[kysirsoze]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

First - short of Hamas, I'm almost certainly the most critical Cardinal fan on this board and I'm gonna guess anybody in the Cardinals thread would echo that. Fan? Yes. Homer? Get the **** outta here with that.

Second - as a fan of the team, I can actually speak intelligently to the background of some of the parties involved here - you cannot. If nothing else, Duncan's corroboration supports that point and he does have insider contacts that I do not. It provides a very feasible alternative motive for the Luhnow data hack. As the latter NYT article pointed out - why would they bother breaking into the system of the worst team in baseball who's data they already had if it wasn't expressly to spite Jeff Luhnow?

If you believe that there was a substantial competitive advantage gained here - please expound. The Cardinals almost certainly have the systems that Luhnow was incorporating at the time of the data breach. They have any of the information they would have been able to get. There's no new insight to be gleaned here had there been had they hacked any other team in baseball. This one particular GM simply had no new insight to offer them as he was running the Cardinals player procurement system for 5 years or so before he left.

There's no benefit to price enforcing on a team outside the division and again, if they used it to get a FA to sign with them, it could have only been Peralta - the only key FA signing they made in that time period. The only major trades they made were for guys like Mujica. The Astros, being in a complete rebuild, would not have been in on guys like Mujica and Peralta. They could have found out some intel on how other teams value their players but guess how else they could have found that out? Call the other teams. Those teams are going to be just as likely to feed misinformation to the Astros as they are the Cardinals. The only true 'trustworthy' intel would have been internal.

I also acknowledged that as the dust settles it could turn out that they did use this to their advantage in some instances, in which case I'll view it differently. However, right now, based on the timelines of the data leaked, this appears almost certainly to have occurred in the Spring of 2013 and maybe have impacted 2 drafts, no trades and no FA signings.

Explain how I'm being a homer here.

Had this been the Cubs, Dodgers, Yankees, Angels, D-Rays....literally ANY other team, then the motive would have been clearly competitive and the takeaway could have been far more substantial. It wasn't. My analysis is specific to this instance and the particular GM/System that was compromised. How is that hard to digest?

Personally, I think that damaging the competitive advantage of another team out of spite is just as bad for baseball as cheating for you own gain. I mean, when the leak came out it was a big embarrassment for the Astros and seemed to hurt them when it came to trade discussions. As it stands right now, barring significant new info coming to light, I think anyone who authorized/performed these invasions should be banned from the sport for life.