Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. says his team's alleged hack of the Astros' analytics database last year is a case of "roguish behavior" by, well, someone.
DeWitt added that he's in the dark about a possible motive.
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“I still don’t know the reason for it,” DeWitt said, per The Associated Press. “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.”
The Houston Chronicle reported Thursday night that the Cardinals breached the Astros' database in 2012, 2013 and 2014. Previous reports mentioned just the '13 and '14 incidents. The Chronicle cited a source with knowledge of the details of the FBI's investigation into the case. The source requested anonymity.
DeWitt denied having any involvement in the scandal. Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak did the same Wednesday.
The Astros said little Thursday night in response.
"(Team owner) Jim (Crane), (general manager) Jeff (Luhnow) and our entire organization have a tremendous amount of respect for Mr. DeWitt and the Cardinals organization. We have no doubt that they will handle this appropriately," Astros general counsel Giles Kibbe said in a statement.
The Astros hired Luhnow from the Cardinals in December 2011. Media have speculated that people in the Cardinals' organization hacked the Astros' database because Luhnow took proprietary information with him to Houston. Luhnow denied doing that. He also denied the database's password was weak and left the database vulnerable to a hack.
The FBI and the Cardinals continue to investigate the matter.
“We’re committed to getting this resolved, we hope sooner rather than later,” DeWitt said, according to the AP. “We’re a little bit at the government’s pace. We’re not in a position of pushing them, as you might imagine.”
