The St. Louis Cardinals Have Hacked Their Way Into Sports Spying History

"We quite frankly don't care what formations or trick plays that Knox College plans to use. We don't have the reputation of spying on our opponents. If we cannot beat another team on the square we do not care to win."

That was Coach Schissler of Lombard College in Galesburg, Illinois, addressing accusations that Lombard students were spying on rival Knox's practices prior to the annual football game between the two schools in 1921. Five students wearing Lombard's distinct bright yellow sweaters had been seen in the window of a house looking over Knox's practice field. When Knox coach Justin Barry stationed a few players outside the house, a "Cadillac automobile driven by a student wearing a Lombard College jacket" rescued the spies, who sprinted through the lawn and away from the Knox watchmen.

Schissler denied it all, but a 14-0 victory for his previously 1-7 team spoke louder than any self-righteous blather he could muster. After Lombard squad shut out Knox again in 1922 and 1923, the latter school ended the series, fed up. There was no reconciliation by the time Lombard closed its gates in 1930.

The history of sports is rich with stories of spying, surveillance and sign-stealing. What the St. Louis Cardinals front office allegedly did in accessing a proprietary Houston Astros database this week—no, it wasn't actually hacking—is little more than a higher-tech version of what Lombard's "letter sweater"-wearing spies were doing 94 years ago, and what countless others have been doing ever since. If you're not cheating, you're not trying—and if you are trying, you're probably spying.

Consider the last decade. Football had Spygate, and it wasn't just the Patriots who were implicated. Newsday broke a story in 2007 that the Jets had been caught videotaping a Patriots (who else?) practice the season before, and former coach Jimmy Johnson said on Fox's NFL pregame show, "I know for a fact there were various teams doing this… That doesn't make it right, but a lot of teams are doing this." Baseball, meanwhile, is constantly racked with allegations of sign-stealing. The biggest recent scandal involved a mysterious "man in white" in the center field stands at Toronto's Rogers Centre, who allegedly signaled opposing pitch selections to Blue Jays hitters by waving his arms.

Again, this isn't new. A story on the New York Jets' preparation for 1969's Super Bowl III discussed the team's fear of spies, born after the Jets' traveling secretary had discovered a man watching New York's practices at a training camp in Denver, and then injured himself while chasing the spy out of his perch in a tree. In 1976, the University of Oklahoma was caught spying on closed University of Texas football practices. A businessman named Lonnie Williams—also a personal friend of an Oklahoma assistant—posed as a painter and hid in Memorial Stadium bathrooms to take notes. Longhorns coach Darrell Royal was first tipped off when Oklahoma players recognized a "quick kick" formation the team hadn't used in four years. Coach Barry Switzer denied all involvement (sound familiar?), but years later admitted his knowledge of the scheme.

And then there were the men with reputations. Al Davis aroused such suspicions that a paranoid Buffalo Bills coach shooed away a nun from watching his team at training camp at Niagara University, a Catholic school. A psychologist working with the San Diego Chargers in 1971 recalled head coach Harland Svare yelling into a light fixture, "Damn you Al Davis!" When Davis heard the story, he responded, "The bug wasn't in the light fixture." And then there was Washington coach George Allen, whose most creative scheme involved a mother pushing a baby carriage around an opposing team's practice—except the spy wasn't the mom, but a little person Allen stashed in the carriage.

We shouldn't be surprised. American sports were designed to recreate an atmosphere of war. Some men made it explicit, like the Muscular Christians of the 1800s. Or men like former California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Max Rafferty, who said in 1970 that "Football is war — without killing. Athletes possess the clear, bright fighting spirit which is America itself." Rafferty might sound a bit daft to modern ears, but then again, our sports vocabulary is stuffed with explicit and implicit references to war—"blitz," "battle," "throwing the bomb," "field general," "captain," and on and on.

It would be naive, really, to think this metaphorical understanding of sports is limited to game days. If our athletes are supposed to believe it's war out there when they come out of the tunnel or go up to bat, why would said war end after the game is over and hands are shaken? There's always another battle to be fought, always more planning to be done, always more intelligence to gather, via above-board scouting or through sneakier means.

Of course, the men in charge of these teams are supposed to be aware that they aren't actually fighting a war, that these are just people—sometimes kids—playing a game. But in America, the men in charge of sports teams have always fancied themselves commanders and generals, and at some point, perhaps from the very start, they forgot they were playing pretend. As such, it was only a matter of time until the world of sports espionage moved into the digital age. The Cardinals just happened to be the first—the first to get caught, at least.