"St. Louis Cardinals Investigated by F.B.I. for Hacking Astros"

[ScrapTheNickname]

The New York Times has just reported that the pristine, clean, and uber successful St. Louis Cardinals organization is being investigated for hacking into the Houston Astros internal networks to get an advantage.

 

"The attack represents the first known case of corporate espionage in which a professional sports team has hacked the network of another team."

 

Read the article here.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/sports/baseball/st-louis-cardinals-hack-astros-fbi.html?emc=edit_na_20150616&nlid=70197486&_r=0

 

 

[Craig Arko]

Belichick's kicking himself for not being the first.

[Mike Sixel]

If true, they should be banned from post season play, fined, and otherwise almost shut down, frankly.

 

They should lose their draft picks for this year, and those guys should go in some kind of special lottery.

 

Throw the book a them.

[gunnarthor]

Very interesting.  Looks like they think the Astros GM, who used to work for them, had "taken their idea and proprietary baseball information to the Astros" when creating the Astros computer databases.  

 

I love this kind of stuff.  I suppose MLB will have to do something to the Cards but if the Astros did steal the Cards database system, do they get hit too?

[Mike Sixel]

 

  On 6/16/2015 at 3:45 PM, gunnarthor said:

Very interesting.  Looks like they think the Astros GM, who used to work for them, had "taken their idea and proprietary baseball information to the Astros" when creating the Astros computer databases.  

 

I love this kind of stuff.  I suppose MLB will have to do something to the Cards but if the Astros did steal the Cards database system, do they get hit too?

 

They should, that is intellectual property for sure.......

[jokin]

  On 6/16/2015 at 3:47 PM, mike wants wins said:

They should, that is intellectual property for sure.......

But the Cards didn't learn anything from the OJ Simpson affair- you go to jail for 33 years if you break and enter, even in attempting to recover your own sports memorabilia. The article's specificity sure makes it seem like the FBI has the goods on the Cards. You were right, Mike, throw the book at them (perhaps both teams, at some future point), including fines, post-season bans, draft-pick forfeitures.

[tobi0040]

Is this a movie?

[jokin]

One quote from the NYTimes article caught my eye:

 

"The (statistical) program (in question)took a series of variables and weights them according to the values determined by the team's statisticians, physicist, doctors, scouts and coaches."

 

Team "Physicist"? Really? Somehow, I don't think the Twins have to worry about anyone hacking their databases for the Team Physicist's notes.

[Vanimal46]

St. Louis Cardinals - Best Hackers in baseball - trademark pending for approval.

[gunnarthor]

I don't think they can do a post season ban but  they could take away draft picks, I suppose.  And a few people will be fired, I'm sure.

[tobi0040]

 

  On 6/16/2015 at 4:15 PM, gunnarthor said:

I don't think they can do a post season ban but  they could take away draft picks, I suppose.  And a few people will be fired, I'm sure.

 

Not to mention going to jail.

[Mike Sixel]

 

  On 6/16/2015 at 4:15 PM, gunnarthor said:

I don't think they can do a post season ban but  they could take away draft picks, I suppose.  And a few people will be fired, I'm sure.

 

Why not? That would be true punishment, everything else is gravy (other than jail time).

[David HK]

I seriously had to check the date on this article to make sure is wasn't April 1st...  

[Otto von Ballpark]

 

  On 6/16/2015 at 3:45 PM, gunnarthor said:

Very interesting.  Looks like they think the Astros GM, who used to work for them, had "taken their idea and proprietary baseball information to the Astros" when creating the Astros computer databases.  

 

I love this kind of stuff.  I suppose MLB will have to do something to the Cards but if the Astros did steal the Cards database system, do they get hit too?

If the Cardinals had a beef with Luhnow and the Astros, they should have gone to MLB, not resorted to illegal tactics.

 

And how do you really prevent someone from taking an "idea"?  We're not dealing with patents and things here.  If he took the actual database or its component data, that's another thing, but if he just took information he was aware of when creating the Astros database, not sure if that's really something that's preventable or even bad, in the context of MLB.

[Hosken Bombo Disco]

At first glance, this looks like nothing more than some spurned employee(s) with IT skills who have or had some lingering resentment towards Luhnow. If so, punish the employees.

[gunnarthor]

 

  On 6/16/2015 at 4:20 PM, mike wants wins said:

Why not? That would be true punishment, everything else is gravy (other than jail time).

You can't ban a team from the post season in a professional league, it destroys the competitiveness for the rest of the league.

[Brock Beauchamp]

Oh boy, this is going to be fun!

 

And I thought I'd have to rely on FIFA news to keep me entertained through the summer.

[Mike Sixel]

 

  On 6/16/2015 at 4:28 PM, gunnarthor said:

You can't ban a team from the post season in a professional league, it destroys the competitiveness for the rest of the league.

 

So let them steal other team's information, with no on field consequences? Not a fan of that at all.

 

You cheat in a big way, you don't get to the playoffs.

 

Other options:

guys you just drafted go into a pool and are dispersed to other teams

you lose picks in future years

you can't sign any FAs for some time

 

 

[nytwinsfan]

 

  On 6/16/2015 at 3:45 PM, gunnarthor said:

Very interesting.  Looks like they think the Astros GM, who used to work for them, had "taken their idea and proprietary baseball information to the Astros" when creating the Astros computer databases.  

 

I love this kind of stuff.  I suppose MLB will have to do something to the Cards but if the Astros did steal the Cards database system, do they get hit too?

 

I doubt the Astros really did anything technically wrong, because if they did, then why didn't the Cardinals follow legitimate channels to pursue it?

[nytwinsfan]

 

 

  On 6/16/2015 at 4:28 PM, gunnarthor said:

You can't ban a team from the post season in a professional league, it destroys the competitiveness for the rest of the league.

 

This is a very good point. In theory they could do it . . . and announce it at the end of the regular season, but at that point it would have to be a surprise, which would be tricky and arguably not fair.  Plus it would create wierd incentives for the future, so I agree, probably better not to ever do that. A better punishment is draft picks.

[Hosken Bombo Disco]

Who's cheating who, again? The Cardinals have been a model organization on and off the field for most of their 100+ years. Luhnow knew nothing about baseball until the Cardinals hired him. No one should get their hopes up on this one.

[tobi0040]

 

  On 6/16/2015 at 4:50 PM, nytwinsfan said:

I doubt the Astros really did anything technically wrong, because if they did, then why didn't the Cardinals follow legitimate channels to pursue it?

 

The story alludes to the hack was turned over to the FBI, then the FBI found the hack originated from the house of a Cards FO person.  Guessing the Cards haven't known about it or were told after and can't talk about an ongoing criminal investigation.

[jimbo92107]

"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."

 

They stole passwords, hacked into the Astros database, but didn't know enough to mask their own IP address?

 

So unprofessional, in so many ways.

[jokin]

  On 6/16/2015 at 4:55 PM, Hosken Bombo Disco said:

Who's cheating who, again? The Cardinals have been a model organization on and off the field for most of their 100+ years. Luhnow knew nothing about baseball until the Cardinals hired him. No one should get their hopes up on this one.

Luhnow wasn't hired off of a turnip truck, Advanced degrees from Norhtwestern's Kellogg School of Management and Penn's Wharton School of Business. The Cards made a full headlong leaping gamble into Sabremetrics with Luhnow and it paid off big time for them, even as it evidently brewed internal dissension from some of the more traditionalists and those left high and dry from Luhnow's departure for Houston.

 

There's a companion NYT article (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/sports/baseball/of-all-teams-to-hack-why-the-astros.html) that throws more background info on the whole affair. It sounds like there is some lingering jealousy in St Louis for Luhnow receiving the bulk of the credit and reaping the rewards of the Cards success through his promotion to GM with the Astros. But in the body of the article is revealed a most interesting character who was hired by Luhnow, and perhaps the extreme motivation by some Cardinals officials to gain access to what quantitative analysis the Astros were compiling on draft options, trade targets, Free Agents and International prospects. His name is Sig Mejdal, and he is indeed an interesting character:

 

 

 

"...Mejdal graduated from University of California, Davis with bachelor's degrees in mechanical engineering and aeronautical engineering. He later earned master's degrees in operations research and cognitive psychology[4] from San Jose State University.[5] While attending college in the late 1980s, he worked as a blackjack dealer at High Sierra in Lake Tahoe.[4]

 

After graduating from UC Davis in 1989,[3] Mejdal worked for Lockheed Martin's satellite operations unit at the Onizuka Air Force Station.[1]:113[6] Mejdal's interest in baseball was recreational until 2003, when Moneyball inspired him to consider pursuing a career in sabermetrics.[3][7] He attended the Winter Meetings in search for a job in baseball,[8] but ended up working for NASA as a biomathematician in the Fatigue Countermeasures Group.[1]:23 Mejdal studied sleep patterns of astronauts on the International Space Station[9] in order to optimize their sleep schedules.[8][10]

 

While working for NASA, Mejdal had a side job as the chief quantitative analyst for Sam Walker's fantasy baseball team Streetwalkers Baseball Club,[10][11] which was participating in the Tout Wars competition's "Battle of the Experts."[10] The fantasy team would later become the subject of Walker's book: Fantasyland: A Sportswriter's Obsessive Bid to Win the World's Most Ruthless Fantasy Baseball.[9]

 

In 2005, Sig Mejdal was recruited to do sabermetrics for the St. Louis Cardinals' new analytics department.[12] According to Sports Illustrated, "[o]ver the next seven seasons the Cardinals would draft more players who became big leaguers than any other organization."[4] He was promoted to senior quantitative analyst in 2008[13] and director of amateur draft analysis in January 2011.[14][15] Mejdal created a formula to predict the risk of injury to baseball players[16] and contributed a section on injury probability to The Bill James Handbook.[17]

 

In 2012, Mejdal became the Director of Decision Sciences for the Houston Astros, where he supported recruitment decisions based on physical tests and historical player performance...The system was criticized for de-humanizing players, but after trading off some players and making new recruits, the Astro's farm system became ranked among the best in baseball.[4] The Astros also used analytics to persuade players that were uncomfortable with non-traditional positions on the field to embrace shifts, which the team now uses very heavily. "

 

Yes, Tobi0040, this could indeed end up being Moneyball II.

[Mike Sixel]

 

  On 6/16/2015 at 4:55 PM, Hosken Bombo Disco said:

Who's cheating who, again? The Cardinals have been a model organization on and off the field for most of their 100+ years. Luhnow knew nothing about baseball until the Cardinals hired him. No one should get their hopes up on this one.

 

If the FBI is investigating this......well, go read the fangraphs article on this. This is a criminal activity, and it reads like the case isn't going to be hard to make.

[Vanimal46]

Even though it is unethical to do this, it gives us fans a sneak peak at exactly what they discuss, and it's pretty fascinating. Pretty much exactly what we do to our buddies in our fantasy baseball/football leagues.

 

http://deadspin.com/what-the-cardinals-learned-from-hacking-the-astros-1711709663

[Hrbowski]

This doesn't surprise me. I had heard about this before, and that they were the people who released all of those ridiculous trade ideas that the Astros had.

[Otto von Ballpark]

 

  On 6/16/2015 at 5:05 PM, jimbo92107 said:

"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."

 

They stole passwords, hacked into the Astros database, but didn't know enough to mask their own IP address?

 

So unprofessional, in so many ways.

Not sure if they "stole" passwords, so much as used password lists that Luhnow and other Astros executives had left behind with the Cardinals.  And the "hacking" was probably just using those passwords on Astros servers and accounts.

 

Not an excuse for the Cardinals at all, but if the "hack" wasn't an advanced technique, that's probably why no advanced techniques were used to mask their trail.

[TheLeviathan]

Truth is stranger than fiction indeed.

[Otto von Ballpark]

  Quote

 

Agents soon found that the Astros’ network had been entered from a computer at a home that some Cardinals officials had lived in.

"A home that some Cardinals officials had lived in" suggests the "hackers" don't occupy high-level positions in the Cards FO (although perhaps their actions were directed by someone higher up).  Maybe some junior staffers that could have had a beef with Luhnow, either dating from the Cardinals days or why they weren't offered jobs with the Astros?  Should be interesting.