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Good afternoon and welcome to episode 698 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from

baseball perspective presented by the plate index of baseballreference.com. I am

Ben Lindbergh of Grantland joined by Sam Miller of baseball perspective. Hello.

Yo. Anything to discuss? Sure, a few things. Okay. All right. There's a little note in

one of the articles on the Astros hack that noted that four Cardinals

employees have hired defense attorneys. Yeah. Criminal defense attorneys. And I

wanted to ask you whether you think this is appropriate, not them hiring attorneys. I

mean, of course, but there's sort of always been a rule that if you like assault a

human being, they don't press charges as long as you assault him in a baseball way,

you know? Like they never come after a guy for throwing a projectile at another

person's head. Like it, I think there's very, very, very rare exceptions like that

thing in hockey one time. But generally speaking, it has been determined that crimes committed

in pursuit of a baseball victory are for some reason, perhaps a good reason, perhaps not

exempt from the justice system. And so I wondered how you feel about this being in the actual

real criminal justice system. Is there any reason that this should be a crime? Do you think?

Well, other than that it technically is one. I know, but I mean, it was so many, so many

potential crimes are considered not crimes because they happen in sports, right? Yeah, that's true.

Some, well, some level of physical aggression is accepted, but this is so, this is so divorced

from that. This is front office people sitting at a computer. It is, and it's looking for a

competitive advantage, whereas the things that we're talking about guys hitting other guys with

baseballs, I guess you could say it's there's an advantage to it if it has a, if it intimidates your

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