Former St. Louis Cardinals executive pleads guilty to hacking Houston Astros

The scouting director fired by the St. Louis Cardinals after he was accused of hacking into the Houston Astros’ computer network was set to plead guilty to criminal charges Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The Cardinals fired Correa last summer when allegations surfaced.

Prosecutors accused Correa of improperly downloading an Excel file of the Astros’ scouting list naming every eligible player for the 2013 draft. Ground Control was a password-protected online database were confidential payer details like scouting reports, stats and contract information was stored.

In 2014, an internal and proprietary Astros database was compromised from outside the organization and portions of it were leaked to the public.

It is not yet known which of the charges Correa will plead guilty to.

Even when unauthorized access to the database was detected by the Astros and user passwords were changed, Correa simply logged into the staffer’s email account and lifted the new credentials.

Major League Baseball has not released a statement. “The Astros refute Mr. Correa’s statement that our database contained any information that was proprietary to the St. Louis Cardinals”. U.S. Attorney Kenneth Magidson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a telephone interview after the hearing that Correa claims he found that the Astros had proprietary information belonging to the Cardinals. Astros employees’ emails could also be accessed online via password-protected accounts. Couple that with the fact they aren’t huge upgrades and GM Jeff Luhnow may decide to go a different route.

“It was stupid”, replied Correa, who is free on $20,000 bond. Both Astros employees once worked in analytics for the Cardinals. He also denied he used any of the Cardinals’ intellectual property or information from Redbird to create Houston’s database.

Cardinals Chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. had blamed the alleged hack on “roguish behavior” by a handful of individuals. The Astros and Cardinals were rivals in the National League Central Division until Houston moved to the American League in 2013.