June 16, 2015

St. Louis Cardinals Investigated by F.B.I. for Hacking Astros: The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors are investigating whether front-office officials for the St. Louis Cardinals, one of the most successful teams in baseball over the past two decades, hacked into internal networks of a rival team to steal closely guarded information about player personnel.

posted by BornIcon to baseball at 11:41 AM - 10 comments

Jinx!

posted by Ufez Jones at 11:42 AM on June 16, 2015

Technically, I was a minute before you lol

posted by BornIcon at 11:47 AM on June 16, 2015

I posted this to huddle at almost the same moment, which was misguided. You guys win because this is way more than huddle material.

posted by beaverboard at 11:50 AM on June 16, 2015

3 way tie? We should all get kudos for this one.

posted by BornIcon at 12:03 PM on June 16, 2015

posted by Mr Bismarck at 12:22 PM on June 16, 2015

I worry about our perspective sometimes. I was disappointed when the posting of Blatter's resignation only got a handful of responses after we went to the wall about deflategate. I will be disappointed if this story does not exceed the deflategate response count.

The Cards? So clean and successful, so pleased with themselves, and proud of their "Way".

The Astros? They were a doormatting afterthought. Not really worthy of hackage at the time. Looks like they were more a victim of convenience than anything, with the idiot GM not being diligent and inventive enough to scrap his old passwords and come up with new ones. This is like hacking into Prince Charles' cell phone by looking up the names of his dogs and nannies.

Now I want to go look at the background on the process of moving the Astros out of the NL Central to the AL West. How was that engineered, and by whom?

I always felt it made more sense to move the Padres to the AL West and move the Astros from the NL Central to NL West, so that Texas would continue to have a team in each league.

posted by beaverboard at 12:33 PM on June 16, 2015

Any guesses as to what his password was?

posted by Ufez Jones at 12:38 PM on June 16, 2015

If Cardinals front-office officials intentionally broke in to the Astros network to steal secrets, this would be one of the biggest scandals in baseball history. It should result in a lot of firings and a severe organizational penalty for the Cards.

The posting of some stolen information to an anonymous file site on the Internet suggests the people who did this were particularly malicious in intent.

People are going to jail for this.

posted by rcade at 12:51 PM on June 16, 2015

The posting of the information to an anonymous file site would seem to suggest that the motivation, at least in part, was to embarrass Jeff Luhnow. Not sure why you would call attention to the hack if the intent was to use the information to competitive advantage. Not that motivation really matters here.

I would be surprised if anyone in the higher reaches of the Cardinals front office would be stupid enough to have authorized this or to have condoned it once known. But the good thing with the FBI involvement/criminal justice system angle is that there should be more transparency into what went down than in your typical sports league internal investigation/Robert Goodell kangaroo court.

posted by holden at 03:12 PM on June 16, 2015

Looks about right Bismarck!

posted by BornIcon at 12:46 PM on June 17, 2015

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