cardinals one of the pettiest organizations in professional sports. Now I'll admit that the Cardinals can come off a bit smug at times with that whole "best fans in baseball" schtick, but they don't seem that petty.
And it's not as Luhnow could actually take away the Cardinals' system and database when he left. Luhnow may have been gone but the Cardinals still had their own program. What exactly were they supposed to be gaining? And aside from the Luhnow connection, why the Astros, a team not even in the Cardinals' league (literally in this case, as the Cardinals are in the NL and the Astros in the AL). In the most basic sense, the two teams aren't really competing with one another. The New York Times report on the story suggests that Luhnow made a rookie mistake in carrying over some of the passwords used in the Cardinals' program to the new network he built with the Astros. That makes Luhnow spectacularly careless, and the Cardinals (if they really hacked to try to guard against Luhnow somehow carrying over actual information) paranoid on a New England Patriots scale.
"Jeff, did you ever change those passwords?"
A side point on this story is that for all the fuss of the moment, the whole story may not amount to much legally. The FBI may be investigating, but it's entirely possible that the whole business may not rise to the level of a chargeable crime. I find that pretty depressing, if the same high bar applies to the hackers who keep trying to get into personal computers. At the same time even if no criminal charges are filed, MLB may well choose to carry out some kind of punishment against individuals involved. At the minimum MLB (and other professional leagues) may be compelled to develop a policy on this kind of thing. Most stories of such hacking seem to fall into the realm of international espionage, accusations or charges that China or North Korea breached databases or systems in the US government or of US corporations. One sports team hacking another is in the strictest sense unprecedented.
More broadly, though, the business of one team cutting ethical corners to get a leg up on another is quite an old story; it usually played out on the field or in the stands, most notably in the business of stealing signs. Teams might station someone in the center-field stands or some other advantageous location to spy on the signs the catcher flashes to the pitcher, calling the next pitch, or maybe signs being flashed from the dugout to the catcher. In theory, that information would be relayed to the hitter, giving him the advantage of knowing what pitch was coming. The famous home run hit by Bobby Thomson in a 1951 playoff between the then-New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers turns out to have been hit against a backdrop of sign-stealing by the Giants during that season.
Frankly, this leads to about the only point that can really be made here; baseball has a pretty long history of ethically dubious behavior. I'm not even getting into the allegations of the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the 90s or other kinds of drugs in the 70s and 80s. Go back further and you find pitchers spitting on or sanding down or otherwise defacing a baseball in order to cause it to break differently and fool hitters. (This stuff still happens on occasion.)
You can also look back even further to a time when the Cardinals, who as noted above can come off as a little smug and maybe even a tad self-righteous, would have been thought of as the dirtiest team in baseball. The 1934 team known as the "Gashouse Gang" somehow managed to stand out in what was still a very rough league at the time, one in which deliberately trying to injure an opponent with your spikes or by some other means was pretty common.
As for front offices, their malfeasance tended to be directed against players. Whether in unjust withholding of salary or bonuses owed to the player, or simply stashing a player in the minor leagues without hope of promotion, no matter how well he played. Back then rules didn't give a player any leeway at all in terms of moving from one team to another; fans gripe about it now, but some level of freedom of movement for players, only won with great difficulty across the 60s and 70s, is BFD precisely because of such abuses from the earliest days of baseball.
This is just one sport, like all others or even non-sporting organizations populated by humans, and bad apples are going to appear. It is perhaps a little disturbing how often church folk, or at least some strains of church folk, tend to resort to sports as some kind of shaper or guarantor of moral and ethical character when baseball (and every other sport) is littered with examples that would seem to suggest the exact opposite. Any endeavor that includes competition is inevitably rife with some level of corruption, once you look at its history. (Seriously, can you name me one human endeavor with competition involved -- sporting or not -- that doesn't end up in some kind of scandal or corruption? I'd really like to know) Why, then, do we seem so willing to lionize sport and its participants as some kind of ethical lodestar?
I really have no idea where this Cardinals-Astros business will end up. I suppose that the only surprise is that the story, or something like it, took this long to come to the fore. Maybe one day we'll quit thinking of sports as character-building and realize that it, like pretty much everything else we do, is another venue for the demonstration of the fallenness of humanity.
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