The FBI began investigating the team in 2015.
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Former St. Louis Cardinals director of scouting Chris Correa will plead guilty to five charges related to accessing scouting data on the Houston Astros' database, the Wall Street Journal reports. Correa will face 12 total charges related to the hacking.
Correa was fired by the Cardinals in July after the FBI announced it would investigate the team for accessing the Astros' scouting database.
Astros General Manager Jeff Luhnow formerly worked for the Cardinals' analytics department, and established the database the team uses for scouting and drafting. He took his position with the Astros in 2011. Correa worked under Luhnow with the Cardinals from 2009 to Luhnow's departure.
Luhnow created a similar scouting database in Houston. Correa became suspicious that the Astros were accessing the Cardinals database created by Luhnow. In July, the St. Louis Dispatch reported the events as follows:
The source said that Correa's involvement in the hacking began in 2013, in an attempt to determine whether Luhnow or any other former Cardinals employees took proprietary data to the Astros.
Correa's suspicions were aroused in part by a résumé in which a job seeker claimed expertise that Correa believed could have come only from working with Cardinals data, the source said.
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. The source claims Correa located some data on the website, but did not report it to his bosses because the information was outdated and unreliable without being redone.
The source said that others must have accessed Houston's database if federal investigators' claims about the number of hacking attempts are correct.
MLB is expected to release a statement on Correa's alleged guilty pleas.
LINK: FBI Investigating St. Louis Cardinals For Hacking Houston Astros