With the baseball season about to enter the postseason, perhaps it’s time to revisit an interesting off-the-field legal drama from the 2015 season, namely the corporate espionage case involving two former National League Central rivals.
As originally reported in the New York Times,1 the St. Louis Cardinals made news in connection with the alleged hacking of a database owned by the Houston Astros. The attack appears to have been in furtherance of a variety of potential motives: A desire to obtain intelligence from the Astros proprietary “Ground Control” database, to embarrass Jeff Luhnow, a former Cardinals executive who is now the Astros General Manager, or to determine whether Luhnow took data or other intellectual property developed by the Cardinals with him to a competitor. The FBI conducted an investigation into the allegations.
