The Astros receive two draft picks and $2 million from the Cardinals to compensate Houston for the computer hacking by a Cardinals employee:

Houston will receive the Cardinals’ top two Draft selections — Nos. 56 and 75 — in the 2017 Draft, which is the most severe penalty of its kind imposed on an organization. The Commissioner’s decision to have the Cardinals pay reparations to the Astros was because he determined that Houston suffered material harm as a result of Correa’s actions.

The Cardinals also are required to pay $2 million to the Astros within the next 30 days. The amount is substantially higher than the damage calculation relied on by the federal government in its case against Correa, who is serving a 46-month prison sentence for unlawfully accessing another company’s information. As part of Manfred’s ruling, Correa was placed on the permanently ineligible list.

Very good. The Cardinals are lucky in a way they are not losing a high draft pick, but for a team that is very good at recognizing and developing talent, they are going to have a bit of a hole in their system for one year. It’s a bonanza for Houston, which will have at least four picks in the top 100.

This sends a very clear signal to clubs that hacking won’t be tolerated.

I hope the two players chosen with the two forfeited picks make the majors together so we can call them the Hack Brothers.

Via BBTF, new information about the Cardinals hacking the Astros:

According to the documents, portions of which remained redacted, Correa intruded into the Astros’ “Ground Control” database 48 times and accessed the accounts of five Astros employees. For 21/2 years, beginning in January 2012, Correa had unfettered access to the e-mail account of Sig Mejdal, the Astros’ director of decision sciences and a former Cardinals employee. Correa worked in St. Louis as an analyst under Mejdal, who came to Houston after the 2011 season with Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, also a former Cardinals executive.

“(Correa) knew what projects the Astros’ analytics department was researching, what concepts were promising and what ideas to avoid,” said one of the documents, signed by Michael Chu, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the case against Correa. “He had access to everything that Sig Mejdal … read and wrote.”

The story was that Correa thought the Astros staff had taken information from the Cardinals. If so, the first couple of days would have confirmed that. This looks like a much more aggressive hack, one aimed at stealing information instead of uncovering wrong-doing.