That stuff is all in the computers too, though. If Steve Scout finds a kid in Buttville High School who looks goddamn amazing and maybe is being overlooked, that’s in there, because he’d have emailed “holy moly this kid’s awesome” back to someone.
That’s valuable information to another team. Not even an MLB team can scout everyone; there aren’t enough scouts. Gathering intelligence from another team’s databases could confer an enormous advantage.
The fact the Astros were bad in 2011 or whatever is obviously irrelevant. Even bad teams have good prospects. The Astros in 2011 had any number of promising young prospects and of course information on many more in colleges, high schools, and foreign teams.
No question that from a strictly legal standpoint, this is a much bigger deal than the Patriots stealing signals or deflating balls. Whether it is a bigger deal from a competitive advantage standpoint I’m not convinced. Of course front-office types think it is, because they think their jobs are rocket science.
But really, what did the Cards gain here other than access to a bunch of scouting reports? Sure, there’s an advantage in getting information without having to pay for it, but if the Cards really thought having lots of scouting reports was the Golden Road (to Unlimited Championships), they could just hire more scouts. (Question: is there data on how much each MLB franchise spends on scouting? If so, it should be easy to see how much correlation that has with winning).
And yeah, they might be able to negotiate trades with the Astros in which they thought that they got a much better deal than they could have without knowing the Astros’ real opinion of the players involved – but they would still have to be right. I’m finding it hard to believe that this information would be likely to translate to more than a small fraction of an extra win per year.
In conclusion, as a Cubs fan, I believe that the appropriate punishment would be for the Cardinals to be relegated to the International League.
I think having access to all of the scouting and internal reports of a team is pretty big. No more pig in a poke buying, and no more overestimating a player’s worth to his home team. You would know how they rate a player, what they would take for him, etc.
It would obviously be even better to have that for more than one team, but if one team is all you have access to, it’s still really valuable.
Another item that was in there besides scouting reports was internal Astros discussion about trades/ potential trades with other teams. In fact it was the leak of those documents a year ago that started the current investigation. That information would give the Cardinals some insight into what players around the league are on the trading block, and also give a sense on how other teams value their players based on negotiations with the Astros. That knowledge could then be used by St. Louis in future trade negotiations.
So now every team in MLB has to figure that if they had any discussion with the Astros in the past few years, the Cardinals know what was discussed.
My hope, as a Cardinals fan, is that this never rose above the level of whichever numbskulls did it. It sounds like the evidence is currently only pointing towards a couple of mid-level folks, so maybe this will prove to be the case.
If the higher-ups in the organization received, kept, or in any way used this information then it’s obviously a very big deal. If it was just some lower level disgruntleds poking around to see if they could sabotage a former boss then as long as the organization reacts swiftly and strongly then I’m not sure it rises to the level of serious organizational malfeasance.
No, that’s not reliably findable. Some teams don’t even list their scouts on the staff part of their websites.
From what I can tell, the average MLB team will have anywhere from 50 to 80 scouts. They are broken into major league scouts, who assess opponents or specifically go to watch players who might be acquired via trade; pro scouts whose job it is to search the minor leagues and assess other teams’ talent bases, and amateur scouts. The amateur scouts, who might not all be full time employees, plus a scouting management staff of ten people or so, are usually assigned areas in which they live, so every team will have a guy based in Georgia, a few in southern California, in the Northeast, western Canada, so on and so forth, plus guys in Latin America. As big a staff as that is, it can’t cover every player; you have a lot of places to go to watch kids play ball. The Blue Jays have one scout listed as based in Ohio, which you may recognize as being a rather large place with many ball-playing teenagers and college students. Someone has to go to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, too. Not all players can be fully scouted in person. It’s just not physically possible.
You can of course hire more scouts. But there comes a point when there simply aren’t enough people who make good scouts. Scouting is itself a skill; you cannot just be a retired baseball player and know how to judge talent. the job doesn’t pay a huge amount and requires some travel, but does require a lot of knowledge. There is a lot of experience and science in understanding if a player’s skill set can translate to professional success, and in recent years the performance expectations on scouts have RALLY ramped up; the “Moneyball” effect has not been to reduce scouting, it’s been to make teams examine, with objective evidence, what scouts are producing. If Smith’s recommendations have gone four years without producing a kid who can get past A ball, Smith’s dumped. But no team could hire 5000 scouts because there just aren’t skilled people to hire in that volume. Most of them would be incompetent, and the noise to signal ratio would be impossible to deal with.
So this sort of thing potentially IS really serious. Quality scouting is a difficult commodity to scale up. If you can just steal another team’s scouting data, well, it’s a huge coup. (That’s on top of the other stuff mentioned - knowing what trade negotiations are in the works and stuff like that.) The Cardinals could now have access to information on a top Venezuelan prospect they otherwise would never have really noticed. Or they’ll know a top prospect they DID notice has a hidden injury or a personal problem, which the Astros are hiding and hoping to dump on someone; now the Cardinals known to avoid trading for that guy, and 28 teams don’t.
I sincerely hope this story turns out to be just a couple of idiots goofing around because if it’s actually a team deliberately hacking… oh, man.
Well, look at it this way. You can jump on the Royals bandwagon now, start voting, and get to see all 8 of the AL all-star starting line-up be your new favorite team!
You are right, it doesn’t have a LOT to do with the story, but you made me go back and double-check the story, and my friend as turns out was President, not CEO, of a non-profit that did this, allegedly. I don’t think his position entitles him to check into co-workers emails.
CEO is interesting case; in a larger company it might be advised they send some sort of investigation request to the IT department if they suspect wrongdoing just to avoid a major lawsuit. I don’t know how the law would apply, to lets say a landscaper who is CEO of his company of 5 employees that share iPhones paid by him/her, for example.
As for draft picks, duly noted thought this would be the case in the NFL.
No matter the details, this could get bad for anyone in the Cards organization caught.
To ride on the coattails of RickJay’s nice post just a bit and addressing the aforementioned Astro’s recent lack of success, they went through a period the last number of years where they’d lost a good GM, Hunsicker, their owner was looking to sell and for a period there was no firm hand on the tiller. Then post sale they embarked on a long term rebuilding program, including all the front office. As evidenced by their current drastic turnaround it’s not that they were making bad scouting or trade decisions before, it’s that they had a different focus in mind and many of those personnel decisions were in fact very astute and well researched. So even when their W/L was low there was real value in the details of the program they constructed.
On Friday, former Cardinals’ scouting director Chris Correa pleaded guilty to unauthorized access of the Astros’ player database. (see hereand here).
Correa was fired last year after word of the hacking broke. The DOJ press releasehas a pretty good description of what Correa admitted. It says no other officials have been charged, but I don’t know if the DOJ considers the case closed or if other charges might be coming out.
One thing that still puzzles me is that some of the data was reported to have wound up on AnonBin. I wonder how it wound up there. Did Correa or someone else in the Cards organization leak it there for some reason? Or did another unrelated hack expose the data coincidentally? Weird.
