[NY Times] Cardinals under FBI investigation for hacking Astros

On a related question, you think we're above-board in our international dealings? FBI is investigating, right? I think the Braves are mentioned.

 

At this point none of the press has us involved in the investigation, for whatever that means.

 

Above-board as in following every MLB rule, doubtful as I expect most teams do what is practical over letter of the MLB rules. Basically, I expect Baltimore may be only by the book team on international dealings. I think Astros probably follow the rules as much as most teams without egregious moves like the Braves.

 

It's the MLB that should set stricter guidelines. We're dealing mostly with minors here, make sure they're not exploited. I would require some sort of schooling like a baseball academy per country (classes + baseball). The teams could pool their resources to set these up or subsidize them.

I know they recruit directly. That's how we found Framber Valdez. On the last stop of the last trip of the Astros scout, they almost forgot about him. So a certain number of slots for direct recruits can be given per team; the rest go into the international draft.

 

This has been a real thing for a very, very long time.

What teams are getting better at is "americanizing" them once they move to Florida. It's a whole new world. How do you eat? How do you shop? How do you...etc....? Integrating the Caribbean kids with the US youngsters is a win-win for both. Ask Bregman.

 

Until they come up against the cultural differences.

 

I wouldn't call either of those moves "bold." In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to name a "bold" move - maybe Correa when he wasn't the consensus first overall pick? Or how he exploited the slot money dynamics of the draft? They accelerated use of the shift - but didn't invent it. They haven't (yet) adopted tandem starting (MLB) or the opener strategy.

Not a knock, at all - I think just Luhnow has mostly built the team on a serious of smaller (Morton, Gonzalez, Gattis) or reasonably sound decisions (Verlander, Cole).

The baseball hall of fame doesn't induct too many GMs. Schuerholz & Gillick, recently. I think Theo Epstein is a lock. If this run can be maximized, and you factor in the impact he had on the Cardinals..... Luhnow could be a very viable candidate when all is said and done.

 

But he wasn’t the GM there. And he was never going to be the GM or chief of baseball operations there. He was never going to have full control of the Cardinals, hence pretty much any other job that did so was going to be more attractive.

The Astros ownership group had amazing foresight to targeting a guy like Luhnow... but lets not act like Luhnow was being courted by a lot of teams, including the Cardinals, to stay.

On the flip side, even if there was another organization that wasn’t looking to fully integrate analytics yet... if they’re handing over full control to him, he’s taking that job.

I also think his more bolder moves included not moving Keuchel/Altuve/Springer (when pretty much every other member of the old regime, draft picks included, were dealt or cut).... but again, he would be the first to admit that there’s a helluva lot of luck involved with those sorts of foresight moves. Absolutely nobody was expecting Altuve to blossom to this... including Jose and Jeff alike, otherwise there would never have been a chance to lock him into that low extension.

 

[...]

He believed Luhnow and Mejdal had taken proprietary data and algorithms with them, which he and his colleagues had spent thousands of hours to help develop. On the fateful, unremembered day on which he first pecked Mejdal's old password into the Astros' email server—where he found more passwords that gave him unfettered access to Houston's new database—he believed he found evidence of his suspicions.

Over the next several years, Correa insists that he found more and more evidence, although he will not specify what that was. While he knew what he was doing wasn't right, he never thought that it could be a crime. "It was all in the context of a game, to me," he says. "When a pitcher throws at a batter's chest, nobody runs to the local authorities and tries to file an assault charge. I'm not making excuses. I'm trying to explain where my head was at, as I now understand it. If another team does something wrong, you retaliate. That's the lens through which I mistakenly viewed it, and I used that to give myself permission. It was wrong."

[...]

He and his lawyer, David Adler, agreed to the plea deal for two reasons: "One, I was guilty. Two, I wanted to accept responsibility as soon as possible so I could move on with my life, whatever that meant."

[...]

"This is a serious federal crime," U.S. Attorney Kenneth Magidson told the media. "It involves computer crime, cybercrime. We in the U.S. Attorney's office look to all crimes that are being committed by computers to gain an unfair advantage .... This is a very serious offense, and obviously the court saw it as well."

Really? thought Correa. I'm the big criminal mastermind you're proud to nab? Even so, he found some comfort in finally knowing what his future held. "Having the ability to say, 'O.K., I'm going to do my time, I'll get out in 2019 or whatever and then come up with a plan for rebuilding my life,' that's actually a relief," he says.

[...]

Nine months later, when the Astros won the World Series, he didn't feel much of anything. "I'm happy for those guys, but obviously it's kind of a mixed history with the organization," he says. "Not happy about the way they went about some things, but I'm not resentful." (Says Astros general counsel Giles Kibbe: "We have always maintained that the Astros did nothing improper. The FBI and MLB have both extensively looked into Mr. Correa's actions. Neither have said that the Astros did anything improper. What is clear from the proven facts is that Mr. Correa unlawfully intruded into our system.")

Correa felt he had moved past rancor toward not only the Astros but also Major League Baseball, and even St. Louis. While it has always been difficult to believe that no one else within the Cardinals at least knew what Correa had been up to, investigators didn't identify a co-conspirator, and only Correa was individually punished. ("The breach of the Astros' database was thoroughly investigated by the FBI, by Major League Baseball and through our own internal investigation," says Mike Whittle, the Cardinals' general counsel. "All three of those investigations concluded that the breach of the Astros' database was isolated to a single individual.") But Correa no longer has the desire to relitigate who had done what. "What I've endured, I'm not going to wish on anyone," he says. "Nobody I know is a bad enough person."

He didn't watch an inning of the Astros' championship run, for a few reasons. "There are TVs, but the population is young and diverse, which is not exactly baseball's key demographic," Correa says. "I'm not going to fight to change the channel." As someone who had regularly stood close enough to the cage at Busch Stadium to hear bats whistle, he found it unsatisfying to follow the game through newspaper box scores and periodic updates from friends.

Correa has also narrowed his focuses to the things that really matter to him. Even though pro baseball isn't among them he still wants to reach a deeper understanding of why he acted as he did when he worked in the game. He has thought a lot about Immanuel Kant's categorial imperative, which removes context from any assessment of moral obligation; what's wrong is always wrong, no matter the circumstances. "What was really surreal to me was when I stood back and recognized how essentially disrespectful my behavior was of the people whose privacy I violated," Correa says.

He stops short of imagining precisely what his future might look like. He has considered resuming his doctoral studies, but under terms of his plea bargain he is expected to find a job to continue to pay off the nearly $280,000 he owes the Astros—a challenge for any convicted felon, even one with Correa's intelligence and experience. He would like to figure out a way to direct his skills, particularly in education and data analysis, to reforming a criminal justice system he now knows from the inside.

"Applying my skill set to baseball was interesting in a lot of ways, but probably one of the more unsatisfying parts of it is that baseball's a zero sum game," he says. "If I did my job really well, all that meant is I helped my team win a few more games, and that some other team lost some games. I'm not really adding a lot. If I were to apply some of my skills to a civic-minded organization, that would be an opportunity to actually contribute something positive to the world without necessarily taking something from someone else."

Everyone in baseball has now moved on from him, anyway. The Astros are embarking upon their second consecutive postseason, and the Cardinals narrowly missed the playoffs. Correa himself will move forward sooner than he once expected. Due to a combination of good behavior and programming, his 46-month sentence has been reduced. On July 5th he was transferred to a halfway house in Washington. He is now on home confinement, which means that he spends nights at home, with his wife, but must otherwise be at the halfway house or at his job—a temp position in which he performs administrative office work for 40 hours a week. If all goes right, he will receive his supervised release on Dec. 31. Like every inmate, he will have to persuade society not to define him by the worst thing he ever did.

"Every day I'm getting closer," he says. "I hope someone's willing to give me a chance."​