Former St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa will reportedly be indicted Friday with the intent to plead guilty to charges associated with a hack of the Houston Astros' computer network.
Brian Costa of the Wall Street Journal first reported the news Friday. Costa noted Correa has "tentatively agreed" to enter a guilty plea for five of the 12 charges brought against him in the case.
Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times reported in June that prosecutors from both the FBI and the Justice Department were investigating an alleged hack by Cardinals employees into the Astros' network to "steal closely guarded information about players."
Law enforcement officials believed it was a "vengeful" act to disrupt the work of Houston general manager Jeff Luhnow, who left the Cardinals for the Astros in 2011, according to the New York Times report.
Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated noted the Astros reported a breach of their systems after a series of leaks that featured behind-the-scenes information, including 2013 trade deadline talks, showed up online across a 10-month period.
A Verducci source confirmed the expected reasoning for the acts.
"There are people with the Cardinals who think Luhnow took credit for a lot of the things St. Louis has been doing for years," the source told SI. "It wouldn't be surprising that any chance they would have to embarrass him, they would take it."
Correa started working with the Cardinals in 2009 as part of the team's statistical analysis department and worked his way up to director of scouting in 2014. He was fired by the organization in July amid the ongoing investigation.
Robert Patrick and Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported when he was let go that sources said Correa admitted hacking into the Astros' network but only with the intent to see if they had any "stolen proprietary data." He denied responsibility for the leaks and any further hacks that occurred.
No further information about the plea, including which charges he's planning to plead guilty to or the potential punishment he'll face, was immediately released.
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