Major League Baseball just announced its punishment in the St. Louis Cardinals hacking scandal, and it’s pretty severe. The Cardinals will have to forfeit their first two picks in the 2017 draft—Nos. 56 and 75—and were additionally fined $2 million. MLB did not stop there, however. Both the money and the draft picks will go directly to the Astros.
If you’ve forgotten how this all started—totally reasonable, by the way, since this started nearly three years ago—here’s a quick recap. In 2014, the Astros proprietary online database of player statistics, Ground Control, was hacked and certain documents were leaked online. A year after that, the New York Times reported that several members of the St. Louis Cardinals front office were being investigated. In July 2015, St. Louis fired Chris Correa, who had recently been promoted to director of scouting. Last January, Correa pleaded guilty to five counts of illegal entry into the Astros database, and was sentenced to 46 months in jail.
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The connection between the two franchises was Jeff Luhnow. Before he was the Astros general manager, he was an executive with the Cardinals and got the idea for Ground Control from a similar database developed while he was in St. Louis. Luhnow brought some staff with him from the Cardinals and Correa was able to access the system using the same passwords they had in St. Louis. Documents that were recently unsealed by a federal court detail the extent of Correa’s snooping.
According to the documents, portions of which remained redacted, Correa intruded into the Astros’ “Ground Control” database 48 times and accessed the accounts of five Astros employees. For 21/2 years, beginning in January 2012, Correa had unfettered access to the e-mail account of Sig Mejdal, the Astros’ director of decision sciences and a former Cardinals employee.
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On April 3, 2013, two months before that year’s amateur draft – the second of three consecutive years in which the Astros had the No. 1 overall pick – Correa accessed the Astros’ list of players they considered drafting, ranked in preferential order, the document shows. He also accessed the scouting observations of Astros amateur scouting director Mike Elias, national cross-checker David Post and regional scout Brian St. Pierre.
That same day, Correa checked the Astros’ latest reports on Marco Gonzales, a lefthanded pitcher from Gonzaga who two months later the Cardinals drafted with the 19th overall pick.
In addition to the docked picks and fine to the Cardinals, Correa has been banned from baseball, joining Pete Rose on the permanently inelgible list.
