Baseball Prospect Data Breach: 42,260 Records Exposed from Defunct US Sports Information Site

Baseball Prospect Data Breach: 42,260 Records Exposed from Defunct US Sports Site in 2019

Baseball Prospect, a now-defunct United States website dedicated to sports information and player scouting data, suffered a database breach in March 2019. The incident resulted in the exposure of 42,260 user records, each containing an email address and a plaintext password. The site's audience -- baseball enthusiasts, scouts, and sports analysts -- was likely also active on other sports platforms, ticketing services, and professional networks, making this a useful dataset for credential stuffing campaigns targeting the sports and entertainment sector. The site is no longer operational, meaning direct notification of afected users through the platform is impossible.

Baseball Prospect (March 2019): Data Breach Summary

• Records Exposed: 42,260
• Data Types: Email addresses, plaintext passwords
• Breach Type: Database breach -- unauthorized access to stored user credentials
• Password Type: Plaintext -- stored without hashing or encryption; immediately usable without any cracking
• Country: United States
• Date Leaked: March 27, 2019

Plaintext Passwords in a Sports Database: Persistent Risk

Baseball Prospect's use of plaintext password storage in 2019 placed it in poor company: by that point, the industry standard for secure password storage had been well-established for years, and major platforms had largely moved to salted bcrypt or Argon2 hashing. Storing passwords in plaintext means no cracking step is required before the data becomes weaponizable -- an attacker who obtained the Baseball Prospect database received 42,260 ready-to-use email-password pairs with zero additional effort. Sports information sites occupy an interesting attack surface for threat actors: their user bases often skew toward highly-engaged fans who maintain active accounts on premium sports services, fantasy platforms, and ticketing apps, many of which share user email addresses as account identifiers. A plaintext credential set from a 2019 sports site is a useful starting point for stuffing attacks across this ecosystem.

Defunct Sites and the Notification Gap

With Baseball Prospect no longer operational, the standard post-breach remediation process -- notifying users, forcing password resets, and publishing incident disclosures -- was never available. The practical consequence is that many users whose credentials were exposed in March 2019 may never have recieved any notification. If those users deployed the same password on other platforms in 2019 and have not since changed it, the exposed credentials remain viable attack material today. This is a recurring pattern in the dataset: defunct and legacy platforms disproportionately contribute to undisclosed credential exposure because their operational closure removes any accountability mechanism. The absence of breach notification doesn't mean the data isn't being used; it means affected users have less reason to take protective action.

Check If Your Data Was Exposed

HEROIC's free breach scanner searches across more than 400 billion exposed records, including the Baseball Prospect database breach. If your email appears in this dataset and you reused the exposed password on other platforms around 2019, those accounts should be considered at risk. Use HEROIC's breach scanner to identify all known breach appearances for your email address and prioritize which passwords to update.