Better
http://grantland.com/the-triangle/2015-mlb-st-louis-cardinals-houston-astros-fbi-hacking-investigation/
4. This is the opposite of a normal baseball scandal: It actually matters from a legal perspective.
Unlike the congressional hearings on steroids 10 years ago, the government’s involvement here isn’t federal overreach. Much as we all like to think that pro sports exist in their own legal bubble, this alleged breach will be considered corporate espionage if proved. It’s the kind of invasion that, if one government did it to another, would constitute an act of aggression. And while ESPN legal analyst Lester Munson
seems to think the breach will remain in the bubble of sports, NBC’s Craig Calcaterra, himself a lawyer, notes that whoever broke into the Astros’ system could be charged
with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. We know about the leak of internal discussions from Houston’s network, called
Ground Control, last year, but what if more sensitive information got out? Proprietary data or statistical models? Medical data on players? That’s no-longer-joking-around territory.
5. Those stakes are going to make it tough to get some intern or IT guy to take the fall.
We don’t yet know who in the Cardinals organization actually infiltrated Ground Control, whether GM John Mozeliak knew about the breach at any point, or if he or someone else we’ve heard of actually ordered it. Baseball-Reference’s Sean Forman
posited that the rogue-low-level-employee theory might actually be the most likely scenario, while Yahoo’s Jeff Passan
finds it harder to believe that upper management didn’t actually know about this. I have no idea which is the case.
Ordinarily, we’d expect someone relatively low on the food chain to take the fall for this. But if the Cardinals have to deal with Johnny Law instead of just MLB, which has an obvious PR and financial incentive to minimize this story, it’ll be more difficult to get an intern or an analyst to roll over and take jail time to save his boss. I’d sell out my boss in a second under those circumstances, and so would most of you.
While all of that is extremely serious, though, it’s not unamusing to picture some 24-year-old database analyst seated at an aluminum table in a room with one bare lightbulb, telling federal agents that he’d rather die than talk. Just because investigators say the Cardinals committed egregious violations of both ethical and legal standards doesn’t mean we can’t write cheesy noir dialogue along the way.