Former St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa will plead guilty to five of 12 charges in the Houston Astros hacking case on Friday afternoon, according to The Wall Street Journal. The 35-year-old Correa was the Cardinals’ director of baseball development until he was sacked last summer, and he faces up to five years in prison on each charge when he is sentenced April 11. Correa was sacked by the Cardinals in July after details of the hacking emerged.
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The Cardinals centered an analytics department around Jeff Luhnow, who became general manager of the Astros in December of 2011. Throughout 2013, Correa was able to access scout rankings of every player eligible for the draft and viewed a weekly digest page that described the performance and injuries of prospects the Astros were considering, according to officials. The database, known as Ground Control, included scouting reports, statistics, and, until just prior to the 2015 season, summaries of trade discussions. That protected computer held the player personnel database of the Houston Astros.
At the time, Correa claimed he accessed the database only to confirm that Luhnow had not lifted proprietary information from the Cardinals and through his attorney denied “any illegal conduct”. Correa says he trespassed on Astros computer system based on suspicion the Astros had unauthorized Cardinals data.
Correa started working with the Cardinals in 2009 as part of the team’s statistical analysis department and worked his way up to director of scouting in 2014. Correa will be released on a $20,000 bond.
Correa admitted taking advantage of the fact that Victim A had used a password for his Astros email that was similar to the one he had used for the Cardinals, and that Victim A had to turn in his laptop and password when he left the Cardinals. Luhnow was a key figure in the Cardinals’ own database, called Redbird. The Cardinals, whose chairman, Bill DeWitt Jr., had blamed the incident on “roguish behavior”, declined comment.
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“There are people with the Cardinals who think Luhnow took credit for a lot of the things St. Louis has been doing for years”, the source told SI. The only team to win more World Series titles than them is the Yankees.
