The Cardinals hacking soap opera continues

Within the last couple days, a seemingly innocent transaction crossed over the wires as the St. Louis Cardinals fired scouting director Chris Correa.

A quick check behind the lines reveals why, and it makes you wonder what Correa was thinking.

Could he have been the mastermind behind the hacking incident that has all of the Cardinals haters turned toward St. Louis with laughter?

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Correa didn’t seem like he would be implicated. After all, he just took the job in December when Dan Kantrovitz left to become assistant general manager of the Oakland Athletics.

According to St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporters Derrick Goold and Robert Patrick, Correa denies any involvement in the case other than hacking into a Houston database to determine if the Astros top brass stole any data.

So who’s telling the truth?

And, more to the point, why would you want to target the Astros? Is it something Jeff Luhnow, the team’s general manager and a former Cardinals front-office executive, did?

It is possible the Cardinals wanted to check and see if the Astros had any top-secret information stolen from St. Louis’ computers. Either way, hacking isn’t the way to do it.

The Cardinals front office is once again silent. Owner Bill DeWitt Jr. and general manager John Mozeliak did address the matter a few days after the story originally broke. Now they have gone back into clam-up mode.

Did they order the firing of Correa because they sensed he had done something terrible involving sharing of information?

Either way, Correa looks like he was still in action up to this week, signing draft picks and taking care of front-office matters before he was fired at mid-week.

My take: I still do not believe anyone in the Cardinals front office was attached to the hacking scandal. Mozeliak and DeWitt are straight-up guys who do not boast about anything but doing things “The Cardinal Way”.

This is not the Cardinal Way, and everyone who follows this team knows it.

I suspect there will be more to this story as it unravels. Until then, a firework exploded a little early. Here’s hoping there aren’t a number of explosions yet to come.