Well, half of our front office will be in jail by the end of the year.
We were the perpetrators of perhaps the most bizarre baseball story since the Ryan Braun thing. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/sports/baseball/st-louis-cardinals-hack-astros-fbi.html
More bizarre than Ryan Braun. I might put it as the most bizarre story (note: In general I don't consider the steroid scandal very bizarre outside of the entity that is Jose Canseco.) since the George Steinbrenner ban. I'm almost as interested in the punishment as the crime, can MLB even do anything with regards to draft picks and post-season bans? I feel like if they try that the MLBPA will mutiny and we'll all have a bad time.
There's some vague wording in the CBA so I think the answer is we won't know until they try. I anticipate something akin to the arbitration process -- MLB won't come down too hard because they're not sure what line they might cross that would cause the MLBPA to sue, and correspondingly the Cardinals will accept whatever punishment gets sent down in the interest of cooperation and image-repair.
Honestly, this might be the most serious cheating scandal I've ever heard of outside 1919. It might have been some fuckboy employees and they never gave said data to the team at large, but it's looking more and more like it was multiple people, not for revenge, doing it repeatedly. It's going to be bad, and whatever the FBI does won't be as bad as what the league does.
It's looking more and more like ... no one knows anything yet. Speculation tends to be wrong. It is vastly more probable that it was some low-level idiots than anything else. Caught using your own IP address? Come the fuck on. The scandal is, at least, so far less significant than Pete Rose's betting, or (I think) the owners' collusion in the '70s. [EDIT: and, uh, steroids.] It's not clear to me why the episode happened at all, actually. There is no information the Astros have that the Cardinals could not obtain legitimately if they wanted to. Thus I will believe until told otherwise that this is probably not some sort of organization-sanctioned attack, because that's insane. Anyway, as long as we come out of it with our only essential employee unscathed (Mozeliak), I don't really care what happens to the rest of them. Toss 'em in jail. We'll see in a few days, I imagine. As for the team's punishment ... that will depend on how complicit the organization as a whole was (my guess: not very). Fines, draft picks, some sort of postseason ban: as far as I know the latter two have never been done in the modern era, but fines don't really hurt a successful baseball team. So who knows. For now, we're still five games better than the second-best team in baseball. That's fucked. I'll take it and be content.
r/baseball: Oh you're a Yankees, Cardinals, or Royals fan? FUCK OFF. r/baseball: Oh, Bartolo Colon or Kris Bryant did a thing!? FANTASTIC. Still better than the other sports subs though.
I love /r/nfl. I don't care about bias or echo chamber, it seems very focused on a love of the game, a good natured rivalry among fans and doesn't deviate into other topics even if they might be relevant. It's a reason I keep using reddit. The April Fools prank with the soccer sub is classic. The Orange Helmeted Sportsmen of America has me randomly smiling if I find a reason to remember it