Former Cardinals scout chief facing jail over Astros hack

As part of his plea, he admitted accessing information about Houston Astros prospects and trade discussion, as well as other information. He also admitting taking measures to hide his identity.

Baseball has seen its fair share of cheating scandals in recent years with the whole PED mess, the Pete Rose ccandal, corked bats, illegal pine tar uses, etc. But nothing seems to be as more high-tech, thought out, and as ridiculous as this report of Cardinals employees hacking the database of another franchise. “And he said they did”, U.S. Attorney Kenneth Magidson said in a telephone interview after the hearing. “It goes to his motive”. He took issue with comments made by Correa when he told the judge he had found Cardinals’ proprietary information in the Astros computer system.

Chris Correa, of St. Louis, entered a guilty plea to five counts of unauthorized access of a protected computer, says federal prosecutor Ken Magidson in Houston. We have a great amount of respect for Bill DeWitt and the Cardinals organization. After that, Major League Baseball added, “we will determine what further actions to take”. In June, on the morning of the third day of the draft, Mr. Correa again viewed the Astros’ internal draft page, filtering results to view only players who had to be selected.

Correa had been charged December 22, but the case was sealed until he appeared in court.

Correa worked for the Cardinals from 2009 to July 2015. He became the director of baseball development in 2013. Having that information, Correa was able to access the now-Astros employee’s Ground Control and e-mail accounts using a variation of the password he used while with the Cardinals.

According to the summary of the charges, a former Cardinals employee was told to turn over his Cardinals laptop and password to Correa.

A charging document which was unsealed on Friday claims that the culprit behind the cyber-espionage downloaded a list of every eligible player for the year’s draft that had been compiled by the Astros. Hughes asked Correa, referring to the Astros.

— The unauthorized access continued even after the Astros changed passwords, the website address and other security precautions involving Ground Control, an Astros database that housed proprietary information and that was the subject of a detailed 2014 report in the Houston Chronicle.

Rob Manfred has said Major League Baseball will wait until the FBI finishes its investigation until the league launches its own.

Federal investigators began looking into a possible breach this summer.

The commissioner has broad power when it comes to leveling punishments against individual clubs.