Former St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Christopher Correa pleaded guilty to five counts of unauthorized access of a protected computer, according to a release from the U.S. Department of Justice.
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Eventually, the trail led back to the Cardinals and specifically Correa, 35, who had become the team’s scouting director in December of 2014. However, Correa hacked into an exec’s e-mail account to get the new URL and password, then viewed 118 pages of the Astros’ draft rankings, scouting reports and trade notes.
No other members of the Cardinals organization were charged.
In July, Correa was dismissed by the Cardinals and the Federal Bureau of Investigation recommends charges against Correa for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Correa was only able to infiltrate the Astros database because the team allowed an incoming employee to use an old password, rather than assign or force the worker to pick a new code. Correa accessed the Astros’ system on June 8-before day three of the amateur draft-and the pages he looked at included “information on Players I, J, and K, three players whom the Cardinals had drafted the day before”. At least one former Cardinals employee – Sig Mejdal, a former NASA employee and analytics expert – joined Luhnow in Houston.
The parties agreed that Correa masked his identity, his location and the type of device that he used, and that the total intended loss for all of the intrusions is approximately $1.7 million.
“They were watching what the Astros were doing”, Kenneth Magidson, the US attorney for the Southern District of Texas in Houston, told reporters after Correa’s guilty plea.
The Astros are a team that relies on sabermetrics when evaluating players, and they have been open about their Ground Control databases.
The original FBI investigation into the breach was launched in 2014 when potential player trade information was leaked anonymously to Deadspin.
The source said that others must have accessed Houston’s database if federal investigators’ claims about the number of hacking attempts are correct.
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In a prepared statement, Correa’s lawyer, Nicholas Williams, wrote: “Mr. Correa denies any illegal conduct”.
