Why on earth would the Cardinals hack the Astros? Adam Crawford isn’t quite sure, but he knows it’s set baseball further from its goal.
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Beneath the Surface is peeling back the layers of this onion we call sports.
Baseball: America’s national past time.
The sport where children go to buy Cracker Jacks, catch foul balls, and sing “Take Me Out To The Ball Game”. At least, it’s the sport where that used to happen. This week the only thing people can associate with baseball are Edward Snowden references.
I’ve been a Cardinal fan all my life. My grandfather took me to my first game the year before Ozzie Smith retired. Smith came out onto the field the first inning and I couldn’t wait for him to do his traditional backflip—he didn’t disappoint.
It wasn’t 1998, but McGwire was still playing and I remember sitting a few sections away from Big Mac Land in the old Busch Stadium, a stadium with more character than any other besides maybe Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park. That game will forever be one of my prized memories, unfortunately, the Cardinals lost in the 16th inning to the Pirates. I was sad but didn’t care all that much, it was a great game.
I’ve followed less and less baseball as I’ve gotten older, but I still keep up with my Cardinals. Baseball’s had a bit of a rough go the last couple decades, it was nearly ruined by the steroid era, and longer game times have killed its T.V. ratings. But I was never concerned with the status of the game, until now.
I’m not sure if it’s because my favorite team is at the middle of this scandal, or because the scandal exists at all, it’s hard to say for sure, but either way I’m almost devastated. I guess is would be like finding out your childhood hero turned out to be a steroid user and he will never get into the hall of fame…
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Corporate Espionage is how the New York Times described it, and I guess that’s right, but why the hell would the Cardinals do that? It’s the Astros! You don’t even need to steal their signs from second base to beat the Astros! I don’t get it.
I didn’t get it until I read the article. The article about Jeff Luhnow, the renowned statistician who applied the “Moneyball” phenomenon to the Cardinals organization from 2003-13. Luhnow is said to have been a polarizing figure for the Cardinals organization, and anytime you’re taking a non-traditional approach to a traditional game, that tends to be the result. Some people will love you and some will hate you.
In 2014 Luhnow left the Cardinals organization after winning two out of the three World Series appearances they’d made under his watch. The team he went to work for? You guessed it—the Astros.
As of right now the F.B.I. is investigating this little act of “espionage”, which brings me to the question of, why is the F.B.I. involved in a sporting squabble?
I understand the official terms and that these front offices are for-profit corporations, therefore, the F.B.I. is required to investigate them as if they were any other corporation (because they are), but in a time where our country has been at war for 14 years, it just seems odd to me that we are spending tax dollars to investigate a professional sporting event over a rivalry among men…
It seems to me this issues could just be handled via some of the citizen judges on Twitter.
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Baseball had almost recovered from its disaster in the early 2000’s when Jose Conseco went all rogue double agent on everyone. It had almost found a way to alter the rules just enough to speed up the game but maintain it’s integrity and allow the rule change to go almost unnoticed. The MLB executives seemed to be trending in the right direction. Now they are dealing with another setback, likely worse than deflate-gate, and something that will tarnish one of it’s treasured organizations, and my favorite team of all time.
It’s sad to think that Mike Matheny will have to deal with all of this for the next three years as the F.B.I. takes it’s sweet time to complete the investigation. I can’t imagine the kind of media distraction this had been for him and his players, who had nothing to do with this, I might add.
We’re in a time where you never know what’s going to happen, whether it be in sports, or in the world. But I’ll admit, baseball was cutting in the right direction, and then like a knuckleball from R.A. Dickey, it dove right out of the strike zone for another at bat down 0-2.
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Photo: Flickr/Bradley Park
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