Cardinals owner blames 'roguish behavior' for hacking scandal
St. Louis Cardinals chairman and owner Bill DeWitt Jr. says he blames “roguish behavior” for his team's involvement in the alleged hacking of the Houston Astros' player personnel database.
The New York Timesreported earlier this week that the Cardinals are under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice over whether front-office officials were behind an effort to steal information from the Astros' database, called Ground Control. Authorities say they believe St. Louis employees hacked into the Astros' network after Cardinals executive Jeff Luhnow left the team to become Houston’s general manager in 2011.
Cardinals' hacking into Astros' database is worse than Deflategate
DeWitt says the team is cooperating with the investigation and that only a small number of individuals were responsible for the hacking.
"I still don't know the reason for it," DeWitt said. "I can't come up with a reason for it. It goes against everything we stand for. We don't know who did what here."
Cardinals counsel Mike Whittle has said that DeWitt and general manager John Mozeliak have not been implicated in the investigation.
According to the Houston Chronicle, the Cardinals had unauthorized access to the Astros' computer information as early as 2012. The FBI started investigating after a second breach of the database was found in March 2014.
“Those responsible will be held accountable," DeWitt said, "and we will continue what we feel is a great franchise."
Luhnow spoke out about the hacking scandal, tellingSI’s Ben Reiter that it’s “absolutely false” that the team’s network was hacked due to a failure of changing passwords.
“I absolutely know about password hygiene and best practices. I'm certainly aware of how important passwords are, as well as of the importance of keeping them updated,” Luhnow said.
- Scooby Axson
