MLB disciplines Cardinals in hacking scandal involving Astros

Major League Baseball has ordered the St. Louis Cardinals to send two draft picks and $2 million as punishment for Chris Correa’s hacking of the Astros’ email and player evaluation databases, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred announced Monday.

The Astros will be rewarded the Cardinals’ top two picks for June’s draft — the 56h and 75th overall selections. St. Louis surrendered its first-round pick in signing free-agent center fielder Dexter Fowler this offseason.

Correa, the 36-year-old former Cardinals scouting director, is serving a 46-month sentence in federal prison after pleading guilty in January 2016 to five counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer. He will be placed on MLB’s permanently ineligible list effective immediately, MLB said.Court filings unsealed by U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes on Thursday revealed that Correa intruded into the Astros’ “Ground Control” database 48 times and accessed the accounts of five different Astros employees.

These documents also show that Correa had “unfettered access” for 2 1/2 years, beginning in January 2012, to the email account of Astros director of decision sciences Sig Mejdal, who leads the team’s baseball analytics department.

Correa had worked under Mejdal as an analyst with the Cardinals until Mejdal joined Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, also a former Cardinals executive, in Houston after the 2011 season.

The Cardinals fired Correa in July 2015 amid the FBI’s investigation into the hacks. Correa was sentenced in July, about six months after pleading guilty, but some details of his actions weren’t disclosed to the public until the Hughes unsealed three documents last week.

Portions of the documents remain redacted.

“(Correa) knew what projects the Astros’ analytics department was researching, what concepts were promising and what ideas to avoid,” assistant U.S. attorney Michael Chu wrote in his sentencing report. “He had access to everything that Sig Mejdal … read and wrote.”

Chu also detailed how the extent to which Correa accessed the Astros’ scouting reports and medical records of draft prospects in the weeks and months leading to the June 2013 amatuer draft.

Chu wrote in a separate document that Correa studied the Astros’ trade notes “at least 14 times” as the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline approached and intruded again before the annual general managers’ meetings and winter meetings the following offseason.

“Ultimately, Correa was not intruding to see if the Astros took any information — rather, he was keenly focused on information that coincided with the work he was doing for the Cardinals,” Chu wrote.

A third document includes a subpoena from Correa’s attorney to obtain documents from the Astros, based on Correa’s statement that he was combing the files looking for information taken from the Cardinals.

Hughes denied the request, which sought access to emails between Mejdal, Luhnow, former Astros assistant GM David Stearns and analyst Mike Fast regarding key words like “Girsch,” the last name of Cardinals assistant GM Mike Girsch, “PV,” which according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is the Cardinals’ abbreviation for a player’s value, and “RedBirdDog,” name of the Cardinals’ private database.