HOUSTON — The former scouting director of the St. Louis Cardinals pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to hacking into the player database and e-mail system of the Houston Astros in an unusual case of high-tech cheating involving two Major League Baseball clubs.

Chris Correa pleaded guilty to five counts of unauthorized access of a protected computer, access authorities said dated from 2013 to at least 2014, the same year he was promoted to director of baseball development in St. Louis. The 35-year-old Correa was fired last summer and faces up to five years in prison on each charge when he is sentenced April 11.

“I accept responsibility in this case,” Correa told U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes. “I trespassed repeatedly.”

“So you broke in their house?” Hughes asked Correa, referring to the Astros.

“It was stupid,” replied Correa, who is free on $20,000 bond.

The FBI said Correa was able to gain access using a password similar to that used by a Cardinals employee who “had to turn over his Cardinals-owned laptop to Correa along with the laptop’s password” when he was leaving for a job with the Astros in 2011. The employee was not identified, though Jeff Luhnow left St. Louis for Houston in December of that year and is now the general manager of the Astros.

In a five-page charging document, prosecutors said Correa in 2013 improperly downloaded a file of the Astros’ scouting list of every eligible player for that year’s draft. They say he also improperly viewed notes of trade discussions as well as a page that listed information such as potential bonus details, statistics and notes on recent performances and injuries by team prospects.

MLB could discipline the Cardinals, possibly with a fine or a loss of draft picks, but said only that they looked forward to getting details on the case from federal authorities. There was no immediate comment Friday from the Cardinals, whose chairman, Bill DeWitt Jr., had blamed the incident on “roguish behavior.”

Giles Kibbe, general counsel for the Astros, said it was a “difficult day for everyone in baseball” and that all the information in the case would be turned over to the baseball commissioner’s office “to guide us through this.”

He took issue with comments made by Correa when he told the judge he had found Cardinals’ proprietary information in the Astros computer system.

“To be clear, no one at any time with the Cardinals, or anyone associated with Major League Baseball, has ever made any statement, contacted the Astros or raised any concern that anything in our database or in our network was Cardinals’ proprietary information,” Kibbe said.

The Justice Department said Correa illegally accessed information ahead of critical baseball events, including the 2013 amateur draft and before that summer’s non-waiver trade deadline.

The Astros rely heavily on sabermetrics in their evaluation of players and have been open about the fact that they use a database called Ground Control to house proprietary information. In 2014, the Houston Chronicle had a detailed report on the database, noting the team even had a director of decision sciences and that everything from statistics to contract information to scouting reports were stored at a web address protected by a password.

After that story, prosecutors say, the Astros changed passwords, the website address and other security precautions involving Ground Control.