It would appear as if the hacking case involving the Houston Astros and the St. Louis Cardinals has come to its conclusion. To summarize simply, it appears that the Cardinals’ organization accessed the computer records of the Houston Astros allegedly by using the passwords of the Houston GM who used to be in the Cardinals’ organization because he did not change them. The former scouting director of the Cardinals, Chris Correa, pleaded guilty to 5 counts of “unauthorized access to a protected computer system” and was sentenced to about 4 years in Federal prison.
Here, you can read what the Houston Chronicle has to say about this whole mess and why baseball’s action this week is justified.
This week, MLB Commish, Rob Manford, delivered baseball’s punishment to Correa and the Cardinals. Correa is banned for life from baseball; as I read it, he has the same status as Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose. More importantly, Manford concluded that the Cardinals were “vicariously liable for his [Correa’s] misconduct” and on that basis the Commish docked the Cardinals their two top picks in this year’s MLB Draft and sent those picks plus the $2M that would be allotted to signing those picks to the Astros. Reporters are saying this action is severe and unprecedented.
I guess you can call the loss of a second and a third-round draft pick “severe”; it would be much more severe if levied against an NFL team. I think it is clear that this case is “unprecedented” simply because for the vast majority of baseball’s history there were no computer systems out there to hack. There may not be a documented case where one team gained surreptitious access to another team’s scouting data, but to say that such a thing never happened in the history of MLB is a bit of a stretch.
I will give Commissioner Manford a lot of credit here for making the punishment relevant to the crime. The purpose of the hacking was to gain information about the Astro’s scouting reports on prospects; in that way, sending the Cardinals’ picks – and the money to sign those picks – to the Astros is logical and relevant.
The reason I started all of this by saying, “It would appear as if the hacking case … has come to its conclusion,” is that the accounts of what has recently transpired are reported slightly differently by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. You can read their report and their points of emphasis here.
It will not be long until pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training and when I look at the list of baseball free agents who remain unsigned, some questions come to mind:
- Matt Weiters: He is 30 years old and did not have a good season in 2016. However, each baseball team needs 2 catchers and with him unsigned, that means there are 60 catchers around who are better than Weiters. I don’t think so …
- Mike Napoli: Yes, he is 35; and yes, he is much more valuable to an AL team where he can spend some time as a DH. However, he hit 34 home runs and drove in 101 runs in 2016…
- Jason Hamel: He was 15-10 last year with a 3.83 ERA. Each team needs a minimum of 7 starting pitchers to make it through the season; are there really 210 better starting pitchers than Hamel out there?
- Angel Pagan/Jake Peavy/Chase Utley: Is this the end of the line for them?
Switching gears … I am convinced that there is no force on Planet Earth that can diminish the “Tiger Woods drumbeat” emanating from the golf writers and commentators. I swear that after he dies, someone will write a piece suggesting that Woods will come back from “the other side” to play in some minor tournament somewhere and will cite “alternative facts” as the mechanism by which this will happen. This story does not merely have legs; this story has roots that go to the core of the Earth.
Last week, Woods failed to make the cut in the Farmers Insurance Open. Quick and no Googling here:
- How long has the Farmers Insurance Open been in existence with that name?
- What was this tournament called before that?
- Who won last year?
My point is that you can be a focused sports fan and not know a whole lot about this PGA Tour event; it is not a critical tournament annually. Tiger Woods missed the damned cut here and at least 50% – and maybe 66% – of the stuff written about the events of the tournament focused on him. Just to give you an idea, he shot 76 in the opening round of the tournament and writers took that opportunity to point out that he shot better than his playing partners – Jason Day and Dustin Johnson – did in that round.
Woods is off to Dubai this week to play in an open tournament there and says he will play in two more tournaments in the three weeks after Dubai. Stand by for a tsunami of coverage none of which will acknowledge a simple fact:
- Tiger Woods once was the single best golfer on the planet – – just as Ben Hogan once was the single best golfer on the planet – – just as Jack Nicklaus …
- The fact is that stories written about Woods today are nostalgia pieces and not anything related to news – any more than stories about Hogan, Nicklaus etc. today are related to news.
Finally, here is an item from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times last month:
“Arkansas tight end Jeremy Sprinkle got sent home just hours before Thursday’s Belk Bowl when he got caught shoplifting — from a sponsoring Belk department store.
“Or, as Razorbacks apologists prefer to put it: He had bad hands.”
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………
I concur that the Tiger Woods Comeback Tour (only “500” more to catch up to Cher!) is really a non-story. However, Torrey Pines is a course where he had always done very well when he played there, and so this outcome would provide a clear picture of his game versus the competition.
Therefore, it should be a non-story until he makes a cut (or is in contention to win one outright) or Anna Kournikova wins a tournament.
On why Manfred’s action had to be done, it is something that bears watching in the age of Sabermetric evaluations of players combined with computers and video. There are far more eyes looking at what players do aside from the manager and pitching (and maybe hitting) coach. Health records, notes on tendencies the player doesn’t even know, etc., are closely guarded secrets not only because of the opposition but the betting public. ESPN last year had the fictionalized “Diary of Myles Thomas” and one of the subplots was the information young Myles gave to the betting syndicate about the team’s health.
Baseball draft picks are not nearly as precious as NFL picks, however (something like 50 rounds or equally ridiculous) and the player will not see the bigs for a couple of years at least (except for extremely rare circumstances) if the player makes it there at all, and the 2 million dollar fine is bad but is at a level that can be written off as a business expense, such as paying Bobby Bonilla for not playing for decades if memory serves. No knock on Bonilla, he had a good agent, but fines have to hurt far more than this to be effective enough to be avoided.
rugger9:
Manfred also needed to do something here as a deterrent for other teams or other rogue employees – assuming that is what happened in this matter.