St. Louis Cardinals front office under FBI investigation for hacking

[ReynardMuldrake]

WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors are investigating front-office officials for the St. Louis Cardinals, one of the most successful teams in baseball over the past two decades, for hacking into the 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.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/sp...id=tw-bna&_r=0

[MagicHef]

Originally Posted by Amnorix

Except it might not have been ANY air. The physical evidence is weak as hell. Heck, the New York Times, relying on an independent research report, blew the Wells Report out of the water.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/op...gate.html?_r=0




http://www.aei.org/publication/on-wells-report/

https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploa...lls-report.pdf

Big punchline:

Why is a conservative political thinktank doing research on footballs?

Anyway, remember how I was talking a few weeks ago about how you have to assume an extremely specific timeline (invented out of thin air by a Patriots fan) of what happened during the halftime measurements to come to this conclusion? These guys don't just assume it, they state it as fact in their report with no evidence.

Also, to reach their conclusion, they're assuming that a football is a rigid vessel. I don't think it is, do you?

[Amnorix]

Originally Posted by Hootie 2.0

yeah

Kraft just accepted forfeiture of a 1st round pick, 4th round pick, and $1M because the Patriots did nothing wrong

that's what innocent people do

yep

Actually, he accepted it because there is really no way to fight it. The teams aren't subject to the collective bargaining agreement, and the bylaws give all power to the commissioner. His options were accept it or go full rogue and bring a lawsuit against Goodell and the League. Basically, the full Al Davis route.

And even then it's not clear how he could win. The NFL bylaws vest all power to adjudicate these types of things to the Commissioner.

Basically, the NFL clubs, long before Kraft or pretty much any of the current owners were involved, gave authority to the Commissioner to decide issues like this. Doesn't matter if any given club doesn't like it or not, there's very little recourse for them.

[Hootie]

Originally Posted by MagicHef

Why is a conservative political thinktank doing research on footballs?

Anyway, remember how I was talking a few weeks ago about how you have to assume an extremely specific timeline (invented out of thin air by a Patriots fan) of what happened during the halftime measurements to come to this conclusion? These guys don't just assume it, they state it as fact in their report with no evidence.

Also, to reach their conclusion, they're assuming that a football is a rigid vessel. I don't think it is, do you?

I'd just give it up, man. It's like arguing Kobe/LeBron with Arrow 2. You can post 1500 statistics that all point 1 way and it doesn't matter.

The owner of the team accepted the penalties levied for being caught cheating. He accepted them. That is not what innocent people do. It wasn't a plea bargain, it wasn't anything. The NFL said, "this is what we fine you. This is what you lose." And Kraft accepted that as is.

Anyone arguing that they didn't cheat, at this point, is a total ****ing idiot.

[Eleazar]

Originally Posted by MagicHef

Why is a conservative political thinktank doing research on footballs?

Anyway, remember how I was talking a few weeks ago about how you have to assume an extremely specific timeline (invented out of thin air by a Patriots fan) of what happened during the halftime measurements to come to this conclusion? These guys don't just assume it, they state it as fact in their report with no evidence.

Also, to reach their conclusion, they're assuming that a football is a rigid vessel. I don't think it is, do you?

A football can be rigid enough a vessel to resist deformation at a certain pressure, which is all that matters in this case.

[MagicHef]

Originally Posted by Cochise

A football can be rigid enough a vessel to resist deformation at a certain pressure, which is all that matters in this case.

No, a rigid vessel means that the container has the same volume regardless of pressure, not that it resists deformation when at pressure. A football is not a rigid vessel.

[Amnorix]

Originally Posted by Hootie 2.0

That's not what innocent people do ... ever.

Yeah, right. It's all about choices and options. If your options/choices suck, then you do what you have to, even if it means swallowing a bitter pill.

There are millions of examples, from innocent people who can't afford to fight the charges so they plead guilty to something that doesn't carry jail time, to someone who decides to settle a discrimination claim because their choices are paying $5,000 to the shitty employee they fired or paying $25,000+ to lawyers to defend the claim, with an uncertain outcome, that will take a year or three to reach.

Or the person/company who got ****ed when the other side breached the contract, or didn't perform, who let them get away with it because they didn't want to deal with it, or couldn't afford the lawyers to sue them, or whatever. They paid someone else to do it instead, paying 1.5 or double the amount necessary (or more) even though they shouldn't have had to.

Here in the real world, it's all about options and choices.

[Amnorix]

Originally Posted by MagicHef

Why is a conservative political thinktank doing research on footballs?

Anyway, remember how I was talking a few weeks ago about how you have to assume an extremely specific timeline (invented out of thin air by a Patriots fan) of what happened during the halftime measurements to come to this conclusion? These guys don't just assume it, they state it as fact in their report with no evidence.

Also, to reach their conclusion, they're assuming that a football is a rigid vessel. I don't think it is, do you?

Do you mean measuring the Colts footballs last? No evidence? They said they ran out of time when doing the Colts footballs. What does that suggest? That they did the Pats balls first, and THEN the Colts balls. Heck, "suggest" is too weak a word. What other possible conclusion could there be.

And bottom line is the Wells report should have included the timeline, and should have factored it in, or ELIMINATED IT, but they didn't.

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Hootie 2.0

but we already have DJ, Cards homer, defending the breach saying it provided no competitive advantage since the morons who 'hacked' the system leaked the information rather than continuing to cheat and gain an actual competitive advantage

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?

[Hootie]

so the NFL really had a lot to gain by suspending the face of the league and docking the Patriots more picks and money for a cheating scandal that never existed

yeah man

totally

that is way more likely than ... THE PATRIOTS CHEATED. AGAIN.

way, way more likely

God you're dumb.

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by BossChief

Who's to say they didn't do something similar with other teams, too?

-I have no dog in this fight-

Did you see how they got in?

They literally used the list of his past passwords to access his system. Because of his experience with the Cards, they'd have probably been able to find whatever external server he housed in on pretty easily. This looks like they just logged into a cloud-based system.

This wouldn't be applicable to any other team. The only other possibility would be Oakland where their former director of scouting, Dan Kantrovitz, is now the assistant GM. I'm pretty sure Dan Kantrovitz isn't controlling Billy Beane's player procurement software.

[MagicHef]

Originally Posted by Amnorix

Do you mean measuring the Colts footballs last? No evidence? They said they ran out of time when doing the Colts footballs. What does that suggest? That they did the Pats balls first, and THEN the Colts balls. Heck, "suggest" is too weak a word. What other possible conclusion could there be.

And bottom line is the Wells report should have included the timeline, and should have factored it in, or ELIMINATED IT, but they didn't.

No, they couldn't come up with any temperature coefficients that made sense with that scenario, so they had to invent a different one to try to fit their explanation into the data: there was a significant break in between measuring the last Patriot ball and the first Colt ball. The made up scenario states that the officials measured all of the Patriot balls, stopped measuring to re-inflate all of the Patriot balls, and then proceeded to measure all of the Colt balls. Basically, the first Colt ball should have warmed up just about the same amount as the last Patriot ball in any scenario other than this specific one, and the data does not support this.

[mr. tegu]

Whoever leaked the initial hacking information a while back could have been upset that they were being forced to do it. It just as easily could have been orders from the higher ups just as it could have been a bit lower person going rogue.

[duncan_idaho]

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?

One question: How many scouts did Luhnow take with him? I could see the value of having another team's scouting reports on prospects/players/advanced scouting/shift data/etc.

The only real value I could have seen the Cardinals gleaning from this hack is related to that type of scout info.

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by mr. tegu

Whoever leaked the initial hacking information a while back could have been upset that they were being forced to do it. It just as easily could have been orders from the higher ups just as it could have been a bit lower person going rogue.

If that were the case, they'd have leaked that the Cardinals ordered it. If they were that upset, they'd have burned the house down. It's possible, sure, but "just as easily"...nah.

But here's the thing - the FBI has the house that the system was accessed from and they know the former Cardinals employee(s) that resided there at the time. They have the names and the names will come out.

There's not gonna be a hell of a lot that doesn't get found out here. If Mozeliak sanctioned it, heads will definitely roll and that sucks a great deal because Mozeliak was kicking some substantial ass well before Luhnow even left. Now I've always been of the mind that our best talent evaluater went out the door with Luhnow but Mozeliak is a damn shrewd GM in his own right. He's not as good at finding the hitters that Luhnow was, but he's developed a damn good system for pitching and has largely been aces in fishing/cutting bait on veteran players.

We have, at worst, a top 10 MLB GM in St. Louis and almost certainly a top 5 front office overall in terms of a common culture and organizational stability. If this petty horseshit from a schism that occurred a decade ago implodes that, it's going to be damn disappointing.

But if Moe sanctioned it, there's no alternative. In the end, I guess it would be karmic justice. The Cards do seem to have some Devilmagic that leads to their success. I have no idea how a squad with their 1 and 2 starters, 3 and 4 hitters and setup man (now closer as well) all injured has the best record in baseball by 4 games, especially with the worst manager at the helm I've ever seen. It makes no sense. But it would figure that something like this is what takes them down.

[Hootie]

I'm not going to pretend to know much about Mike Matheny and his managing. I assume it would drive me about as crazy as Ned Yost and Ned Yost's bullpen management.

I will, however, point out that a manager, in the regular season, is basically +-2 wins for his team, tops.

The Cardinals were the same fan base that hated Tony LaRussa.