News broke this past Tuesday morning of an alleged plot by front office staff members of the St. Louis Cardinals to hack into the player personnel database of the Houston Astros. Potentially stealing pertinent information on player statistics, salaries, trade secrets, and other proprietary information, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (F.B.I.) has now issued subpoenas to team officials and to representatives of Major League Baseball itself. No word has been given as to a timetable of this this investigation, but legal and media experts expect this to take several months to be resolved. Many important hard copy files, computer files, and hard drives have already been seized by the federal government from the Cardinals’ organization.
This latest baseball scandal, which have many now proclaiming the Cardinals’ organization to be the “New England Patriots of Baseball,” centers greatly around Houston Astros GM, Jeff Lunhow. He was, after all, a key linchpin of the Cardinals’ scouting department that led the team to another World Series championship in 2011. Many folks that were working in the front office with him, however, saw Lunhow as a supposed “polarizing” figure. One of the biggest clues surrounding this mystery is that Lunhow may have used similar passwords when player personnel files kept in the Cardinals’ organization were labeled as “The Red Bird’s Nest,” and similarly, may have triggered the name “Ground Control” for Astros’ player personnel files. Another possibility is that some that worked with Lunhow in the Cardinals’ front office, that are still presently employed by the organization, were attempting to seek revenge against him by going through an assortment of old passwords that could break into the Astros’ player personnel files and steal the pertinent information for trade secrets, farm system drafting, player stats and salaries, etc.
In the midst of all of this, the Astros do not have any right to sue the Cardinals for any wrong doing, as commissioner Rob Manfred pointed out in a press conference on Wednesday. Rather, both teams would have to wait for the investigation to be over before any and all punishment, should any be warranted, be dished out. This means that Manfred himself would be the only one in all of Major League Baseball to exercise any kind of punishment deemed to fit the crime, outside of what the feds charge the guilty party with. For this particular case, however, corporate espionage and cyber trespassing are some pretty big crimes for any organization to have to answer for.
So what could the fantasy impact from this scandal be? It’s not expected to be very much. This presents the Cardinals and its players a new set of questions it will be required to answer until the issue is resolved. You would think that impact would be minimal. The team itself could face fines and it’s not out of the question that there are implications when it comes to drafting and international salaries available moving forward.
James Zeankowski is a correspondent at FantasyPros. To read more from James, check out his archive and follow him @tvwizard85.