Cyber game latest twist in Astros-Cards history
Baseball paths of two cities first crossed in 1868
From shared encounters on a baseball diamond that date to the 1860s, teams rep- resenting Houston and St. Louis now find themselves in a uniquely 21st-century arena usually occupied by matters of national security, industrial espionage and financial fraud.
At some point in the not-too-distant future, the FBI and Justice Depart- ment will disclose if criminal charges are warranted against St. Louis Cardinals officials who are under investigation for gaining unauthorized access to the Astros’ trove of player evaluations and other data. Attorneys speculate that felony charges are possible under at least two federal statutes.
Also, if the Cardinals are found to have obtained unauthorized access to information in 2012, 2013 and 2014, they may face punishment from MLB ranging from fines to suspensions to the loss of draft picks or other actions as commissioner Rob Manfred sees fit.
Under any circumstances, the Astros’ recent reputation as baseball mavericks for their heavy reliance on statistical analysis is back on center stage, and
the Cardinals’ reputation as epitomizing all that is admirable, efficient and excellent has been called into question.
In a dynamic, fast-moving story involving a sport that increasingly is defined by data, the pertinent details have yet to emerge.
“We don’t know who did what here,” said Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt Jr.
History, meanwhile, records that baseball fans in Houston and St. Louis crossed paths as early as 1868, when an umpire from the St. Louis Empires Base Ball Club officiated at a San Jacinto Day game between Houston clubs named for Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, according to a history of Houston baseball commissioned by the Society for American Baseball Research.
Eighty-five years later, there was a brief but fleeting opportunity for the Cardinals to leave St. Louis and move to Houston. It didn’t happen, but Houston would join St. Louis as a Major League Baseball outpost in 1962 with the debut of the Colt .45s, who became the Astros in 1965.
Before the Colt .45s and Astros came to be, Houston and St. Louis were linked through the Cardinals’ longtime association with the Houston Buffaloes, the city’s minor league team from the pre-World War I era through the Colt .45s’ arrival in 1962.
Generations of fans in Houston grew up following the Buffs and, by extension, the Cardinals. Old habits were hard to break for some.
“For the first 15 or 20 years of the Colt .45s and Astros, there were a lot of people in Houston who were more Cardinals fans than they were Colt .45s or Astros fans,” said former Houston pitcher, manager and broadcaster Larry Dierker. “For years, it seemed like we drew a little better when we played the Cardinals. That interest continued until people got older, and probably there aren’t a lot of people left who can relate to that history.”
For the rest, on-field clashes between the Cardinals and Astros during their last decade as National League rivals ring more strongly than do the days when the Buffs were part of the Cardinals’ family. ‘Mutually beneficial’
Even a reasonably dispassionate observer like Mike Vance, who helped write and compile “Houston Baseball: The Early Years” for the SABR chapter, can’t help but be a little snarky when it comes to the Cardinals and their alleged cyber-snooping.
“The baseball relationship between Houston and St. Louis was a mutually beneficial one, but it wasn’t without previous bumps,” Vance said. “Not that blatantly and illegally hacking into our scouting reports is a mere bump.”
Vance notes that the Cardinals’ original association with Houston baseball was based on deception. Histo- rians say that the Cardinals owned at least a portion of the Buffs franchise through third-party straw owners as early as 1920, even though the Baseball Commission, which oversaw the game from 1903 through 1920, and the Texas League did not allow minor league clubs to be owned by major league clubs.
The Cardinals eventually were allowed to buy full ownership of the Houston franchise, and both parties benefited — St. Louis with an outpost as part of baseball’s first successful farm team systems and Houston with the Cardinals’ agreement to build Buffalo Stadium, which opened in 1928 south of downtown Houston along what is now the Gulf Freeway.
Over the next few decades, such future Cardinals stars as Dizzy Dean, Pepper Martin, Joe Medwick, Harry Brecheen, Mort Cooper and Solly Hemus and future managers Eddie Dyer and Johnny Keane passed through Houston on the way to St. Louis. The Cardinals benefited, and so did the Buffs, who won Dixie Series championships in 1947, 1956 and 1957.
Arguably the most significant moment linking the two cities, however, came in 1953, when Cardinals owner Fred Saigh put the St. Louis team up for sale as he was preparing to go to prison for income tax evasion.
No local offers emerged in St. Louis, and the leading bidder for the Cardinals at the time was a group led by Houston public relations executive George Kirksey, who would have moved the Cardinals to Houston. Saigh, however, considered the flak that would have accompanied the Cardinals’ departure and accepted what was, according to subsequent news reports, a lower offer from AnheuserBusch beer baron August Busch to purchase the Cardinals and keep them in St. Louis. Common denominator
Over 54 years of Major League Baseball, 120 players have played for both the Cardinals and Astros, but the current flap concerns a name that isn’t on the active player roster: Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow.
Luhnow, a former Cardinals executive who was hired by new Astros owner Jim Crane in 2011, has remade the Astros in the Cardinals’ image, advancing young, promising players through a revitalized farm system to the major leagues. Luhnow, who brought scouting director Mike Elias and Sig Megdal, the team’s director of decision sciences, with him from the Cardinals, was for a time a polarizing figure in St. Louis, although his rep- utation advanced as players he drafted produced pennants and a World Series title.
Now, speculation is rife regarding whether Luhnow’s move to Houston could have prompted the Cardinals to cyberspy on their colleague-turned-competitor. Both sides say there are no hard feelings and express mutual respect, and many Cardinals executives came to Luhnow’s recent wedding.
Despite the longstanding ties between Houston and St. Louis, for this generation of Houston baseball fans, the Cardinals are less Big Brother and more Red Menace. The teams were part of the National League Central Division from 1994, the first year that the Jeff Bagwell-Craig Biggio era team became a contender, through 2012.
The rivalry was at its peak between 2001 and 2006, when the teams in every year except 2003 finished 1-2 in the NL Central standings, with the Cardinals prevailing each season except 2001.
The cappers, of course, were two hard-fought National League Championship Series in 2004 and 2005. Both featured memorable home runs — Jeff Kent’s three-run walkoff blast to win Game 5 at Minute Maid Park in 2004, and Albert Pujols’ gargantuan three-run shot off Brad Lidge to force Game 6 of the 2005 series.
St. Louis prevailed in 2004, advancing to the World Series and a fourgame sweep by the Red Sox, and Houston won in six in 2005 before being swept by the White Sox in the Astros’ only World Series trip. ‘Us or them’
In both years, for Astros fans of this era, it didn’t get any bigger and better than Cardinals vs. Astros.
“It was us or them for quite a while,” Dierker said. “Most people who followed Houston at the time didn’t have any sense of the Cardinals as being a partner. They were more like the enemy.”