Leaked: 10 Months Of The Houston Astros' Internal Trade Talks

[Audrey McNeil <audrey () riskbasedsecurity com>]

http://deadspin.com/leaked-10-months-of-the-houston-astros-internal-trade-1597951970

Two years ago, the Houston Astros constructed "Ground Control"—a
built-from-scratch online database for the private use of the Astros front
office. It is by all accounts a marvel, an easy-to-use interface giving
executives instant access to player statistics, video, and communications
with other front offices around baseball. All it needs, apparently, is a
little better password protection.

Documents purportedly taken from Ground Control and showing 10 months'
worth of the Astros' internal trade chatter have been posted online at
Anonbin, a site where users can anonymously share hacked or leaked
information. Found below, they contain the Astros front office's
communications regarding trade overtures to and from other teams, as well
as negotiations—a few of which actually led to trades. You will find heavy
efforts to get a big haul for Bud Norris at last year's trade deadline
(before settling for very little), pushes to acquire touted young talents
like Dylan Bundy and Gregory Polanco, and even evidence the Astros rejected
out of hand a blockbuster deal that could have brought them Giancarlo
Stanton.

> From a strict baseball perspective, all of this is really interesting just
for the insight it offers into how baseball trades work on an operational
level. As it turns out, it really isn't too different from your fantasy
league, with front office types kicking around ideas, making preposterous
demands, gossiping, and discussing various contingencies. If this happens,
we'll be looking to do this, but then if this other thing happens, we'll be
looking to do this. All of it is worth running through, but a few of the
highlights are as follows:

- The Miami Marlins seem to have been willing to trade Giancarlo Stanton
for prospects Carlos Correa and George Springer. Granting that Correa is an
absolute stud, that Springer has hit fabulously well since his callup
earlier this year, and that they're under team control for years while
Stanton is starting to get expensive, you still wonder if the Astros will
end up kicking themselves over that one. Stanton has the 11th-highest
isolated power in major league history for anyone with at least 1,000
at-bats, and is a Gold Glove-caliber outfielder as well; he's a
generational talent, the kind you can't really overpay for. (Another way to
look at this, of course, is that the embarrassing Marlins franchise was yet
again willing to trade away an irreplaceable player so as to pocket some of
its dole money.)
- While vigorously shopping adequate pitcher Bud Norris last summer, the
Astros came off a bit like that one guy in your fantasy league, asking
after every team's top young players as if there were a real chance that,
say, the Boston Red Sox were going to trade Xander Bogaerts for an okayish
No. 3 starter. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that, but you
wonder if the ultimately unimpressive return they got for Norris from the
Baltimore Orioles had to do with them overplaying their hand a bit,
especially as the flopsweating Pittsburgh Pirates seem to have been willing
to discuss a variety of pretty good prospects.
- The New York Yankees were apparently willing not only to eat $4.5 million
of Ichiro Suzuki's $6.5 million salary, but to sentence Ichiro to spending
perhaps his last year in the majors playing in front of empty Houston
houses for the worst team in the majors. Poor Ichiro.

There's lots more to chew over here; if you see anything particularly
interesting, drop it in the comments below.

The data, as posted online, was split into two parts: the weeks leading up
to last year's trade deadline, and the offseason. We don't know why this is
the only info that's leaked thus far, though it's worth noting that Ground
Control underwent major upgrades last summer—around the time of the
earliest of these messages. As GM Jeff Luhnow said in a Houston Chronicle
story on the database:

"We had a very bare-bones interface for a while. After the draft, the next
critical milestone was the trade deadline, because we knew we were going to
be trading players and we knew we wanted to have all our information
organized in a way that would help."

We have a line in to someone in the Astros organization. We'll update if we
hear back, but Jeff Passan has confirmed the authenticity of the documents
with multiple MLB execs.

[...]

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