Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 695: The Cardinals Face the Feds

Episode Date: June 16, 2015

Ben and Sam banter about Billy Hamilton and discuss the New York Times report about the Cardinals’ involvement in the hacking of the Astros’ internal system.

Hey, watch your steps, don't take the plans away. So, watch all the huggies, ain't nobody's smiling like a, smiling like a Good morning and welcome to episode 695 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspective, brought to you by the Play Index at baseball reference.com where you can get all the baseball information you need without being investigated by the fbi right why hack when you can just work for 30 a year with promo code bp you can get more information

than the astros even had yeah can't Can't get trade talks, but almost everything else. Yeah. And trade talks we know are nonsense. Mm-hmm. All right. So then, hi, Ben. Hi. You're with Grantland, aren't you?

I am. All right. Do you have anything to talk about? You know, we didn't mention that Billy Hamilton played against John Lester. Remember when we were all excited about that happening early in the season and then it didn't happen because Billy Hamilton was scratched and we got a million tweets about it? And it happened this Sunday, Sunday,

and Billy Hamilton stole five bases against the Cubs. Five bases? Three against Lester, I think. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot. So let's see. What's the appropriate fun fact for that more stolen bases than jj hardy has in his career is that a good one i guess that always works is it true it's not true he's got eight oh too bad and there's not unfortunately jj hardy is

an outlier as a guy who has single digitdigit stolen bases but is not considered fat. Let's see. Five stolen bases. I don't know. More than Joe DiMaggio's career high? Ah, it's not. He had six one time. What are we going to do, Ben?

We need a Billy Hamilton fun fact. More than the Tigers season leader or some teams got to have no team with five stolen bases yet, right? You would think so. Who's the best? The Tigers have Anthony Gose. It's not going to be them anymore. Cardinals? The Tigers run now. The Tigers

are leading the majors in stolen bases last time I checked. You're kidding me. Oh, and Kinsler too. Who do they have besides Gose and Kinsler too. Who do they have besides Gross and Kinsler? Iglesias steal? Does he steal bases? Oh, Hayward has six. So the Cardinals have

somebody who has more than five stolen bases. Let me just see if anybody qualifies. Tigers rank third. Tigers rank first in the AL in stolen bases. Who's last? Oh, and Rajai Davis has 14, so that's why. Of course. Last is the Dodgers with 14.

Oh, wait, the Dodgers have 14 stolen bases? Uh-huh. Wow, that's not many at all. But they do have somebody with more than. All right, more than, I got it, Ben. There it is. with more than all right more than i got it ben there it is on sunday billy hamilton stole more bases than the mets season leader that's a poorly phrased but uh if billy you know what i'm saying no hamilton were on the mets he'd be leading them in stolen bases from that one game see that's not

a good way to put it either very Very poorly done. No Met has stolen. The Mets are bad. Wait, no, that's not a good one either. I don't know. Mets are actually very good as well. It's weird to have... What is it? So this year we have the Royals, the Mets, and the Astros are in first place.

Yeah. The Mets and the Astros are in first place. Yeah. Which are the, I mean, I guess the Phillies probably have been punchline here lately. But those are basically the three sweet spot teams we're making fun of as of like two or three years ago. So it's weird. Baseball. Yeah. Baseball.

Yep. So we're going to talk about the Cardinals and the Astros and what they're calling the hacking situation. Yeah, which seems like a generous term for what went on. Not that we know exactly what happened, but based on the way it's described in the New York Times report by Michael S. Schmidt, Times report by Michael S. Schmidt. It doesn't seem like hacking kind of connotes, you know, like some guy writing code in a dark room at night and the computer screen is just scrolling down with numbers and characters and it's very complicated and advanced. And this seems more like a case of not changing passwords. So let's see. How should we introduce this?

We've talked about it twice. Actually, three times. Three times. In a way, this is the fourth time we've addressed this topic. In episode 386, I believe, listener Michael or Matthew, one of the M's. Yeah, one of the Mats. One of the Mats, thank you. One of the Mats emailed us and wanted to know whether we thought in this data-rich age

some team would hack into an opponent's data. And at the time, we were somewhat skeptical. I went back and listened to this, that it would happen. somewhat skeptical, I went back and listened to this, that it would happen. And my point was mainly that teams would generally trust their own information over another team's information. That for the most part, I don't think there's a lot of unique information besides, like you say, the trade rumors, which would be good for gossip, but maybe not necessarily helpful. But there's not a lot of unique information. There's different assessments of information from team to team, and then I think most teams would trust their own assessments

rather than another's. So I said at the time that teams are much more worried about their secrets being stolen than they're actually interested in any other team's secrets, and that a lot of the closed-offness that leads to these proprietary databases is somewhat paranoia. I don't think that there's a huge interest in knowing how another team scouts a player or whatever. But it wasn't a completely comprehensive conversation.

We did talk about some areas where it would be useful. It might be useful to know, for instance, how a team was planning to pitch your players or what their advanced scouting reports said about your players. Although I'm guessing there's not a huge variety there either. You can probably just tell by how the previous team pitched your players, uh, cause it's probably pretty similar from team to team. Um, and ultimately we just decided you decided that you, you said that you thought that the penalty for getting caught would just be probably so onerous that a team wouldn't even risk it. Which is great because like a month ago, we talked about what the penalty would be for hacking into a team system when we did the pretend you're the commissioner and you caught a guy cheating episode. And at that time, when asked what the penalty would be

if you were caught hacking into your opponent's database, you said a fine. A fine. Nobody would do it because they might get fined. A big fine, though. Okay, you didn't say a big fine. I think I did. And we had a relatively long discussion about how a team could be discouraged from doing this

and determined that it's kind of difficult. There's not a lot of good penalties available, particularly for front office misdeeds other than fines. This was when I suggested the one player has to play in jeans penalty. But we ultimately didn't know what a good penalty was. It was a suspension of the GM for a year if the GM was implicated. Draft picks was mentioned. And so that is still an outstanding issue. These are both still outstanding issues.

How likely is a team to do it and or what would a team gain? And what would the penalty be? And then in the middle, we talked about the Astros ground control information being leaked publicly. information being leaked publicly and we now seem to know that that was the result of somebody at least uh somebody in the cardinals system and not just generic dude on the internet uh finding this so allegedly allegedly yesterday we talked about the the smashouth frontman meltdown, and throughout the day when I went to Facebook, the side of the thing, the Facebook news feed, kept saying Smash Mouth frontman allegedly goes off on crowd after having bread thrown at him.

There were hundreds of eyewitnesses. It's a very distinctive guy, the guy who was holding the microphone at the Smash Mouth concert. Ben, I'm going to defend those headline writers. We can't say for sure that that wasn't Sugar Ray. That's true. They often tour together. All right. That's a good joke. Good joke. Good joke alert. All right. So anyway, let's first, I don't know how you want to talk about this.

All right. So anyway, let's first, I don't know how you want to talk about this. First, though, let's talk about whether this fits into our first episode when we talked about a team doing this. It does to suggest that these were disgruntled former co-workers of Jeff Lunau, who maybe were annoyed that Lunau had taken information that he had worked on or someone had worked on while he was with the Cardinals and was applying it with the Astros. And they were, I don't know, looking to see whether he did that or get back at him somehow. The way that the New York Times report is phrased, it sounds more like revenge or just fishing than actual an attempt to find out something that the Astros were doing so that the cardinals could apply what they were doing it was more like the opposite i guess to see if the if the estrus were using stuff that the cardinals had but we don't know all the details we don't and you could even you could even conjure up a more innocent narrative that this was essentially like a prank or, you know, relatively immature behavior that was intended to kind of embarrass

or, you know, you're bored. I mean, the fact that, I don't know, the, the, the most, it seems to me that just knowing how humans are, like I can see the temptation. Like when I, for instance, everybody has left a job and had, you know had various passwords at the job that you were at. And I think a lot of people at some point have tested to see whether those passwords still worked. I've done it. Yeah, you've done it? Uh-huh. Ben?

Uh-huh. then is there anything you that i'm going to find if i start i've looked into uh site activity no my baseball perspective password still works so for instance i know somebody who is at the register and then left and then a couple years later it was like oh man this article that i wrote is still the first thing on my google results or it's pretty high on my google results and so just went in back into the system you could call it fbi could call it a hack and deleted the article and so there's that sort of thing there's uh i one time had a friend whose email I was able to access. And because I was 19, every once in a while,

I would go in and change her email settings so that they would be absurd to work with. And so you do that sort of thing. And that's fairly innocent. Not what you want your grown adult employees doing, obviously, but fairly innocent. And so I think you can definitely conjure up a narrative where this is like, dude, I bet we could figure out Jeff's password and do this. Now, the fact that they then allegedly, presumably might have appeared have perhaps uh leaked it to deadspin elevates it right yeah or leaked it somewhere put it somewhere that someone else leaked it yeah yeah leaked it somewhere that someone else leaked it so anyway the point is that our initial

discussion about using this access for a competitive advantage, the fact that that's not really even seen as a particular issue here kind of confirms what we were saying, right? That they didn't, I mean, that nobody's, in that New York Times article, a large issue is not made of the potential competitive edge that the Cardinals got or could have got right you're reading your reading of that article is as mine was that it pretty pretty much glossed over that aspect of it it did yeah this would be like if a guy was caught doing um you know steroids and but you find out that he just likes the feeling of steroids like steroids make him kind of high.

And nobody thinks that steroid works, that it's just placebo anyway. Right? A little bit. Perfectly relatable analogy. Necessary. My point wasn't clear, but now that I've made up the steroid that gets you high but only works as a placebo example, everybody understands it. So that's one thing. I mean, it remains the case that in this modern era, clubs are collecting massive, massive troves of data and putting them in a central location that through either lazy hacking or sophisticated hacking is probably available to a team that wants it enough. And yet I still feel like the best answer that we have is that this data is not all that useful.

Yeah, maybe that could be. I mean, I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't be useful to the Cardinals. It seems like there are teams that, you know, for some teams having access to another team's entire system would be valuable. Just, I mean, there are data sources that some teams use that other teams probably don't use or things that they put on their site.

I mean, having seen one of those internal systems, there's a lot of useful information on there if you don't know anything yourself already. So it just kind of depends how sophisticated your own team is, really. And maybe the Cardinals are very sophisticated, and maybe they didn't get a whole lot of it out of it. And maybe Lunau was still kind of drawing on what he had known with the Cardinals at that point with the Astros. And so maybe there wasn't all that much new and useful yet. But I still think there would be enough to justify it if you could get away with it. There's enough incentive to try.

Okay, Ben, let's do a little thought experiment. You're a major league team. You have hacked into, it can be the Astros, it can be a different team if you want, some team's system. What are you going for? You have five minutes. You're in the grocery store shopping spree and you're just funneling things into your shopping cart. What are you going for? Give me your, say your top five things you're looking for. Well, if it's like a division rival, I would probably go for the advanced scouting reports on my own hitters. You play them, you know, 19 times a year or whatever it is and can see what their strategy is.

And that would probably be useful. So that's probably the first thing I do, assuming I play them a bunch of times a year. probably the first thing I do, assuming I play them a bunch of times a year, I would go to just a player card and see what's on there, basically. See if they're looking at stats that we're not looking at. If there's anything there I don't understand. The problem is if there is something I don't understand, I only have five minutes to look at it and I'm not going to figure it out in that time or figure out how it's calculated in that time. But it would be useful at least to see what stats that team considers useful and what they look at. I'm going to let you take some of this stuff with you.

You have five minutes to collect. Okay. Well, I just go around snapping screenshots of everything then. Oh, so you'd be a screenshotter. You'd just be getting screen grabs to see what their thought process was yeah right if i could if i could the information the information itself is irrelevant to you you just want to know what information they're collecting well if i could screen grab or export the scouting reports i would do that first probably but otherwise i would just

go around and see what's there, basically. Because in five minutes, you don't have much time to analyze it. But if you get pictures of everything, then you can go over it later. So I think that I would want scouting reports on my own players would be one. I would want all of their player development assessments of their own players. Like that, that would actually be number one one the first thing i would probably do and and that sort of goes to the point i mean we know that teams have an advantage in uh assessing their own prospects than other teams have in assessing those that team's prospects yeah but it's not like it's not like pendants are generally won or lost on this information and you. And you get into this proprietary system

and all you get is one team's assessments of their own prospects, the overwhelming majority of which you'll never be in a position to acquire or make any use of. That feels like pretty low return on this. So maybe that's not number one. But I would probably want that.

I would want scouting reports on my own team, like the advanced scouting, anything that would go into advanced scouting. And then I would want all the trade talk, 90% for gossip reasons and maybe 8% for usefulness reasons and then 2% for useful gossip reasons, like to feed it to reporters, basically, in exchange for them. Like maybe it would have a more – that would be maybe the equivalent of having unlimited wishes. If you had unlimited gossip, you might be able to get unlimited gossip back for it, and I would like the gossip. But there's not – yeah, there's still not a lot. But there's still not a lot. Maybe I just... I don't know if I have a bad imagination here or if I don't know what's in these systems well enough. Well, it depends.

There could be reports that you never would have known existed. I mean, going back a few years, if you had gotten into some system that had a framing report or whatever, then you get the framing report. And you know that that's an important thing or that the team considers it an important thing. Maybe you weren't even thinking about that. So there could be other stuff. I mean, maybe some team has a StatCast report up and working now, and other teams haven't gotten that together enough to produce that sort of thing yet.

So maybe you can see how they're using that data and what kind of reports they're generating from it and who's good at those things that they value. And that would be maybe useful as you try to replicate it in your own system. You're probably more optimistic than I am about various teams having clear edges on this. I mean, I would figure I would already have my own guys working on this,

and I wouldn't expect their guys to be that much ahead. And, I mean, yeah, you could luck into that. You could hit just the right team at just the right time. And I guess if you had constant access to all 29 other teams, then you would assuredly have that. Although then you'd have, A, you'd have a lot of staff work, probably staff time just spying, which is probably worthwhile. I mean, how much do you have to pay a guy to spy on major league teams? How much could you charge a guy to be that? Yeah, people would do that for free, for sure.

They definitely would. So maybe that's not an issue. But, you know, you'd have to replicate everything to figure out if they were doing it all right. So, yeah, I see what you mean. I just don't know how much there is of that that really differentiates one team from another. I mean, if you had the access to, if you weren't the Cardinals, the Astros amateur scouting database to be extremely important, but the Cardinals already basically had that, right? I mean, that's what... They were checking to see if that was the case, maybe. that right i mean that's what they were checking to see if that was the case maybe yeah so if you were any other team that would be huge yeah although you'd still have to figure out how to apply it just because you have whatever spreadsheet the cardinals have doesn't mean that you'd be the

guy who drafts trevor rosenthal and converts him to a relief ace or drafts matt carpenter i mean there's a lot of ways to probably read that spreadsheet. Download a copy of The Cardinal's Way with the new section on corporate espionage. Uh-huh. You could. Yeah. All right. Well, so I guess two questions remain. One, obviously, we don't really know what's going on here yet, but do you have any different opinion about what the punishment should be? What did they say at the time that just fines and whoever did it should be fired or suspended or something? I think that, yeah. team to do it would probably have a lighter penalty just because i mean i guess you know there are actual laws that the fbi is investigating this for a reason and so they could is this against the law really to type in a guy's password it seems like it shouldn't be right

craig kakutera wrote about it and uh he seems to think that it would be a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. I almost don't want a penalty. I mean, we are a sport that celebrates sign stealing. And I just don't feel like the—this is precedent setting. The reason that we celebrate sign stealing is that somewhere along the line, the precedent was established that it was gamesmanship and not super serious. And we get to decide, not we, not you and me, but the sport gets to decide right now whether this is going to be a wrinkle in the sport that makes it interesting and adds a level

of subterfuge to it, or whether we're just going to penalize people in the smithereens whenever they try it. And you can make the case for either one. But, I mean, it's not – I've gone back and forth throughout the morning. But it doesn't seem super serious to me. Oh, it does. It does seem serious. Right? I mean, you don't want people hacking.

What if they hacked in and, like, leaked – like, did a Sony thing and leaked out? Like, you don't want to live life no thinking that all your stuff is going to be on deadspin it's you know what it is i'm going to say that it's it's it's just mean like that's what it was this was not a cheating thing i don't even think baseball should take care of it i don't know who should take care of it god i'm not sure the fbi i guess the fbi but it doesn't feel like a big legal thing it doesn't feel like a big competitive thing it feels really mean like this is mean stuff to leak it more than anything the crime is just like hey these guys have the same job that you have and what you're doing is like pretty small and mean and makes everybody uncomfortable and in a way is self-destructive

because now you're going to be worried that everybody's going to leak your emails. So you should have thought of that. Do you think about that, Scott? And so that's probably what – I don't know. I don't know the appropriate response. But to me it feels more like a cultural thing or an etiquette thing than a cheating thing. What would the motivation be for leaking anyway just to show that the Astros can be hacked? It's not like there was anything super embarrassing in it.

I don't know. Wait, who did they ask for for Lucas Harrell? Yeah, right. So they did have some strange trade proposals that they seemed to be asking a lot. But it wasn't really embarrassing to the astros other than the fact that they did have their security breached so maybe that's the whole thing and maybe the leak was just a mistake because you'd think that if you did this reportedly from your home which is not smart probably then you wouldn't want to put it all on the internet for people to see because something like an FBI investigation could happen.

Is breaking in actually its own reward? Is the fact that there's not really any particularly great information that you're going to get secondary to the fact that by doing this and doing it publicly, you make it harder for the Astros to operate in good faith with the other 29 teams. You make it maybe harder for them to work with agents and teams to get the players they want, and you kind of slow them down because now they can't rely on their supposedly impenetrable system anymore. And like Jeff Luno said the day of, he said, well, I'm going to be taking notes on pencil

and paper now instead of this. I wonder if the disruption, if you create this kind of, if creating the paranoia is itself more valuable than anything you'd get out of it. Yeah, that could be. So yeah, it's hard to, we got a listener email, an email from Andrew, who pointed out that the only real analog that he could think of in the sporting world was the 2007 Formula One espionage confidential technical information about cars from the Ferrari team. And they were fined. They were banned for some from some Formula One championship. And they were fined $100 million, which is a lot.

It's like six figures per page of document that they got from this. So I can't imagine any kind of harsh penalty like that you would you would think that if it is found to be just one or more lower level front office employees with no clear directive from the top just someone with a grudge, that those people would be fired and fined and possibly face some harsher legal penalty, but that it wouldn't really extend to the Cardinals most likely. I don't know how you would extend it to the Cardinals. This is what we talked about. It's kind of hard to punish a team for something that the front office does you could you could i don't know take away

draft picks or take away draft pick money or revenue sharing or i don't know what but you could do those things but it seems unlikely that that would happen to the first offender which is why we talked at the time about how the first team to do this and get away with it would probably get a a lighter penalty than the second team to try it a few minutes ago i might have given the uh i might have uh implied that i was not against this and the more i say here the more i'm i'm unambivalently against this i've decided it's not cool yeah i would agree with that i i would agree with it too okay was there a second question you were going to ask me penalty and oh uh will will this happen again in a

more serious way that where do you do you expect this issue to arise once again and when it does do you expect it to be along competitive lines yes i agree when how when how long how long until we live in a world where uh we're all all baseball teams are like those two companies in that movie with clive owen and julia roberts you know do you know the one duplicity oh yeah no I didn't know. How long until that? Well, I bet that we're going to live in a world as of today where people change their passwords when they change teams, which is a nice initial step.

Probably should have been taken before. But I think we'll see it in the next decade. We'll see something else. I mean, if you're really sophisticated about it, then it might be happening and we'll never know about it. You would, if the Cardinals had done this and had not leaked it, right? Like if they had not leaked it, then we would not know about this. They could have logged in with Jeff Luno's password or whatever it was and poked around a bit and left and that would have been it. We never would have known about it. They wouldn't have flagged it as being accessed from some other IP. You probably have people

in the Astor's front office accessing it from the road all the time. So they wouldn't have known. So a team that's really using this for a competitive advantage would probably be more careful and sophisticated about it and would not leak it and would not do it from home. So very well might have happened. I mean, it has to have happened, right? Like there's so much movement among front offices. I mean, interns, interns interns moving there are interns who work

for four or five teams before they get a job or give up you'd think that it has happened at some point and some of those interns end up at bp where they have not given me any of this i'm not i'm not happy about that yeah i if only we had access to every team's internal database, we would know which ones had hacked. Because they probably have a big memo in there about all their hacking activities. Results of hacking. So yeah, I'm guessing it has happened, might be happening, will happen again. And if you did it well, then no one would know probably. Well, yeah, in this case, certainly.

I mean, in most cases, you might have to do something that actually qualifies as hacking for a lot of teams. But in this case, yeah. I wonder how many, okay, do you think that any of the other 28 teams also knew about and had access to the Astros ground control? Like, do you think word got out? Was this a known secret in baseball that you could get into Luna's email? Or do you think that it really was limited to one front office and maybe two guys in this front office? I guess limited.

I guess limited. All right. Sounds good. Okay. All right. Well, it's probably the best example of a weird thing happening shortly after we talked about it which happens a lot i guess a lot of things happen and we talk a lot so you'd think that a lot of things that we talked about would

happen but this is one of the strangest coincidences quickly following a podcast about this very topic. Okay, so that is it. You can send us emails or we can just pack your email accounts and take your email drafts that you were planning to send us at podcast at baseballperspectives.com. You can support our podcast by supporting our sponsor, the Play Index, but going to baseball reference.com using the coupon code BP and getting the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription with no risk of legal prosecution. And you can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild.

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