Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, a central figure in the Cardinals hacking investigation, denied committing a first round of intellectual property theft or exposing Houston’s database with old passwords.
Mainly, he’s traumatized by the digital snoop he likened to a home invasion.
“At the time when it happened a year ago, it was like coming home and seeing your house has been broken into,” Luhnow told Sports Illustrated in an interview Wednesday night. “You feel violated when someone does that without permission.”
Luhnow, a former technology executive who worked for the Cardinals until departing to become the Astros’ general manager in December 2011, adamantly denied taking proprietary information from the in-house baseball information network he helped set up in St. Louis.
“I’m very aware of intellectual property and the agreements I signed,” Luhnow said. “I didn’t take anything, any proprietary information. Nor have we ever received any inquiries from anybody that even suggested that we had.
“If you were to take a snapshot of the database of one team, within a month it would not be useful anymore, because things change so quickly. … I wouldn’t trust another team’s analysis even if I had it.”
FBI and Justice Department investigators believe the “hack” may have been perpetrated simply by trying the same passwords Luhnow used with the Cardinals.
“That’s absolutely false,” Luhnow said. “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. A lot of my job in baseball, as it was in high tech, is to make sure that intellectual property is protected. I take that seriously and hold myself and those who work for me to a very high standard.”