A retired baseball executive called the other day eager to tell me a comment someone had made to him.

“They blamed deflate-gate on the ball boy,” he said, chuckling before he got to the punch line. “Well, now that the Cardinals have said their computer hacking wasn’t done by the high-ranking officials, they can blame it on the batboy.”

That was supposed to be a joke, but chances are good that in this youth-driven technological age the St. Louis batboy would be more likely to be able to hack into the Houston Astros’ computer system than Bill DeWitt Jr., the team’s principal owner and chief executive officer.

The Cardinals’ alleged hack attack is no laughing matter, certainly not when the FBI is involved. Although the investigation seems to be in extra innings – it reportedly is a year old – if there’s something to be found the FBI will find it.

The last time Major League Baseball suspected computer crime the FBI wasn’t involved in the investigation. The New York Times, which was first to report the current investigation, apparently missed that one.

“The attack would represent the first known case of corporate espionage in which a professional sports team hacked the network of another team,” the Times said in reporting the Federal probe.

In 1989, however, MLB investigated similar allegations against the New York Yankees. Baseball never disclosed who specifically it was investigating, but a baseball lawyer said last Friday it was General Manager Syd Thrift and his chief aide, Jim Bowden.

Thrift died in 2006. Bowden, now an ESPN.com analyst, did not initially respond last week to telephone and e-mail efforts to reach him, later explaining that he had been “at my dad’s burial memorial service and life celebration.” He called this week and explained the 1989 investigation and other issues in which he has been involved.

I wanted to talk to Bowden to find out why he thinks he seems to be singled out so often for suspicion of wrongdoing, especially when it turned out to be unwarranted.

Bowden and Thrift were suspected of taking computer files when they left the Pittsburgh Pirates after the 1988 season. They landed with the Yankees in March 1989. It was never clear who made the accusation of computer theft, but three weeks after they left the Yankees (at the end of August 1989) MLB cleared them of any wrongdoing.

”We have looked into allegations that Pittsburgh scouting information may have been tampered with,” baseball administrator Bill Murray said in a statement at the time. ”At this time, we see no reason to continue to pursue this issue.”

People who worked with Bowden in Pittsburgh would not have been surprised had he taken files with him. His fellow employees obviously did not like him.

“He started as a public relations intern and got buddy buddy with Syd,” one employee said. “There were very few computers in the building, but the scouting department had computers and Syd got him working on the computer. He told people he worked through the Thanksgiving weekend and that’s why Syd liked him so much.

“Nobody ever trusted him. We all knew he was compiling information so that when he went to New York he could take anything.”

But MLB found no evidence that Bowden did anything improper or illegal. Nevertheless, the day after Thrift resigned from his job with the Yankees, George Steinbrenner emphatically displayed his distrust of Bowden.

“George became concerned that he would leave Yankee Stadium with stuff he didn’t have a right to,” said a former baseball executive familiar with the incident.

“My understanding is that’s when Bowden started to go on line and be critical of the Yankees’ way of scouting, comparing it to other organizations. When George became aware of that, he called Bob Quinn and said get rid of him and escort him out of the building.”

Bowden said it was all a misunderstanding.

“Computers were new and no one understood them way back then in the 80s,” Bowden said. “You would use software that was ‘R’ based (for the integration of pathway data). When we went to the Yankees, we bought the same software we used with the Pirates. They looked into it and found out what the story was.”

Quinn, who briefly followed Thrift as the Yankees’ general manager, did as ordered with Bowden, but it didn’t sour him on his young associate. Quinn left the Yankees soon after Thrift and Bowden, went to Cincinnati to be the Reds’ general manager and hired Bowden.

“I hired him in Cincinnati,” Quinn once explained, “because we were so far behind we needed some computer guy. I hired him because he was supposed to be a computer whiz.”

Quinn followed Bill Bergesch and Murray Cook as Reds’ general managers who had served in that same role with the Yankees. Bowden broke that string when he succeeded Quinn in Cincinnati in 1992, then went on to serve until 2003.

It was in his next job, in Washington after moving with the team from Montreal, that Bowden encountered his next accusation.

In 2009 Federal authorities investigated charges that Nationals’ executives and scouts were skimming money from bonuses intended for amateur Latin players the National signed.

The Nationals fired Jose Rijo, a former major league pitcher and Bowden’s special assistant, and Jose Baez, the Nationals’ director of operations in the Dominican Republic. Bowden, however, incurred no penalty or no finding of guilt.

“I’m very confident Bowden didn’t know anything about it.” said Stan Kasten, Bowden’s boss then and Los Angeles Dodges’ president now. “There was no wrongdoing on Jim’s part. There was never any credible allegations that Jim did anything. Nothing was found to lead to that conclusion. I don’t believe today there was any shred of truth to it. As to money going to anyone in our front office, there was no finding that it did.”

Bowden, however, resigned March 1, 2009, denying what he called “false allegations, insinuations and innuendoes by the press.” He added, “There have been no charges made and there has been no indication that parties have found any wrongdoing on my part.”

In the telephone interview, Bowden said, “They looked into everything and didn’t find anything.”

Bowden’s most recent episode came when he was no longer a general manager but was a member of the news media. It involved a prank played at Bowden’s expense by people I don’t know and have no reason to trust. Worse, it centered around a phony Twitter account and a fictional tweet. Right there is enough to heighten the sleaze factor.

Using the name of a known newspaper reporter, someone tweeted a report last August that Marlon Byrd had been traded by the Phillies to the Yankees. The prankster or pranksters, clearly aiming to embarrass Bowden, said that without confirming or attributing the fictional report Bowden tweeted it on his Twitter account as his own report.

“Two minutes later,” one report of the fake report said, “the news was on Bowden’s account: ‘Yankees acquire Marlon Byrd’—a tweet that since has been deleted.”

Bowden’s explanation at the time was ridiculed by his critics, very likely including the perpetrators of the prank, but he repeated it.

“My account was hacked, like a lot of people get hacked,” he told me. “They hacked into my account and took over control of it. I have better security now.”

Bowden’s critics don’t believe him. But does their feeling justify putting a fake message on Twitter, using a real writer’s name to further their prank? I suggest their actions are as wrong as Bowden’s, if he did “steal” the Byrd tweet to use a word from a headline on a report of the prank.

The whole thing about the fake tweet and Bowden’s Twitter account makes me feel justified in shunning all of that nonsense. It’s not journalism and, in fact, demeans journalism.