The password of a high-ranking Astros executive that Chris Correa used to access Astros’ systems was based on the name of a player “who was scrawny and who would not have been thought of to succeed in the major leagues, but through effort and determination he succeeded anyway,” assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Chu said in federal court on Jan. 8 when Correa pleaded guilty to hacking the Astros.

“So this user of the password just liked that name, so he just kept on using that name over the years,” Chu said in response to questioning from U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes.

Sprinkling wit throughout the hearing, Hughes called that choice of password admirable, according to the transcript of the re-arraignment, which the Chronicle obtained via a records request.

Correa’s attorney, David Adler, said the password was similar to “Magidson123,” referencing Ken Magidson, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas who prosecuted the case.

“Or Magidson 1/2, 1/4, 1/3,” Hughes said. “I like the scrawny people who succeed through their hard work.”

Correa, who pleaded guilty to five counts of unauthorized access into the Astros system, emphasized that his initial intention for hacking into the team’s system was to see if the Astros had stolen anything from the Cards.

Correa acknowledged he ended up doing much more than that.

“I originally accessed, trespassed the Astros’ resources based on suspicions that they had misappropriated proprietary work from myself and my colleagues,” Correa said.

Hughes asked if he found any Cardinals information, and Correa said he did.

“Who did you tell?,” Hughes asked.

“Colleagues,” Correa said.

Hughes asked for a clarification that Correa meant colleagues at the Cardinals, and Correa confirmed that was whom he was talking about. He did not name anyone in specific, and no one else has been charged.

Correa’s lawyer added that the correct course of action for Correa would have been to tell authorities.

“He did not go to the FBI, which is obviously what he should have done,” Adler said.

Jan 8, 2016 – Correa

Money trail

Correa’s plea deal includes a figure of $1.7 million as the Astros’ intended loss because of his crimes. That dollar value is significant in federal sentencing guidelines, which work on a points system but are not mandatory, leaving the question of how much of prison time Correa is to serve, if any, up to Hughes.

The plea deal calls for a maximum of five years in prison. Correa’s sentencing is set for April 11.

“There has been a lot of talk about guidelines, and that’s an arithmetical calculation which tries to reduce the varieties of human life to a one-page memo,” Hughes said. “Anyway, it’s like we don’t need Shakespeare to describe human life, we got a matrix.”

The software that Correa used in an attempt to mask his location, identity and the device he was using was software anyone can buy, Chu said.

Chu said the negotiations to arrive at the $1.7 million number were lengthy — and the Astros had some influence on it.

“But since much of the data that we looked at focused on the 2013 draft, what we did was we took the number of players that he looked at by 200 and we divided that by the number of players that were eligible to be drafted that year, and we multiplied that times the scouting budget of the Astros that year,” Chu said.

Chu was asked by Hughes if the budget was spent on anything besides the data contained in the Astros’ system.

“After speaking with the Astros repeatedly, we believe that the deliverable from all of those expenses was the information that they put in that database,” Chu said. “So everything that they did for the scouting was also they could have it all put in this one place so they could analyze it.”

Hughes wondered whether other Astros’ areas of information gathering — free agency for example — were involved in the calculation, which they were not.

“Do you know what the Astros’ budget was for the domestic professional scout?” Hughes asked Chu, who said he did not have access to that information. “It doesn’t matter, but I was just curious.”

evan.drellich@chron.com

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