By now, you know that the St. Louis Cardinals—the sports equivalent of the Duggar clan—are currently under investigation by the FBI for hacking into a Houston Astros database. (The FBI! That means they’re fucked.) And not only did they allegedly hack into another team’s system, but they allegedly did it in the clumsiest, most easily detectable way possible. Unlike other over-covered sports scandals, this one includes actual crime! Real cheating! A legitimate threat to the integrity of the game! THIS IS NOT WINNING THE RIGHT WAY.


The Cards are almost certainly going to handle this scandal by finding a patsy—THE BALLBOY. They’ll identify him as a rogue agent (“What was he doing taking that laptop into the shitter?!”), and then throw him under the bus, which I assume is some kind of tacky tour bus driven in from Branson. And then they will spin into some bullshit about how sticking to the Cardinal Way allowed them to get rid of all those pesky bad apples, and how they’ve proudly taken the necessary steps to ensure that sure this never happens again, and how anyone gloating over the Cardinals’ misfortune is just a sad, pitiable, BUTTHURT person …


But they’re not getting away with this so easily. Not with the feds on their ass, and not with the rest of the sporting world (okay, me) eager to punish them after suffering through YEARS of the team and their fans being a bunch of smarmy, phony assholes. The Cardinals are the fucking worst, and now we have proof! Proof that the most self-righteous people are always the dirtiest! It is the Scrappening. It is Schadenfreude Christmas, and you people deserve to EAT SHIT. Fistfuls of shit. Great, big handfuls of liquid shit. I mean, come on, Will Leitch …

Yep, just SIMPLE HACKIN’ FOLK. Didn’t even know what they was doin’! These newfangled iPuters and Gizdroids are so confusing! We identify as Amish! Our precious Cardinals would never WILLINGLY wage a sophisticated cyberwar against the rest of baseball! These boys were just in it for the purity of hacking!



There is, of course, only one course of action that baseball can take in the wake of this hilarious, impossibly joyful development: CONTRACT THE CARDINALS. That’s right. Destroy them. Raze their stadium. Arrest their players and fans. Intern them all in some kind of horrible Bud Light Mixx Tail tent (with a dress code), where they can wander around in a daze, whispering to each other, “They said it could never happen here, but it DID.”


That is what the Cardinals deserve for lording their superiority over the rest of baseball for decades now. No more Busch. No more best fans in baseball. No more computer hacks that let them get by superior teams in the playoffs and then pass it off as a feat of sheer guile. No more insincere clapping for the other team. No more Bernie Mickelsauce writing deliberately terrible columns in the hopes of getting them fisked. No more custom Darren Wilson jerseys. No more drunken Tony La Russa letting his cat drive.

This is the appropriate course of action for an organization and fanbase that have gone out of their way to brand themselves as special and different from the rest of us. Oh, you’re different, all right. Thanks to the feds, now we know: you’re worse than any of them, and you deserve to BURN. BURN IN A FIRE LARGE ENOUGH TO RIVAL YOUR CITY’S MANY OTHER TIRE FIRES.


Eat shit and die.