Betts acknowledged that Boston used their sign-stealing scheme infrequently.

“Every now and … It’s kind of hard to remember,” Betts noted.

See? No big deal. Nothing really. Move along.

It's fine for him to own up, but he should be taking great pains to distinguish the difference between what everyone else was doing and what the Astros did. All teams were using video before the game to decipher signs. A few teams were finding a way into video room during games to update their knowledge if the opposing team changed signs.

The Astros were signaling pitches from the dugout in real time.

The first part is fair game. The second part needed to be banned (and has been) and the third part is outright cheating.

Speaking of cheating, Drellich had a lot section in his book confirming that the Astros stole a bunch of stuff from the Cardinals and that Correa was essentially correct in his assertion (which doesn't make his subsequent break in to the Astros system any better).

Key elements from an article today in Stl paper


"As far as I know, no one every breached the Cardinals database or performed any criminal act,” an Astros employee tells Drellich, now a senior writer for The Athletic. “But there was a lot of bad (gunk) that would get people who currently have jobs in baseball fired. It would probably also vindicate (Chris) Correa a little bit.”

Within “Winning Fixes Everything,” Drellich describes a PowerPoint presentation made to the “core” of the Astros’ front office in September 2015, a few months after the revelation a Cardinals executive was behind the hacking. The presentation centered on draft advantages Luhnow and Sig Mejdal had helped create for the Cardinals and also how the industry was catching up. Drellich quotes an executive who attended the presentation and says it included “internal draft valuations the Cardinals” made. One example given was how the Cardinals rated Allen Craig, a future All-Star, as the seventh-best player available in the 2006 draft but got him in the eighth round. In 2009, the Cardinals famously saw a slugging catcher from Slippery Rock as the 17th-best player in the draft but got Matt Adams in the 23rd round. Where each player was taken in the draft was obviously public, but the Cardinals internal rankings had not been.

The Post-Dispatch reported in January 2017 that a defense motion was made to access Houston’s internal emails that referenced “Girsch” and “PV,” a reference to Cardinals general manager Michael Girsch and the value metric he helped develop and was used internally by the Cardinals. The motion also requested emails with the words “Leveque” and “mechanics” – references to Cardinals pitching coordinator Tim Leveque and his extensive studies on pitching mechanics.

Drellich’s reporting confirms Houston had Leveque’s “biomechanics grades.”

How does the excerpt in #3 demonstrate hacking, rather than just using the knowledge former employees obtained during their prior employment?

Just infrequently... as a treat...

It's ridiculous to think that anyone is guided by some sense of chivalry or code of honor once they decide to cheat at baseball. The decision to use a cheating scheme like that of the Astros or the more limited ones used by other teams was driven by cost and benefit, risk and reward. The Astros scheme gave them greater coverage but came with significant liabilities (which they would eventually learn about the hard way). Using a baserunner scheme was not obviously distinguishable from naked eye sign stealing. But the Astros scheme produced anomalous signals that couldn't be explained away or confused for anything else. These signals could be decoded by the opposition, who could basically steal back their own signs and adjust their codes as needed. (The cheaters' signal code has to be stupidly simple because they have only seconds to react.) It also created a record of suspicious activity that could be used against them in event of an official complaint. This was a particular problem for the Astros because the bang signals left a clear trace in game film, but even visual signals would be a problem in an era where teams were filming everything obsessively, not just the action on the field (think about the controversy over teams filming the opposing dugout during the 2018 ALDS). "Why is the hitter watching that guy standing by the tunnel instead of the third base coach? And why does that guy always touch his chin when it's a fastball?"

But, no, it's just that teams Playing The Game The Right Way did the work of getting a runner to second and thus earned the right to cheat on that at bat. As ####### if...

How does the excerpt in #3 demonstrate hacking, rather than just using the knowledge former employees obtained during their prior employment?

Follow up question: Unless the powerpoint included the secret sauce that explained WHY the cardinals had higher internal valuations on those players, how would such slides be valuable.

"The Cardinals knew these guys would be great". Um, okay, how does that help us going forward??

Fair point but obviously the person who saw the presentation concluded that it, in fact, did have proprietary info or he wouldn't have raised the issue. IP is like pornography. People know it when they see it. The Astros having our strength coach biomechanic grades - not likely something Mejdal carried in his head. Certainly possible but very unlikely.

Why would someone say Correa would be somewhat vindicated. His argument was the the Astros took proprietary data. So what else could vindicated mean?

There was no concept of IP back then. Did Luhnow take stuff? I don't think he carted off files. I think he and Sig may have copied the system and simply brought it with them. Did they steal it? No. They probably rationalized it by saying "we built that system". The Cardinals didn't patent any of it (I believe) My guess is they didn't even change their user passwords but renamed the domain which is how, when Correa found their domain name, he logged in and used Luhnows old Id and Password (which worked). Once inside there was probably lots of historical cardinal info in the database. Why bother erasing it.

I don't know how many Cardinal front office people moved to Houston. Quite a few I believe. So it's likely a very complicated tale. But it will eventually come out.

In 2009, the Cardinals famously saw a slugging catcher from Slippery Rock as the 17th-best player in the draft but got Matt Adams in the 23rd round.

If this was true, why would the Cards run the risk of waiting until the 23rd round? By that point, GMs are picking guys because their 8-year-old thinks "Slippery Rock" sounds funny.

#7 appears to be entirely supposition. If Luhnow & Mejdal developed the various metrics at issue, or supervised the process, it wouldn’t be surprising that they retained that knowledge and put it to use. They may even have had the foresight to make a printout or thumb drive of their work. That might raise an issue of use of trade secrets, or not, but it doesn’t show that they, or anyone else, improperly accessed the Cardinals computer systems after they left.

Ho, hum.

2017 Astros runs scored:

Home 395
Road 501

W-L Splits:

Home 48-33 .593
Road 53-38 .654

Yeah, that sign stealing was a brilliant scheme, all right, scoring 106 fewer runs in order to lull their opponents into winning 5 more games.

We've been through this a 1000 times. When they were cheating, as Andy points out, they weren't doing it very well.

Doesn't excuse the cheating but the results hardly merit the righteous indignation you see from some quarters.

Quite frankly I just don't care about it. Teams bend the rules all the time to gain advantage and I'm always surprised when a Cardinal fan pipes up about this stuff as your team actually got caught hacking another team's database(which your team managed to convince everyone that only 1 guy knew about it type of thing)

“In 2009, the Cardinals famously saw a slugging catcher from Slippery Rock as the 17th-best player in the draft but got Matt Adams in the 23rd round.”

I would be more impressed if their system had picked some high school outfielder out of New Jersey as the best player in the draft and took Mike Trout at pick 19 that year..

IP is like pornography. People know it when they see it.

Not true.

There was no concept of IP back then.

Really not true.

The Cardinals didn't patent any of it

Not relevant. The issue was the unauthorized access of the database.

— Your friendly neighborhood IP lawyer

I think he and Sig may have copied the system and simply brought it with them.

Based on?

Drellich was on Derrick Goold's most recent podcast that I listened to this morning. As I recall, the distinction Drellich made was, it's okay to take your memories, but it's not okay to take anything tangible like paper or thumb drives. So if the people who left St. Louis for Houston wanted to try to recreate the Cardinals' evaluation systems out of their heads, that's okay. If they remembered the system rating Craig or Adams much more highly than other teams, that's okay. If they took the actual player evaluation software on a thumb drive, or paper files, or they took the Cardinals' complete draft priority lists, that's stuff that belonged to the Cardinals and they had no right to take it. (Disclaimer: IANAL.)

W-L Splits:

Home 48-33 .593
Road 53-38 .654

The road record should read "53-28," Andy.

We've been through this a 1000 times. When they were cheating, as Andy points out, they weren't doing it very well.

Doesn't excuse the cheating but the results hardly merit the righteous indignation you see from some quarters.

On a quasi-related note, when do managers and coaches form their own union?

The road record should read "53-28," Andy.

Right, but that was a typo on my part. The .654 was correct. I'm awaiting the revelation of how those fiendish Astros managed to bribe those in charge of all those other stadiums to let them slip in their sign stealing devices. Those Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park** boys couldn't have come all that cheap.

** The Astros record in each of those parks that year was 3 and 1.

I'm assuming that the PitchCom system will eliminate this old-fashioned visual sign-stealing. As ubiquitous high-definition video of everything on the field became common, I don't think the problem was so much that teams were stealing signs. The problem was that nobody was thinking of ways to head off sign-stealing. Instead, it was all still "I'm going to put down one finger for a fastball and how dare any unprincipled villain watch me do it."

I'm awaiting the revelation of how those fiendish Astros managed to bribe those in charge of all those other stadiums to let them slip in their sign stealing devices.

Andy you dont seem to acknowledge that there doesnt really have to be a 1:1 correspondence between a teams home and away record. We were just discussing the other day how much variabity there is based on projected WAR (seasonal projections as well as pythagorean w/l projections. Just because there road record was better doesnt mean cheating wasnt going on. This seems elementary.

here's a link to a recent discussion:

https://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/newsstand/discussion/how_should_you_interpret_fangraphs_projected_win_totals

I'm awaiting the revelation of how those fiendish Astros managed to bribe those in charge of all those other stadiums to let them slip in their sign stealing devices.

Andy you dont seem to acknowledge that there doesnt really have to be a 1:1 correspondence between a teams home and away record.

Obviously I was being sarcastic, and obviously your point is correct. But the larger holds that it remains completely unproven just how much the Astros were helped by sign stealing. You can't just assume that if a batter knows what type of pitch is coming, without knowing the location, that he's going to be able to tee up on a ball. How many times have we seen batters gear themselves up for a heater, only to still be completely overpowered by it, or to flail helplessly at an outside breaking ball that everyone from the batter to the announcers in the booth knew was going to come in nearly every key situation?

You can claim (rightly) that the Astros cheated, and call for whatever penalties you may think would've been appropriate. YMMV. But those penalties should be based on the Astros' intent, and not on any proof that their cheating did them any good. Because that's something that simply can't be proven by anything other than a faith-based assertion.

If he was the 17th best player in the draft why did they wait to the 23rd round to draft him?

Because they wanted to win TEH internet