By Chris Brown – STL Baseball Today
FBI investigators have recommended that charges be brought down on at least one St. Louis Cardinals employee implicated in the security breach of the Houston Astros’ baseball operations database known as Ground Control, according to a report released Friday evening by CNN.
According to the report from Evan Perez and Shimon Prokupecz, the federal investigation into the unauthorized entry has concluded but is awaiting action by the Houston U.S. attorney’s office, although it’s unclear what the probe revealed regarding other members of the Cardinals organization. It’s also not clear at this time whether the person of mention (or one of them) is scouting director Chris Correa, who was fired by the team on Thursday.
Per a report published on Thursday by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who broke the news of Correa’s firing, the 34-year-old admitted to illegally accessing the database, but said said it was only “to verify whether the Astros had stolen any proprietary data,” when former Cardinals general manager Jeff Luhnow and other team employees moved to Houston in late 2011. According to that source, Correa didn’t leak any Astros’ data and is not responsible for any of the other alleged hacks or leaks. It’s not clear when Correa’s supposed access of the system occurred.
The most-widely discussed one of those reported breaches allegedly occurred at a house in Jupiter, Florida, the Cardinals Spring Training home, in the spring of 2014. Back in mid-June, an official familiar with the investigation told Yahoo! Sports’ Jeff Passan, who broke the news of the Jupiter breach, that many team employees used the house. A New York Times story published roughly a week later reported that the F.B.I. was struggling to determine who was actually responsible for the breach, as the house was shared by many Cardinals employees. The CNN report from Friday notes that Correa was among the employees who resided in that home.
However, reports from the Houston Chronicle, including this latest one from David Barron and Evan Drellich, allege computer breaches of the Astros’ system as far back as 2012, shortly after Luhnow moved to Houston.
Although Correa himself refused comment to the Post-Dispatch, his lawyer Nicholas Williams provided the following statement, accusing former Cardinals employees of stealing information from the organization prior to joining the Astros:
“Mr. Correa denies any illegal conduct. The relevant inquiry should be what information did former St. Louis Cardinals employees steal from the St. Louis Cardinals organization prior to joining the Houston Astros, and who in the Houston Astros organization authorized, consented to, or benefitted from that roguish behavior.”
Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak confirmed that Correa had been let go Thursday afternoon shortly after the Post-Dispatch report was released, but he declined to comment on why Correa had been dismissed.
“I can confirm he was on administrative leave and was terminated yesterday,” Mozeliak said. “I think, at this time, it’s just best to understand it’s an open investigation and any other comments are not in anybody’s best interest.”
The F.B.I. investigation has focused on whether Cardinals front-office employees broke federal law by illegally accessing Houston’s well-known internal communication and evaluation system Ground Control. The database houses information on trade discussions as well as statistics, scouting reports, and medical information on players, according to reports released previously by the Post-Dispatch and New York Times, which broke the story on the hacking investigation.
According to the CNN report, officials “have also focused on whether senior officials at the Cardinals were aware of the spying.” Chairman and CEO Bill DeWitt Jr. and GM John Mozeliak have both firmly denied any knowledge or involvement in the matter. “Unequivocally, I knew nothing about this,” Mozeliak told USA Today Sports’ Bob Nightengale shortly after the initial news broke.
Hired as the team’s scouting director just seven months ago in December to replace Dan Kantrovitz, who left for the Oakland Athletics, Correa has been with the Cardinals since 2009, working closely with Jeff Luhnow in the scouting department as a statistical analyst before Luhnow and many of his staffers moved to Houston when he was named their GM in December 2011.
Luhnow worked his way up the ladder in the Cardinals scouting and player development department after he was hired by the team in 2003, and he was a key figure in the development of the club’s Redbird database, similar to Ground Control, which he set up upon his arrival in Houston. Sig Mejdal, current Director of Decision Sciences for the Astros (a sabermetrics analyst), was among the employees who moved to with Luhnow to the Astros from St. Louis.
In wake of his departure from the Cardinals, some team employees appear to have believed that Luhnow and/or the employees that he took with them took proprietary information with them from the team, according to the CNN report. Additionally, the statement from Correa’s lawyer accuses former Cardinals and current Astros employees of doing just that. The words from the Post-Dispatch source mentioned above seem to indicate that Correa may have decided to investigate the suspicions that Astros’ employees had taken data from the Cardinals himself but did not steal or leak any data. Despite his lawyer’s claims, if this was the case, Correa still broke the law by accessing Houston’s database instead of notifying authorities.
Luhnow has asserted that while Houston’s database was created similarly to the Cardinals, no information was brought illegally to Houston when he came on as GM. Astros’ attorney Giles Kibbe told the Post-Dispatch on Friday that no information was taken illegally from the Cardinals by any Houston employee. Kibbe told CNN later that day that the team looks forward to the conclusion of the federal investigation and stands by “all of our previous comments.”
As CNN and other sources have reported, the illegal access mentioned is not believed to actually be computer hacking. Instead, it’s believed that the Cardinals employees involved used an old password previously belonging to Luhnow or one of the former St. Louis employees who went to Houston to log into the Ground Control network. Luhnow has denied specific rumors that an old password of his could have been used to log on illegally.
This is a rapidly developing story. Check back on stlbaseballtoday.com and follow @STLBBToday on Twitter for updates as they come in.
Feature image used under Creative Commons from Ron Cogswell. No changes made. Image License.
