The Cardinals continue to play baseball.
It’s what they do. And no matter the outcome of the FBI investigation looking into Cardinals front office personnel who (allegedly) broke into the network that contained Houston Astros private internal data, it won’t effect the 2015 Cardinals.
The NY Times is reporting today that the investigation has zeroed in on “a small group of Cardinals employees who specialize in statistical analysis and computer programming”. Cardinals ownership and top front-office members seem to be in the clear. NYT sources confirm that at least 4 members of this group have retained legal representation.
So this isn’t going to be deflategate all over again.
Without boldface names like Tom Brady involved, the interest in this story from outlets like TMZ or ET or Us Weekly isn’t there. A big deal in the baseball world, for sure – but it’s not going to be office fodder for people that aren’t seamheads or Cardinals fans.
PR crises avoided.
When the dust settles, the Cardinals will be fined and probably lose some draft picks. They will also have to terminate most, if not all, of the people involved with this investigation.
Simply put, when Jeff Lunhow and Sig Mejdal left the Cardinals to go to the Astros, the farm system hasn’t been able to be replenished at the breakneck pace the late 00’s produced. Their departure was a big hit. And the Cardinals have been looking to get the development mojo back ever since.
Now the Cardinals are going to lose pretty much everyone in the analytics department. Again.
Specifically:
1) Even though it’s pretty much a certainty that there will be some fall guys, they’ll continue to work with the Cardinals until they’re prosecuted and the team can terminate them with cause. How long will that take?
2) How good of work are these aforementioned people doing right now? FBI investigations, I would assume, tend to take up much of your mental bandwidth.
3) The Cardinals can’t hire replacements to people that haven’t been fired yet.
4) And even if they could, who would come into this situation at this particular moment in time? In fact, how long will top talent stay away from the organization even after everything is final? It’s not like they’re going to be coming into the most welcoming environment. Every move they make will initially be met with more scrutiny than any other team in sport.
No, the 2015 (and probably ’16) Cardinals aren’t going to lose or gain much from this drama.
But all the work that it takes to identify and develop talent takes time. Time that the Cardinals are ostensibly wasting right now since they can’t do much but wait for the FBI to make their move.
Meaning that just about the time we all start to forget about this whole ordeal, it’s going to be just around the time where it starts hurting what we actually see on the field.
Photo: Wikipedia
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