Baseball Team Hacks Another Team's Networks, FBI Investigates

An anonymous reader writes: The St. Louis Cardinals have been one of the better baseball teams over the past several years. The Houston Astros have been one of the worst. Nevertheless, there is evidence that officials for the Cardinals broke into a network maintained by the Astros in order to gain access to "internal discussions about trades, proprietary statistics, and scouting reports." The FBI is now leading an investigation into the breach, and they have served subpoenas to the Cardinals and to Major League Baseball demanding access to electronic correspondence. It's the first known instance of corporate espionage involving a network breach in professional sports. Law enforcement said the intrusion "did not appear to be sophisticated." It seems likely that a personal vendetta against the Astros's general manager is involved.

Comments

Learned from the Patriots

[Anonymous Coward]

Cheating is OK when the reward is championships and the penalty is a wrist slap.

MLB is little more than a corporation anyway

[QuietLagoon]

MLB stopped being a sport years ago.

.
So chalk it up to corporate espionage. Inept corporate espionage, but corporate espionage nonetheless.

Smart Sports

[jimbolauski]

There is science and innovation around all sports, you just have to be bright enough to notice it. Take baseball the batter has to be smart enough to know that the pitcher only throws certain pitches during certain counts and that there are slight differences in the release of different pitches giving the batter a better chance to hit the ball. Same with football you need to have excellent pattern recognition to know what the defense is going to do and what you can do to maximize your teams chance at success. Even something as simple as running has tons of science in it, knowing how hard to train, what type of training, and how fast the person can recover. I didn't even mention the science that goes into clothing and shoes. There are very few dumb jocks that succeed in professional sports, talent alone will not get you to the professional level you need something more.