http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/sport ... .html?_r=0
Cardinals Face F.B.I. Inquiry in Hacking of Astros’ Network
WASHINGTON — 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.
Investigators have uncovered evidence that Cardinals officials broke into a network of the Houston Astros that housed special databases the team had built, according to law enforcement officials. Internal discussions about trades, proprietary statistics and scouting reports were compromised, the officials said.
The officials did not say which employees were the focus of the investigation or whether the team’s highest-ranking officials were aware of the hacking or authorized it. The investigation is being led by the F.B.I.’s Houston field office and has progressed to the point that subpoenas have been served on the Cardinals and Major League Baseball for electronic correspondence.
The Houston Astros hired Luhnow as general manager in December 2011. Before then he had been a successful and polarizing executive with the Cardinals. Credit David J. Phillip/Associated Press
The attack represents the first known case of corporate espionage in which a professional sports team has hacked the network of another team. Illegal intrusions into companies’ networks have become commonplace, but it is generally conducted by hackers operating in foreign countries, like Russia and China, who steal large tranches of data or trade secrets for military equipment and electronics.
Major League Baseball “has been aware of and has fully cooperated with the federal investigation into the illegal breach of the Astros’ baseball operations database,” a spokesman for baseball’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, said in a written statement.
The Cardinals officials under investigation have not been put on leave, suspended or fired. The commissioner’s office is likely to wait until the conclusion of the government’s investigation to determine whether to take disciplinary action against the officials or the team.
The case is a rare mark of ignominy for the Cardinals, one of the sport’s most revered and popular organizations. The team has the best record in baseball this season (42-21), regularly commands outsize television ratings and has reached the National League Championship Series nine times since 2000. The Cardinals, who last won the World Series in 2011, have 11 titles over all, second only to the Yankees.
Their owner, Bill DeWitt, is a highly regarded executive who last year was in charge of the search committee for a new commissioner to replace the retiring Bud Selig.
Law enforcement officials believe the hacking was executed by vengeful front-office employees for the Cardinals hoping to wreak havoc on the work of Jeff Luhnow, the Astros’ general manager who had been a successful and polarizing executive with the Cardinals until 2011.
From 1994 to 2012, the Astros and the Cardinals were division rivals, in the National League. For a part of that time, Mr. Luhnow was a Cardinals executive, primarily handling scouting and player development. One of many innovative thinkers drawn to the sport by the “Moneyball” phenomenon, he was credited with building baseball’s best minor league system, as well as drafting several players who would become linchpins of the Cardinals’ 2011 World Series-winning team.
The Astros hired Mr. Luhnow as general manager in December 2011, and he quickly began applying his unconventional approach to running a baseball team. In an exploration of the team’s radical transformation, Bloomberg Business called it “a project unlike anything baseball has seen before.”
Under Mr. Luhnow, the Astros have accomplished a striking turnaround; they are in first place in the American League West division. But in 2013, before their revival at the major league level, their internal deliberations about statistics and players were compromised, law enforcement officials said.
The intrusion did not appear to be sophisticated, the law enforcement officials said. When Mr. Luhnow was with the Cardinals, the organization built a computer network, called Redbird, to house all of their baseball operations information — including scouting reports and player personnel information. After leaving to join the Astros, and bringing some front-office personnel with him from the Cardinals, Houston created a similar program known as Ground Control.
Ground Control contained the Astros’ “collective baseball knowledge,” according to a Bloomberg Business article published last year. The program took a series of variables and “weights them according to the values determined by the team’s statisticians, physicist, doctors, scouts and coaches,” the article said.
Investigators believe Cardinals officials, concerned that Mr. Luhnow had taken their idea and proprietary baseball information to the Astros, examined a master list of passwords used by Mr. Luhnow and the other officials who had joined the Astros when they worked for the Cardinals. The Cardinals officials are believed to have used those passwords to gain access to the Astros’ network, law enforcement officials said.
Last year, some of the information was posted anonymously online, according to an article on Deadspin. Among the details that were exposed were trade discussions that the Astros had with other teams. Mr. Luhnow was asked at the time whether the breach would affect how he dealt with other teams. “Today I used a pencil and paper in all my conversations,” he said.
Believing that the Astros’ network had been compromised by a rogue hacker, Major League Baseball notified the F.B.I., and the authorities in Houston opened an investigation. Agents soon found that the Astros’ network had been entered from a computer at a home that some Cardinals officials had lived in. The agents then turned their attention to the team’s front office.
Cardinals, the squeaky clean team of the Midwest...
I do. Tony never panned out (obviously), I've mostly just been reading the boards, sending in rosters (Now in actual DMB format. BTW, the MS Surface 3 is freaking awesome, DMB on a touchscreen is great!) and watching my youngins all grow up at the same time. Haven't had much to say really.Tigers wrote:Bren! (or Tony!). You exist....
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I rarely print a whole "subscriber only" article but this is on point and a good one:
Rubbing Mud
Steal This Book of Scouting Secrets
by Matthew Trueblood
One reason that “Up and In” was a great baseball podcast is that they had a foreign affairs correspondent. It was an unofficial thing, of course, but Lincoln Mitchell served as the show’s expert voice on things like the debt crisis, the protests (and progress?) in the Middle East, and politics in general. Mitchell is a professor and political consultant by trade, and a published author, and Kevin Goldstein, naturally, fell in love with the guy.
This doesn’t come directly from Mitchell; it’s an anecdote about an anecdote. Sue me. On a particular episode (I can’t remember which; I recommend you listen to all 102 of them just to make sure you find it), Goldstein was recounting an off-air conversation he had with Mitchell, in which Mitchell mentioned a frequent point of disagreement between himself and most of the people on whom he relied for any internal information about governmental decisions or developments. It boiled down to this: Tons of information about the workings of Congress, governmental agencies, international bodies, everything, is classified and closely guarded. Many pundits, especially those with an agenda to push, make it a point to leverage the information asymmetry between themselves and the public whenever they’re discussing an unpopular or hotly contested development.
The thing is, according to Mitchell, most of the information on which these people place an extraordinary premium is intuitive, widely known, or unbelievably insignificant. Secret information that truly determines the advisability of one course of action or another is extremely rare, at least in the worlds of politics, international diplomacy, and macroeconomics. People on the inside worry way too much about small or even imaginary informational advantages.
Kevin didn’t believe that to be the case when it came to baseball. He placed significant value on what we, the outsiders and the common fans, don’t see and don’t know. (I’m putting these things in the past tense, so as not to attempt to characterize his current opinions. Maybe they’ve changed!) To quote Joe Sheehan (who was writing at this web address years before Kevin, and nearly two decades before me), “there aren’t secret baseball games going on.” I’m of the belief that, while there are certainly trade secrets worth keeping and a wealth of knowledge about specific situations that teams have and I don’t, few of these pieces of information really change the way the game works. Teams didn’t know that some catchers were saving 40 runs per season with their pitch-framing materially sooner than the public did, and the majority of teams found out thanks to former BP author Mike Fast. Bill James knew that on-base percentage was the most important offensive statistic long before Billy Beane did, and it would be five or 10 years before Beane told Michael Lewis that. One of Kevin’s favorite questions to play with was just how great the information gap between insiders and outsiders is. My answer to that question is: awfully small. Specifically, it’s that teams and their employees have reams of information about every player that we’ll never know, but most of that information just doesn’t change the equation very much.
***
This is an important conversation to have right now, since Goldstein and Fast both work for the Houston Astros, and we now know (or think we know; it looks an awful lot like we know) that the Astros were victimized, raided for their proprietary and confidential information, by the Cardinals. There are several important questions the league needs to answer in its effort to find the right way to handle this situation. The first one is the efficacy of the alleged hack, and for my money, there’s not a ton there.
The other questions are, if anything, harder to answer. For instance: We don’t know whether this was the work of rogue interns or high-up Cardinals executives. In fact, the better evidence seems to suggest it was the former. If that’s so, is this a big deal?
If the only intention was to embarrass the Astros, and not to gain a competitive advantage, is that a mitigating factor?
How high up must the conspiracy rise, within the St. Louis organization, for the hammer to come whistling down?
In answer to those questions, I offer Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Like many historical figures, Landis is sometimes too celebrated, and sometimes too vilified. He was the first Commissioner of Major League Baseball, and that was a hell of a hard bill to fill. The game was fraught with poor labor relations, strife between teams and leagues, and (most dauntingly) the serious threat that gambling would overrun the game and rob it of any competitive integrity. That threat reached a fever pitch almost the moment Landis took over the league, when the Black Sox scandal came to light.
As most historical leaders have done in times of crisis, Landis chose decisive action over nuance, and used the public’s somewhat ill-informed sentiments as justification for those actions. He consolidated power by showing his strength, and built the confidence of his constituency by holding up a new hero for a new era, one free from the ugliness that plagued the teens. Thus, it was out with Joe Jackson, in with Babe Ruth, and onward toward the glorious future of the game, albeit at the expense of an opportunity to learn from its past. It wasn’t really a good resolution; it certainly wasn’t a just one. Given the spot he was in, though, I don’t fault Landis. He did what he thought was necessary.
There’s certainly no need for anyone in the Cardinals organization to be banned for life over this. Any and all consequences should be focused on the team, not the individuals involved, because these organizations don’t run on individual brain power. They run on ways of doing things, on protocols and best practices, and it doesn’t matter whether the Cardinals intentionally adopted illegal, subversive practices, or fostered them through neglect of oversight. In either case, the outcome is the same, and the outcome does threaten the competitive integrity of the game, even if that’s more true in terms of perception than in terms of reality.
No, no one needs to be singled out (by MLB; I’m not here to debate or speculate as to whether someone goes to jail behind this), but the response from Rob Manfred’s office needs to be serious. Baseball isn’t going to be hurt by this scandal; it might actually allow the league to lead SportsCenter even after training camp opens for the Eagles and Bills. The next scandal of the same kind will really shred it, though. That’s what the stewards of institutions like this one are always worried about: the next scandal. And they’re not wrong. A soft response to this encourages other teams to try whatever similar thing they’ve been wondering whether to try. It also makes the league look just terrible if anything in the same area code as this happens again.
It was ugly and unseemly when baseball railroaded the MLBPA and manipulated the federal government in its efforts to make examples of guys like Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. Those were witch hunts, persecutions with personal consequences, and they reeked of hypocrisy. None of the same elements are present here. When team-on-team violations like this happen, the Commissioner has a lot of leeway. Manfred should use his to set a strong precedent, or the future of baseball will be peppered with teams trying similar stunts.
It took forever, partly because the union had to protect its members, and partly because some owners needed to get done profiting from PEDs before they got on board, but the league has arrived at the right solution to that problem: make the punishment so severe that taking the risk is an acceptable tradeoff. In other words, since a first-time positive test for PEDs now leads to an 80-game suspension, it’s not a league-wide scandal if a guy uses. He’s risking a lot to do it. He’s risking a ton. If that’s what he wants to do, let him. If he gets caught, he pays for it badly enough that no one can get mad at anyone but the user.
Manfred just has to measure out a response that reads neither as a slap on the wrist nor as a blow below the belt. Taking away a star player would be too much. Taking away a single international signing bonus slot would be too little. There’s a happy medium. The only really important things are that the Cardinals not feel like they were tarred and feathered at the end, and that fans believe a clear message was sent to cheaters.
I’ll make a recommendation, since I’m here. I think the team should be ineligible from the competitive-balance lottery for three years; lose their first draft pick in 2016; be disallowed from signing an international free agent for more than $300,000 in the next two signing periods; and pay a $1 million fine. That’s not draconian, but it materially punishes them, and blocks their avenues for working around the punishment. (For instance, without the provision about the international signings, the team could simply divert the resources they might have poured into the draft toward a bevy of high-end teenagers.)
To me, that should be the punishment, and it matters very little who did it, or why, or what degree of advantage one feels they gained from it. This should mostly be about what was actually done, and it seems clear that what was done was illegal and damaging to baseball. The rest of the questions, while interesting and ripe for debate, are only tangentially related to that central one.
Rubbing Mud
Steal This Book of Scouting Secrets
by Matthew Trueblood
One reason that “Up and In” was a great baseball podcast is that they had a foreign affairs correspondent. It was an unofficial thing, of course, but Lincoln Mitchell served as the show’s expert voice on things like the debt crisis, the protests (and progress?) in the Middle East, and politics in general. Mitchell is a professor and political consultant by trade, and a published author, and Kevin Goldstein, naturally, fell in love with the guy.
This doesn’t come directly from Mitchell; it’s an anecdote about an anecdote. Sue me. On a particular episode (I can’t remember which; I recommend you listen to all 102 of them just to make sure you find it), Goldstein was recounting an off-air conversation he had with Mitchell, in which Mitchell mentioned a frequent point of disagreement between himself and most of the people on whom he relied for any internal information about governmental decisions or developments. It boiled down to this: Tons of information about the workings of Congress, governmental agencies, international bodies, everything, is classified and closely guarded. Many pundits, especially those with an agenda to push, make it a point to leverage the information asymmetry between themselves and the public whenever they’re discussing an unpopular or hotly contested development.
The thing is, according to Mitchell, most of the information on which these people place an extraordinary premium is intuitive, widely known, or unbelievably insignificant. Secret information that truly determines the advisability of one course of action or another is extremely rare, at least in the worlds of politics, international diplomacy, and macroeconomics. People on the inside worry way too much about small or even imaginary informational advantages.
Kevin didn’t believe that to be the case when it came to baseball. He placed significant value on what we, the outsiders and the common fans, don’t see and don’t know. (I’m putting these things in the past tense, so as not to attempt to characterize his current opinions. Maybe they’ve changed!) To quote Joe Sheehan (who was writing at this web address years before Kevin, and nearly two decades before me), “there aren’t secret baseball games going on.” I’m of the belief that, while there are certainly trade secrets worth keeping and a wealth of knowledge about specific situations that teams have and I don’t, few of these pieces of information really change the way the game works. Teams didn’t know that some catchers were saving 40 runs per season with their pitch-framing materially sooner than the public did, and the majority of teams found out thanks to former BP author Mike Fast. Bill James knew that on-base percentage was the most important offensive statistic long before Billy Beane did, and it would be five or 10 years before Beane told Michael Lewis that. One of Kevin’s favorite questions to play with was just how great the information gap between insiders and outsiders is. My answer to that question is: awfully small. Specifically, it’s that teams and their employees have reams of information about every player that we’ll never know, but most of that information just doesn’t change the equation very much.
***
This is an important conversation to have right now, since Goldstein and Fast both work for the Houston Astros, and we now know (or think we know; it looks an awful lot like we know) that the Astros were victimized, raided for their proprietary and confidential information, by the Cardinals. There are several important questions the league needs to answer in its effort to find the right way to handle this situation. The first one is the efficacy of the alleged hack, and for my money, there’s not a ton there.
The other questions are, if anything, harder to answer. For instance: We don’t know whether this was the work of rogue interns or high-up Cardinals executives. In fact, the better evidence seems to suggest it was the former. If that’s so, is this a big deal?
If the only intention was to embarrass the Astros, and not to gain a competitive advantage, is that a mitigating factor?
How high up must the conspiracy rise, within the St. Louis organization, for the hammer to come whistling down?
In answer to those questions, I offer Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Like many historical figures, Landis is sometimes too celebrated, and sometimes too vilified. He was the first Commissioner of Major League Baseball, and that was a hell of a hard bill to fill. The game was fraught with poor labor relations, strife between teams and leagues, and (most dauntingly) the serious threat that gambling would overrun the game and rob it of any competitive integrity. That threat reached a fever pitch almost the moment Landis took over the league, when the Black Sox scandal came to light.
As most historical leaders have done in times of crisis, Landis chose decisive action over nuance, and used the public’s somewhat ill-informed sentiments as justification for those actions. He consolidated power by showing his strength, and built the confidence of his constituency by holding up a new hero for a new era, one free from the ugliness that plagued the teens. Thus, it was out with Joe Jackson, in with Babe Ruth, and onward toward the glorious future of the game, albeit at the expense of an opportunity to learn from its past. It wasn’t really a good resolution; it certainly wasn’t a just one. Given the spot he was in, though, I don’t fault Landis. He did what he thought was necessary.
There’s certainly no need for anyone in the Cardinals organization to be banned for life over this. Any and all consequences should be focused on the team, not the individuals involved, because these organizations don’t run on individual brain power. They run on ways of doing things, on protocols and best practices, and it doesn’t matter whether the Cardinals intentionally adopted illegal, subversive practices, or fostered them through neglect of oversight. In either case, the outcome is the same, and the outcome does threaten the competitive integrity of the game, even if that’s more true in terms of perception than in terms of reality.
No, no one needs to be singled out (by MLB; I’m not here to debate or speculate as to whether someone goes to jail behind this), but the response from Rob Manfred’s office needs to be serious. Baseball isn’t going to be hurt by this scandal; it might actually allow the league to lead SportsCenter even after training camp opens for the Eagles and Bills. The next scandal of the same kind will really shred it, though. That’s what the stewards of institutions like this one are always worried about: the next scandal. And they’re not wrong. A soft response to this encourages other teams to try whatever similar thing they’ve been wondering whether to try. It also makes the league look just terrible if anything in the same area code as this happens again.
It was ugly and unseemly when baseball railroaded the MLBPA and manipulated the federal government in its efforts to make examples of guys like Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez. Those were witch hunts, persecutions with personal consequences, and they reeked of hypocrisy. None of the same elements are present here. When team-on-team violations like this happen, the Commissioner has a lot of leeway. Manfred should use his to set a strong precedent, or the future of baseball will be peppered with teams trying similar stunts.
It took forever, partly because the union had to protect its members, and partly because some owners needed to get done profiting from PEDs before they got on board, but the league has arrived at the right solution to that problem: make the punishment so severe that taking the risk is an acceptable tradeoff. In other words, since a first-time positive test for PEDs now leads to an 80-game suspension, it’s not a league-wide scandal if a guy uses. He’s risking a lot to do it. He’s risking a ton. If that’s what he wants to do, let him. If he gets caught, he pays for it badly enough that no one can get mad at anyone but the user.
Manfred just has to measure out a response that reads neither as a slap on the wrist nor as a blow below the belt. Taking away a star player would be too much. Taking away a single international signing bonus slot would be too little. There’s a happy medium. The only really important things are that the Cardinals not feel like they were tarred and feathered at the end, and that fans believe a clear message was sent to cheaters.
I’ll make a recommendation, since I’m here. I think the team should be ineligible from the competitive-balance lottery for three years; lose their first draft pick in 2016; be disallowed from signing an international free agent for more than $300,000 in the next two signing periods; and pay a $1 million fine. That’s not draconian, but it materially punishes them, and blocks their avenues for working around the punishment. (For instance, without the provision about the international signings, the team could simply divert the resources they might have poured into the draft toward a bevy of high-end teenagers.)
To me, that should be the punishment, and it matters very little who did it, or why, or what degree of advantage one feels they gained from it. This should mostly be about what was actually done, and it seems clear that what was done was illegal and damaging to baseball. The rest of the questions, while interesting and ripe for debate, are only tangentially related to that central one.
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Padres
- Site Admin
- Posts: 4822
- Joined: Sat May 13, 2006 1:00 am
- Location: Wells, Maine
- Name: Jim Berger
And this is a comment to the above post:
As a Cardinals fan, I find this whole situation ugly and embarrassing. The Cardinals are regularly skewered for the perceived self-righteousness of "the Cardinal Way" and the "Best Fans in Baseball" narrative (that is overwrought and mostly a media creation). This provides more fuel for that fire by adding a layer of hypocrisy to the whole situation.
But aside from the public perception issue, I find what the Cardinals did to be distasteful. At best it was a petty and childish act of revenge against a former colleague and at worst it was an attempt to gain an unfair competitive advantage. I hope that the Cardinals take the high road on this and clean house of anyone that was responsible for what happened here instead of covering up and making lame excuses.
I'm not a big fan of Matt's suggested penalties because they will offer a competitive disadvantage to the Cardinals and as a fan that sucks, but I don't disagree that they are probably appropriate. I hope the team steps up and takes whatever punishment MLB determines and doesn't try any appeals or anything.
Finally, on a broader scope, I am weary of all of these sports scandals that happen outside the lines. The Patriots issues in football, steroids, now hacking - I enjoy following sports because what happens on the field provides relief from the noise of the real world. My enjoyment of sports is diminished when the specter of all these scandals constantly hangs over the play on the field. I might as well think about my job, or politics, or the economy if it's going to be like that.
As a Cardinals fan, I find this whole situation ugly and embarrassing. The Cardinals are regularly skewered for the perceived self-righteousness of "the Cardinal Way" and the "Best Fans in Baseball" narrative (that is overwrought and mostly a media creation). This provides more fuel for that fire by adding a layer of hypocrisy to the whole situation.
But aside from the public perception issue, I find what the Cardinals did to be distasteful. At best it was a petty and childish act of revenge against a former colleague and at worst it was an attempt to gain an unfair competitive advantage. I hope that the Cardinals take the high road on this and clean house of anyone that was responsible for what happened here instead of covering up and making lame excuses.
I'm not a big fan of Matt's suggested penalties because they will offer a competitive disadvantage to the Cardinals and as a fan that sucks, but I don't disagree that they are probably appropriate. I hope the team steps up and takes whatever punishment MLB determines and doesn't try any appeals or anything.
Finally, on a broader scope, I am weary of all of these sports scandals that happen outside the lines. The Patriots issues in football, steroids, now hacking - I enjoy following sports because what happens on the field provides relief from the noise of the real world. My enjoyment of sports is diminished when the specter of all these scandals constantly hangs over the play on the field. I might as well think about my job, or politics, or the economy if it's going to be like that.
I haven't got to read a ton on this because I was in STL the last 2 days and only had my phone. From what little I caught on twitter yesterday it sounded like someone got into the Astros database because Lunhow didn't change his password and that apparently his password was redbird? My guess is this is probably a couple of low level guys that thought they'd get to go to Houston with him and get significant promotions and didn't. So they pulled this stunt and once they're pinpointed they'll be canned and face potential jail time. Could be wrong but that's what my gut says.
“Satan’s messengers on Earth," was the way Murray described the Cardinals.
“And then it turns out your team is cheaters, too,’’ he added.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-l ... 00400.html
“And then it turns out your team is cheaters, too,’’ he added.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-l ... 00400.html
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Rockies
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Fucking fantastic...Athletics wrote:“Satan’s messengers on Earth," was the way Murray described the Cardinals.
“And then it turns out your team is cheaters, too,’’ he added.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/mlb-big-l ... 00400.html
In the holy shit it's a small world department Chris Correa (the guy they fired) was the guy who sold me First Inning, how crazy is that?
Your REIGNING AND DEFENDING #evenyear IBC CHAMPION
2015- #torture #evenyears 179-145
2006-2014 Gritty Gutty A's 828-631
2005 Texas Rangers 65-97
Total: 1072-873 .551
2015- #torture #evenyears 179-145
2006-2014 Gritty Gutty A's 828-631
2005 Texas Rangers 65-97
Total: 1072-873 .551
