Astros GM Luhnow denies using same password

For the first time Wednesday night, Houston Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow addressed elements of a New York Times’ report that front-office employees of the St. Louis Cardinals broke into Houston’s internal database and leaked sensitive information some time in 2014. Luhnow paints a slightly different picture of himself and the Astros than the one reported.

Luhnow says he and the Cardinals parted on good terms. (USATSI)

• Luhnow, a former Cardinals employee, denied that anyone accessed Astros information by using old passwords that Luhnow also might have used at his former job, which the Times said federal investigators believe. Luhnow told Sports Illustrated’s Ben Reiter:

“That’s absolutely false,” said Luhnow, who worked as a technology executive before he began his career in baseball. “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.”

• Luhnow also said he didn’t steal any ideas or intellectual property from the Cardinals, saying that he wouldn’t want the information anyway because it would have been out of date.

“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,” he said. “Not to mention that the types of analysis you would do back in 2011, versus 2012 or ’13 , is evolving so quickly because of new tools like PitchFX and StatCast. I wouldn’t trust another team’s analysis even if I had it.”

• Luhnow also rejects the notion that he was a polarizing personality while in St. Louis, who left behind “revenge-minded colleagues.”

“This wasn’t a bad breakup. It was a happy promotion of a person to a higher position in another organization.”

Luhnow’s responses leave at least one question unanswered:

• If the stolen data wasn’t useful to the thieves because it was outdated, and if Luhnow had left St. Louis without leaving any “revenge-minded colleagues” in the organization behind — because he got along with everyone — what was the motivation for the hack?

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