Some certainly think that’s the case. Twitter was/is full of such theorists. 

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And in the mind of the L.A. Times’ Bill Plaschke, a longtime hot-take regular on ESPN’s “Around The Horn,” if the Cardinals front-office types would hack into the Astros’s system, why wouldn’t the Cardinals’ players and coaches have blatantly cheated on the field, too? St. Louis has knocked out L.A.’s own Dodgers in October two years in a row, after all. 

That’s one heck of a leap in logic, but Plaschke is an Olympic-caliber long jumper, it seems.

From his column:  

Suddenly, in Plaschke’s mind, the Joe Kelly fastball that drilled Hanley Ramirez in the ribs in the first inning of Game 1 of the 2013 NLCS was an organizational plan, not a wayward upper-90s pitch minutes into the most pressure-packed start of Kelly’s career. 

That’s common sense. 

Suddenly, it wasn’t just runners on second base relaying signs to St. Louis hitters that helped pick apart the Dodgers’ pitching staff, especially ace lefty Clayton Kershaw. As Plaschke suggested, it probably was a much more malicious method of stealing signs and pitching game plans. 

That idea is not sour grapes.  

Was Plaschke alone in his Cardinals-are-capable-of-any-evil theory?

Over at Sports on Earth, Will Leitch theorized that further investigations could reveal that the Cardinals were “using hacked information to send imperceptible shocks into the brain of opposing hitters right when they were about to swing the bat.” Or that they could have been “secretly mainlining all their players with HGH” to gain a competitive advantage. 

Because if the Cardinals were hacking an opposing team’s database, and as Plaschke said, if it was fair to wonder if they were intentionally eliminating the opponents’ best hitters or using malicious methods to steal signs, why wouldn’t they do these other things, too? 

Except that Leitch was being facetious.

HE WAS JOKING, expanding to the absurd to prove a point. And still, Leitch’s hypothetical crow-hop from Plaschke’s conspiracy theory spanned a shorter distance than Plaschke’s leap from the facts we actually know are true from the report.

So this is where we are. The well-reported story in the New York Times didn’t even hint at on-field cheating. In fact, it specifically focused on so-far-off-the-field personal issues. 

But Plaschke took the leap. 

Can the rest of us stay a bit more grounded until we find out the actual details? Thanks.