The Cardinals Way (22 page)

Where They Will Be Next Year:
Either here, or darn close to here. Their first-round pick doesn't come until the 25th selection, so there's no star power coming from there either, not unless someone falls into their lap. If Miller collapses for some reason, there's nobody here worthy of top-prospect recognition.
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To be fair to Goldstein—one of the best writers on the minor leagues before getting hired in 2012 by the Houston Astros … and Jeff Luhnow—he wasn't so much criticizing the Cardinals' overall development of minor league talent as what was left—note the point about trading, “which happens when you are a perennial contender.” From that perspective, the new pipeline was working quite well.

As
Baseball America Prospect Handbook, 2010
noted, “The Cardinals rushed RHPs Clayton Mortensen (1s) and Jess Todd (2), then used them in deals for Holliday and Mark DeRosa … 3B/1B Brett Wallace (1) would be the best prospect in the system if the Cardinals hadn't used him and OF Shane Peterson (2) in a trade for Matt Holliday.”
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If that sounds like the Cardinals traded a ton of talent to get Matt Holliday, you're right. But a few things about that: They targeted Holliday for nearly eighteen months before acquiring him. This happened in a multitude of ways, from scouting him first with the Colorado Rockies, then with the Oakland Athletics, who acquired him in November 2008. Mozeliak and DeWitt met and discussed what it would probably take to keep him once he hit free agency, and they created room in future budget years for a player they hadn't yet acquired.

Holliday was something the organization hadn't developed—a right-handed, power-hitting left fielder to put in the middle of the lineup with Albert Pujols and absolutely terrify opposing pitchers. Holliday would be in high demand, and by some of the smartest teams, too—note that it was the Athletics who first pried him loose from the Rockies.

But money alone wasn't going to give the Cardinals a chance to trade for him. Again: the paradigm had changed.

Why that mattered so significantly, according to DeWitt, was how much more success the Cardinals have with retaining free agents once they play in St. Louis, as opposed to luring them to the Cardinals when they hit the market, unfamiliar with the experience.

“We actually talked to Colorado about dealing for him before the A's made the trade,” DeWitt said.

“We had a lot of intel on Matt that he was a great team guy in addition to being a good player. He was in the right point in his career. We haven't been successful in getting free agents who weren't already here. Once they hit free agency, they know about the Cardinals and they know it's a great place to play, but that process is so hard. You get a lot of advice when you're a player in free agency. Players have told us it's not pleasant. You travel all over the place. You talk to a number of teams. And players, generally, who go that route, gravitate to the highest bid. And we just haven't had success in being the highest bidder for premium players. Sure, we've signed free agents, but they haven't necessarily been premium players. They've been more complementary players. They're not all-star players.

“Unless they've been with us. And once they're here and they understand the environment, I've never heard a player say, ‘You know what? When I get to free agency, I'm going to look around and decide to go somewhere else.' They always say, ‘I want to stay here. Let's try and make it happen.' They just wanted to be treated fairly. And we've really had a lot of success with that.” DeWitt mentioned the signings of Jim Edmonds, Mark McGwire, Darryl Kile, Scott Rolen, and Matt Holliday off the top of his head, and there were many others.

The approach also requires discipline, which means avoiding an overpay relative to what the team has determined a player is worth. Without the analytic firepower to confidently run an estimate for a player going forward, Mozeliak and DeWitt would instead have been making their best guesses, as much of baseball did for nearly the entirety of the sport's existence.

“Because every team has their limits, whether it's the Yankees and Red Sox or the smallest-payroll team,” DeWitt said. “They feel like for a given need, they can pay so much. Another team might feel they can pay more for that need if they have a higher payroll or if maybe they have some young players and they just feel like they need to get that last piece. So it's what we feel a player's worth to us. What we can afford to pay him and still have a team. I've said many times to players when they negotiate, ‘I'm better than so-and-so, why can't I get paid what they're making?'—because we can't have a team if that happens. We've got these arbitration-eligible players coming up, and we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket and then gamble that we can fill with cheaper players.

“So, if we have someone who can fill the need internally and it's a younger player—we know we'll always have needs. And you've got two resources. You're got financial resources and player resources. We'd rather use financial resources in this era than player resources.”

Notably, the Cardinals spent both on Holliday, first dealing Mortensen, Peterson, and Wallace, then retaining him that winter, after he experienced St. Louis, for seven years for $120 million.

How were they so sure?

“Well, I mean, first—the first question is, is this a replaceable asset?” Mozeliak said of the thinking in paying big for a free agent. “And if the answer is yes, then you have to define how. If the answer's no, that obviously puts a priority on trying to find a way to get it done.

“The season before we traded for him, which was '09, the winter of '08 to '09, we had the scouts looking at Matt Holliday with the Rockies. He subsequently got traded to Oakland. So when he was in Oakland, he was someone that we had a lot of interest in, and the thought process there was to get him here. And then we felt like if he was here, he would enjoy it and want to stay here. And ultimately, that's what happened.”

One of those scouts was Slater, who dug deep into Holliday's profile to get a full sense of the person they'd potentially be investing in. Meanwhile, those on the analytics side put together an estimate of what the Cardinals could expect in production from Holliday on the field as he pushed deeper into his thirties.

“We talked about him leading into that year,” Slater recalled of the winter of 2008–9. “And then come June, I specifically remember being on the phone with Mo at my son's Little League tournament and—the offense needs a lift and why don't we revisit Holliday. So then at one point, Mo said, ‘Okay, make sure you see him.' And the A's played a series at Dodger Stadium that year that I went and saw him. And the one thing I remember is that, even though he wasn't hitting all that much for the A's—maybe not the great numbers he was, if you recall—the ball was coming off the bat. The power being displayed in BP was what I always remembered. I think he was just not in a great [hitting] environment there. That's why he wasn't producing at all.” Playing in the pitcher-friendly Oakland Coliseum, Holliday's OPS+ was 120, down from his career mark of 136.

“And the thing with Holliday, as you know, we re-signed him to a big deal after we had him for half a season. What I recall from seeing him then was his work ethic. His being the first one out of the dugout and—early in the BP and so forth. And that's a key for a good scout, going to games early, are notes on little things like that. That can make a difference.

“And Mo will tell you—we're not a team that signs free agents from other organizations to big contracts. But we do give big contracts to our own players who become free agents. Yadi, Holliday, Wainwright before he did, and so forth. But that's because we feel like we know these players very well. And what do we know about them that makes us give out these contracts is the fact that they have a certain work ethic that tells us that they're going to make team performance better or at least maintain effort throughout a long-term deal. And I think that's something that Holliday showed to us. He was going to be someone who kept his body in shape. Was going to be giving us the effort that we would need to make a long-term commitment to him.”

Holliday, through August 2015, is nearly six years into his seven-year deal. His career OPS+ is 136. With the Cardinals, over that time, it's actually better, 143. And he's been durable as well, averaging 147 games per season, though that number will come down following an injury-filled 2015.

That's an absolutely critical way that Mozeliak incorporated analytics into the Cardinals' full operation—these decisions were made with a full complement of information on hand. This is scouting, this is statistical builds, this is psychology.

The Cardinals are quick to tell you that they haven't invented something new, something that will leave the rest of baseball behind. But what the Cardinals are doing, at all times, is trying to make sure they are using every bit of information available to them, integrating it as quickly as possible into decisions that often have to be made with blinding speed, and to constantly be asking themselves how to get even better at that entire process.

One way Mozeliak thought they could get better was to separate the decisions of the scouting department from player development. So Mozeliak put John Vuch, with longtime development executive Gary LaRocque, atop PD. Luhnow would now be overseeing the draft alone.

“The reason for that was that I felt like having one person doing that meant there just weren't enough controls or filters on it,” Mozeliak said in one of our October 2014 interviews. “Because I think scouting directors, they're not necessarily calibrated on the players that they're drafting and signing. They want to see them succeed. I think it's an imbalance on decision making.

“Well, we were doing an okay job. What was happening was—I don't think we were being honest on when it was time to maybe let a player go. And at some point you need clarity. That's sort of the nature of our business. And when you're convinced, in terms of who you're picking and you want to see them succeed, you have that inherent bias. And that's just a hard thing to get over.

“I think it's more like your personal investment and you want to see it [proven] right. Human nature. It's almost like watching the play-offs right now, right? And you see that manager. You know it's time to get the starter out, yet he tries to get another out. And guess what? He didn't get the out.

“And that's sort of what happens with farm directors, if they're the scouting directors. You're always hoping to get more than maybe you're going to get. And I just felt that having that clarity in our front office ended up helping make better decisions.”

The pairing of Vuch, a lifelong Cardinals fan and front office member who worked his way up from a runner in the late 1970s while he was still in high school, with LaRocque, a cerebral former player and manager who'd taught high school math in the gap year between the end of his playing career and the start of his coaching career, turned out to be effective.

While it was the 1982 Cardinals who lured Dan Kantrovitz into a life of baseball, Bob Gibson's 1968 Cardinals captured Vuch.

“I was born and raised in STL, and like almost everyone in the area was a huge Cardinals fan,” Vuch told me in a December 2014 e-mail. “One of my first memories was my father taking me out of school as a five-year-old in 1st grade to see the Cardinals play in the 1968 World Series. As much as I'd like to say I got to see Bob Gibson strike out 17 in G1, unfortunately it was a 13–1 Game Six loss. From that point on, [I] was a huge Cardinals fan.”

Vuch actually transferred schools, to the University of Missouri–St. Louis, to be available for the team year-round through college.

“The runner duties were pretty basic—we primarily just worked on game days and we'd take tickets and cash from the main ticket office out to the ticket windows throughout the stadium, would take phone messages down to the clubhouse, would run off stats for the media relations department, escort groups down to the field for pregame ceremonies and pretty much anything else they needed us to do.

“I graduated from college in January of 1985, and of course was hoping to get on full-time with the team after graduation, but back then there were probably no more than 30 or so full-time front office employees, so it was a little tougher to find an open position. Of course, after paying for my college education, my parents were wanting me to ‘get a real job,' but since the team was doing so well in '85, I wanted to hang around until the end of the year in case we made it to the World Series, so we agreed that if I didn't get anything full-time by the end of the year, that I would then get more serious about finding a job outside of the game. As fate would have it, in August of '85, Dave Edmonds [who was Stan Musial's son-in-law] mentioned to me that he was leaving his role in the sales department, so I spoke with Joe Cunningham (Sales Director) and expressed my interest. He knew me from my work with taking the groups on the field, and also from running other errands for him, and agreed to hire me for the role. He knew that while I was doing fine with sales, my true interest was on the baseball side of things. He was close with Lee Thomas, who was the Farm Director at the time, and Lee mentioned that he had a young lady [Madeleine Clever] working in an administrative role for him, who felt like her ceiling was limited on the baseball side and was looking to get into sales or marketing. So just prior to the 1988 season, she moved to the sales department, and I moved into her role as a Player Development Assistant—or as I would later tell people, I was ‘traded for a secretary to be named later.'”

Within a few years, the Cardinals GM had Vuch working up arbitration cases. He recalled a desire to incorporate statistics long before the Cardinals ultimately did, which helps to explain why the Strat-O-Matic–playing Vuch, who discovered Bill James in college (and still has the 1983–88 abstracts on his office bookshelf), was so in sync with the Luhnow changeover.