Report: FBI investigating Cardinals for stealing information from Astros

The Cardinals have been one of MLB's model franchises over the past 15 years, reaching the World Series four times since 2000 and winning two championships.

This year, St. Louis has the best record in baseball — humming along at 42-21, an absurd 108-win pace that includes a 3-2 victory over the Twins on Monday.

But according to a New York Times report on Tuesday, the Cardinals could be at the heart of a cheating scandal that would make anything done by another of the sporting world's most successful franchises — the NFL's Patriots — pale in comparison.

Per the Times:

The F.B.I and Justice Department prosecutors are investigating whether front-office officials for the St. Louis Cardinals … hacked into internal networks of a rival team to steal closely guarded information about player personnel. Investigators have uncovered evidence that Cardinals officials broke into a network of the Houston Astros that housed special databases the team had built, according to law enforcement officials. Internal discussions about trades, proprietary statistics and scouting reports were compromised, the officials said.

MLB is aware of the investigation and is cooperating, per the report.

Whoa.

Law enforcement officials believe the hacking was executed by vengeful front-office employees for the Cardinals hoping to wreak havoc on the work of Jeff Luhnow, the Astros' general manager who had been a successful and polarizing executive with the Cardinals until 2011.

It is believed that these employees gained access to the Astros' database by using a master list of passwords Luhnow had assembled in his time with the Cardinals.