Former Cardinals executive pleads guilty to hacking Astros

From 2009 to July 2015, Correa was employed by the Cardinals and became the director of baseball development in 2013. He is looking at up to five years in jail on each charge when he is sentenced on April 11.

The Astros also provided e-mail accounts to their employees.

Prosecutors accused Correa of improperly downloading an Excel file of the Astros’ scouting list naming every eligible player for the 2013 draft.

The Astros are a team that relies on sabermetrics when evaluating players, and they have been open about their Ground Control databases.

“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. In 2014, the Houston Chronicle had a detailed report on the database, noting the team even had a director of decision sciences and that everything from statistics to contract information to scouting reports were stored at a web address protected by a password. Some of the material was posted online.

He used an old password from a former Cardinals employee working for the Astros to access the Houston database “a few” times but did not download data, the source said.

According to the Department of Justice, Correa was able to obtain an Astros employee’s password because that employee has previously been employed by the Cardinals.

Last July, the Cardinals fired Correa in what was believed to be the first known fallout from the scandal, though the team did not say why he was let go.

When Luhnow began to revamp the Cardinals’ talent acquisition strategy, he helped established Redbird Dog, a repository of the entirety of the club’s baseball knowledge.

Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. said this past month that the Cardinals internal investigation had concluded. In this role, he provided analytical support to all areas of the Cardinals’ baseball operations. This sparked an investigation that, according to New York Times, concluded the breach could be traced to a home lived in by Cardinals employees, which turned investigators onto the front office.