As Major League Baseball continues to fold itself into still another conspicuous conduit of information technology, hurrying the game along the dubious track from wondrous sport to monstrous math problem, certain precautions need now be taken.
Unless, of course, you're confident that the game that brought you the designated hitter can protect itself from the next logical menace, the designated hacker.
The St. Louis Cardinals, an organization that has long since grown comfortable on the high ground of baseball royalty, were this week revealed to be the target of an FBI investigation into the matter of a data breach along some cyber fault line in the informational superstructure of the Houston Astros.
It is hard to believe at this point in the legal process -- legal because what the Cardinals are alleged to have done is a felony -- that the front office in St. Louis is the only one of 30 across baseball with a designated hacker.
"It goes against everything we stand for," said Cardinals President William O. DeWitt III, casting the story as a solitary spasm of some "roguish" mid-level staffer[s]. "We don't know who did what here."
That, I can believe.
Someone in the Cardinals ecosystem apparently decided that Houston General Manager Jeff Luhnow, a former lieutenant in the St. Louis operation, had unsecured digitized information that could either useful to the Cardinals, embarrassing the Luhnow, or, perhaps best of all, both.
The Astros have a vice president for strategy and analytics, a senior technical architect, a mathematical modeler and, more famously, a director of decisions sciences, the estimable Sig Mejdal.
Mejdal, whom Houston also hired away from the Cardinals, presents a resume that unfolds officially like this, if only partially:
During his time with St. Louis, Mejdal was involved with modeling, analysis and data-driven decision-making throughout all levels of the organization. He was a key contributor in the draft decision processes that led to the selection of more Major League players than any other organization in that time frame.
Earlier in his career, Mejdal worked at Lockheed Martin in California and for NASA. He earned two engineering degrees at the University of California, Davis and later completed advanced degrees in Operations Research and Cognitive Psychology/Human Factors at San Jose State University.
Mejdal's academic and professional accomplishments are to be praised, obviously, but he is not exceptional in the modern front office, where the only surprise is that brains so capacious might not be able to ensure a professional level of cyber security.
Meanwhile, the Houston Chronicle, citing a source familiar with the FBI investigation, reported Friday that the Cardinals' incursion into Houston's sensitive data occurred "not just one or two times." The Astros, who had actual notes from last summer's trade negotiations with several teams including the Pirates appear on Anonbin, a site where users sometimes share hacked data, have apparently been attacked all the way back to 2012. As it first happened during a tailspin in which Houston lost 324 games in three consecutive seasons, the breaches got shrugged off as typical franchise incompetence.
But now it appears Commissioner Rob Manfred can start rooting through his discipline protocols for the first real justice test of his fresh administration. He can suspend anyone up to the owner of a franchise, fine a franchise up to $2 million and potentially subtract benefits of the various rules, a.k.a. draft choices.
But first he should take a look at ways to shepherd the data into systems that discourage the informational scientists from cannibalizing themselves and a game that somehow remains ever ripe for scandal.
Sports on 06/22/2015