Punishment for Cardinals could be harsher, but message sent
The St. Louis Cardinals were forced to give two draft picks and $2 million to the Houston Astros, but did the punishment fit the crime?
In the century-plus that Major League Baseball has existed, the old adage, “if you ain’t cheatin, you ain’t tryin,” has loosely served as the sport’s moral code. From sign stealing, strategically-placed binoculars and radios in the stands, piped-in crowd noise, allegations about funny business with the air conditioning or roof of domed stadiums, all the way to PEDs and corked bats, players, teams, and managers have been doing whatever they can to gain an advantage.
Christopher Correa, a former director of scouting with the St. Louis Cardinals, took all of those archaic ways to cheat and flipped them on their ear by systematically hacking into proprietary data compiled by the Houston Astros. The hack by Correa was the first of its kind in baseball history, but it may not be the last as shadowy hackers seemingly loom over every aspect of our lives.
Correa is already in jail for his part in the hacking scandal, but the Cardinals had not yet been punished for the actions of their rogue employee. MLB handed down a bevy of sanctions Monday afternoon, taking two draft picks from St. Louis and giving them to the Astros. Additionally, the Cardinals must pay $2 million to Houston. The draft picks (56th and 75th) will also carry over the associated bonus pool money to the Astros. The $2-million fine is the maximum allowed by the CBA.
On the surface, the punishment seems exceedingly lenient. None of this will impact the Cardinals for the 2017 season, and perhaps not even in 2018. The 56th pick and 75th pick are not guaranteed to blossom into superstars or even replacement-level players. The Cardinals will not be prohibited from making their usual signings internationally. When the Boston Red Sox were found guilty of manipulating the bonuses of international prospects last year, they lost all five prospects tied to the scandal and will not be allowed to sign international free agents for an entire year. That is a much harsher punishment in terms of long-term impact on a farm system.
A fine of $2 million is a drop in the ocean to a stable MLB team with billionaire owners like the Cardinals. Losing two picks will hardly serve to slow down the well-oiled machine that is up and running in St. Louis. The Cardinals pride themselves on player development, and have been able to turn more than a few late-round picks into contributing players. All-Star Matt Carpenter, for example, was a 13th-round pick. If anything, taking the burden of scouting top-100 players away will only make it easier for the Cardinals to identify the diamonds in the rough in the 10th round and beyond.
From the jump, it was assumed that the punishment for the Cards would include some loss of draft picks and a fine. The lost picks could have been carried over for more than one year, but the impact of the crime was very low relatively speaking and did not impact games on the field. An extremely Draconian measure like stripping St. Louis of a year’s worth of draft picks would take away opportunities in the game for potential draft picks and place undue stress on the players already in the farm system.
MLB could have come down harder on the Cardinals to send a message, but a precedent-setting ruling as this was rarely throws the entire book at an offender. Had the league taken away five years worth of first-round picks from the Cardinals, for example, there would be little room for upping the ante if a team takes hacking to another, more nefarious level where games are actually affected. It remains unclear whether the Cardinals benefited from Correa’s rogue actions at all. The New England Patriots came away relatively unscathed after Spygate, but were taken to the woodshed for Deflategate, their second major offense. The Cardinals, or whichever team commits the next offense, will likely see a harsher punishment.
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With increased reliance on analytics, big data, and sabermetrics in scouting, the St. Louis Cardinals will not be the last team to find themselves embroiled in a hacking scandal. Industrious teams will find their way into the databases of other teams in the future, just as runners on second base have been relaying signs to the dugout for years. A willingness to seek out marginal advantages —-no matter how non-existent or perceived they may be– has always been a part of the game of baseball. The Cardinals are the first team to test the Commissioner with cyberhacking, and his response showed the league will take the crime serious. The ground-floor punishment has been set high enough that the rest of the league will not be rushing off to Russia to speak to Putin’s best men, and that was the main point of the seemingly-weak sanctions against the Cardinals.