NEWSLETTER
So much for the theory that this was just a few low-level employees playing around.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch just dropped a bombshell in the ongoing Cardinals hacking story: Cardinals Scouting Director Chris Correa has been fired.
According to the report, Correa has admitted to hacking into the Astros’ system, but only to verify whether former Cardinals employees took information from the Cardinals after they left in 2011. It appears that Correa also denies any involvement in additional hacking (the FBI reportedly believes there were multiple incursions over a multi-year period). Nobody is commenting publicly or verifying whether Correa’s departure is related to the hack, but, again, that’s the report.
Correa was promoted to scouting director this year after joining the front office in 2009 to work with then-Cardinals employee Jeff Luhnow (who subsequently left to become the GM of the Astros, thus setting the stage for the hacking scandal in the first place). He became the team’s baseball development manager in 2012, according to the Post-Dispatch.
The investigation is ongoing, but having someone so high up in the organizational structure involved is going to make it harder for the Cardinals to credibly claim that no one at the highest levels was at all aware of what was going on. That said, it appears that Correa was a slightly lower-level employee at the time of the hacking, so it’s still possible the higher ups were unaware.
Once the FBI’s investigation is complete, MLB has intimated that it will take action from there.
