Photo via Shutterstock.
Photo via Shutterstock.

Your typical “hack” story doesn’t typically involve two Major League Baseball teams, but that’s exactly what the FBI and Justice Department are investigating.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that the St. Louis Cardinals are under investigation for allegedly hacking into the internal networks of rival Houston Astros in an attempt to steal information on scouting reports, trades, and proprietary analytics.

The Times notes that this is the first instance of a professional sports team being investigated for corporate hacking.

Investigators say front office employees from the Cardinals, one of baseball’s most accomplished franchises that won a World Series title in 2011, were concerned that former colleague Jeff Luhnow — who became Houston’s general manager in December 2011 — took proprietary information from St. Louis to Houston. So, the Cardinals employees went through old passwords created by Luhnow and used them to hack into Houston’s network.

More from the Times:

Believing that the Astros’ network had been compromised by a rogue hacker, Major League Baseball notified the F.B.I., and the authorities in Houston opened an investigation. Agents soon found that the Astros’ network had been entered from a computer at a home that some Cardinals officials had lived in. The agents then turned their attention to the team’s front office.

Here’s my favorite tweet about the story so far:

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