The ugliness builds page by page, incident by incident, and by the end of the federal indictment against former St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa, this much is obvious: If Major League Baseball doesn't dock the Cardinals draft picks in addition to a seven-figure fine, it is not just tacitly approving the computer crimes to which Correa pleaded guilty on Friday but encouraging similar nefariousness among other teams.

Chris Correa leaves the Bob Casey Federal Courthouse in Houston. (AP) More

Shock rippled around baseball Friday when authorities released the five-page charging documents that detailed Correa's crimes. In accessing the Astros' proprietary Ground Control database, the team's repository for player evaluation, he sought draft information before and during the draft, trade information on the day of the trade deadline and, in the grossest breach, broke into an Astros employee's email to retrieve the new URL and password to Ground Control after the Astros had changed both.

As far as sins in baseball go, this exceeds any brushbacks or beanballs, any signs that can be stolen, anything shot subcutaneously through a needle. This is a direct assault on another team's front office, the triumvirate of immoral, unethical and illegal, and no matter where it emanated from on the corporate hierarchy, the punishment needs to be severe.

That it came from the director level – one step down on the organizational chart from general manager John Mozeliak – only adds embarrassment to a team that prides itself on conducting things The Cardinal Way, which presumably does not include vengeance hacking among its chief tenets.

It's bad when the best defense a team can muster is that an employee committed federal crimes in the name of retrieving something that may or may not have been stolen. In court Friday, Correa contended he hacked Ground Control in search of proprietary information Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, a former top Cardinals executive, may have taken with him to Houston – a charge the Astros denied in a statement. Were this a one-time job, that's a reasonable-enough explanation from Correa, even if the action is still wildly illegal.

Of course, this was far from an isolated incident, as the government laid out in its case against Correa, who lawyers believe could serve prison time even with his guilty plea. When an employee left the Cardinals in December 2011 – the Astros hired Luhnow on Dec. 8 that year – he turned in his computer and password to Correa. The employee, noted as Employee A in the indictment, used a similar password with the Astros, and Correa gained entry to Ground Control and an email account using it in March 2013.

On March 24, Correa downloaded an Excel file from Ground Control that ranked every draft-eligible player. He looked at other pages that included notes on trade discussions, what the Astros thought of Cardinals prospects, potential draft bonuses and scouting reports. The final 30 rounds of the draft took place June 8, when Correa accessed Ground Control again – and sorted the list of players by those still undrafted.

Seven weeks later, on July 31 – the day of baseball's non-waiver trade deadline – Correa logged into Ground Control to once again see the Astros' trade discussions. The talks eventually wound up on an anonymous sharing site in June 2014, the Astros' innermost workings laid bare for the world to see.

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