Sports fans look at their favorite professional teams and see athletes. Hackers look at sports teams and see data. So, when news broke in June that the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the St. Louis Cardinals' front-office personnel for allegedly hacking into an internal network of the Houston Astros, attorneys who deal with trade secret theft were hardly surprised.

“Business is business,” said Peter Toren, a partner at Weisbrod Matteis & Copley who specializes in intellectual property law and cybersecurity. “The theft of trade secrets takes place more often than people realize, and it was only a matter of time before it happened in the sports world.”

Professional baseball may still hold romance as America's pastime, but like most big businesses today, it has become a sport where statistics and data analytics rule. Your average fan may watch a game to see players make heroic catches or unexpected hits, but the sport is now just as much about tech geeks and even MBAs doing some sort of quantitative analysis of aggregate numbers.