Long story short: Employees of the St. Louis Cardinals are accused of “hacking” into the databases of the Houston Astros, gaining insider information about trade talks, player data and other proprietary information.
I used to not really care about the St. Louis Cardinals. In the sense that they weren’t on my radar at all, and I didn’t really have feelings of like or dislike for them, period. In 2006, I actively rooted for the Cardinals en route to their World Series victory, because they were 83-win underdogs throughout the entire playoffs, and had a pretty amazing run, and it was fun to watch them upset the Mets in the NLCS that year.
Eventually, I became enamored with Albert Pujols, who was, at the time performing basically baseball Jesus-feats on a nightly basis for the Cards, and I can admit that I was a fan of Pujols, even if it meant passively supporting the Cardinals.
Times change however, and as my own baseball fandom progressed, somewhere along the line, I kind of got tired of the Cardinals. As a whole, their franchise is revered and often lauded as one of the squeaky clean, most “right” organizations out there, and everything from their players, their style of play, the organization, their ballpark, all the way to their fans, were often considered the crème of the crop as far as the royal baseball was concerned.
When anything cool is happening, like a hitting streak or a pitcher with an impressive run of scoreless innings, if the Cardinals were on the horizon, you could basically bank that the good times were going to end. If there was a team you were rooting for that was on a hot streak, it could be pretty certain that when they played the Cardinals, it would come to an end.
What really sucked is that no matter what the circumstances, the Cardinals were always good. Nothing could derail them, whether it’s injuries, the free agent departure of Albert Pujols, or anything else, my rule of thumb became that if the Cardinals made it into the playoffs, they were going to fuck things up for basically everyone.
In 2011, the Braves had the mother of late-season collapses, and went from basically being a sure-fire bet for the Wild Card and a chance in the playoffs, the losing the last game of the season, and getting leap-frogged, by the Cardinals. The Cardinals would then storm through the playoffs, and win the World Series outright.
In 2012, the Braves were the unfortunate first victims to the absurdity of a one-game playoff system newly integrated, and in spite of being six games superior in record, still had a date with the St. Louis Cardinals, to see who got to really play in the playoffs. Naturally, the Cardinals benefitted from the mother of botched umpire calls, and defeated the Braves, where they would proceed to get umpire assistance again against the Nationals, breaking the hearts of my closest friends, before ultimately failing to the Giants, because it was an even-numbered year.
The stories never really cease either, because no matter the loss of Pujols, the blown-out elbows of Chris Carpenter or Adam Wainwright, the Cardinals just keep winning. They always make the playoffs, they always make it far, and they just simply just get the job done, no matter what.
I resent the Cardinals, because they’re really that good, and on top of that, they seem to be the charmed franchise that always gets that extra bit of luck, whether it’s benefitting from umpire calls, or taking a piece of garbage player, and finding the right role for him that turns him into a Cy Young-caliber pitcher or a pinch-hit wunderkind.
Which is why it makes this story, that the Cardinals are underhanded hackers, attempting to capitalize on absolutely anyone, including a team that’s no longer in their division, much less league, that much juicier and gratifying of a story.
Of course the Cardinals are cheaters! Why else are they always this good? Why do they always seem to know what scrapheaps to pick up and transform into productive tools?
I think it was J. Jonah Jameson who said it best in Spider-Man, that as much as people love to see heroes rise, they love to see them fail as well. This is, in a way, kind of the Cardinals failing just a little bit, because no matter what resolution comes from whatever happens next between the FBI, the Cardinals, Astros and MLB, the Cardinals are most certainly marked forever now. A team that tried to get covert insider information from another organization, and who knows the magnitude of how far down the rabbit hole the espionage went?
I mean, I’m not saying it happened, but if the Cardinals kind of knew that the Braves were going to be huge sellers, seeing as how the Braves traded Evan Gattis to the Astros, who’s to say that that kind of knowledge didn’t help facilitate the Jason Heyward for Shelby Miller trade between the Braves and Cards?
Either way, I love that this happened to the St. Louis Cardinals. For all the years of talk about how the Cardinals do everything the right way, it’s nice to see that when the day was truly over, they weren’t above trying to use an underhanded method to facilitate the image of success that they’re always striving for.
