On Tuesday evening Nicole Vartanian’s mobile phone was blowing up. Hours earlier the New York Times had announced that employees of her favorite team, the St Louis Cardinals, had been accused of hacking into the internal database of the Houston Astros. The incoming text message was from a friend in Boston. It read:
Welcome to the club of your favorite team doing crazy shit!
“I wrote back that I hate it, it’s a club I don’t want to be a part of.”
By now, with a pair of “gates” under their belts, battle-hardened Patriots fans flinch little when their organization is accused of football acts deemed unsavory. To Cardinals fans scattered around the country, the idea that their storied baseball franchise is under investigation by the FBI for unprecedented electronic sports espionage is unfathomable.
“It’s a combination of shocked, and a bit of despair and embarrassment,” said Vartanian, who remains hopeful the investigation will turn out to be less damning than it seems on the surface. “An allegation of this magnitude is a punch to the gut.”
The Cardinals have won 11 World Series titles, 19 pennants and have reached the playoffs 27 times. They are baseball royalty, complete with a unique view of themselves in the sports world. In fact, much of being a Cardinals fan is tied up in the “Cardinal way”, a philosophy that seems to provide an ethical road map both on and off the field.
“Cardinals fans are very unhappy largely because we do think we play by the rules,” said Mark Momjian, a Cards fan living in Philadelphia. “And we think that the Cardinal way elevates the national pastime. We think as a fan base we understand there’s a responsibility to play baseball way in the fine tradition of the Cardinal way.”
Now Cardinal fans, derided by the opposition for being a sickly sweet group of do-gooding polite Midwesterners that refuse to get upset with their own players even when they suck, are managing their baseball fandom in what has become a vastly different bizarro world: one in which their team are accused of being cyber-warfare baddies who broke into the Astros’ computer systems containing sensitive information about players, trades, scouting reports and “proprietary stats”.
Becoming founding fathers of tech-based sports espionage is anything but the Cardinal way.
“You believe in something your whole life and then all of a sudden it changes,” said Mark Bridges, part of the diaspora of Cards fans living in Chicago. “I think back to Mark McGwire when he was setting the [single-season home run] record and the excitement, and then everything comes out about the steroids. A friend of mine took a photo of him hitting the record-setting home run, I had a huge picture of it on my wall, and now I don’t even hang it up. It’s something that doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. It makes you wonder if this turns out to be something bigger, what will I feel about the championships? It kind of scares me to think about.”
The key figure in the FBI investigation is, of course, Jeff Luhnow, the current Astros GM and a former Cardinals executive who headed up their scouting and player development from 1994 to 2012. The sabermetrically inclined Luhhow, who built computer networks for both franchises, was a large piece of the Cards winning puzzle, building up the treasure trove of talent that has, for example, has allowed the current team to be 21 games over .500 in June despite losing ace Adam Wainwright, front-end starter Lance Lynn, first baseman Matt Adams and outfielder Matt Holliday to injury.
This is a guy who did a lot for the team,” said Joel Schrock, a New York-based Cardinals fan. “And if this was indeed an act of vengeance (for his leaving the team under less than ideal circumstances), it would be frustrating to realize your team is a part of it. This has been a really fun time to be a Cardinals fan and a big part of that has been Luhnow’s drafting and player development. And if it turns out that they are trying to sabotage the Astros, it’s a show of disrespect.”
For fans of opposing teams, many of which have watched the Cardinals suck the life out of their franchises on baseball’s biggest stages, the unravelling of a picture-perfect franchise that can do no wrong is schadenfreude of the highest calibre.
“Faith is tested every day,” said Vartanian. “And right now Cardinal nation woke up with a collective pit in our stomach. We’re hoping it’s a mild bout of nausea that will be resolved quickly, but there’s also the long-term ramifications: giving those who roundly derided Cardinal fans a new punch line that doesn’t go away.”
