The Cardinals Way (23 page)

“For a long time, I was the closest thing we had to an analytic department—at one point my title was something like Manager of Baseball Information, so I was all for us ramping up the statistical side of things, as I thought we underutilized the stats in our decision making process,” Vuch wrote. “For example, one of the things they would have me do each year was project what an appropriate offer would be for free agents, and when I gave them my projection for Tino Martinez, they thought I was crazy for saying that he shouldn't get more than two years and shouldn't get more than $5MM/year because ‘he hit 34 HR's last year.' I pointed out that he was 32 or 33 years old and that 22 of those 34 HR's came at home as a LH hitter playing in Yankee Stadium, and that you shouldn't expect nearly that level of production playing 81 games in Busch Stadium. Unfortunately, we ended up giving him 3 years times $7 MM and his production ended up dropping off to about what you would have gotten if you took out his Yankee Stadium numbers from his last year in NY.”

As for LaRocque, his experience as both a player and a coach prepared him for the almost familial obligations when it comes to developing and promoting within the farm system. A Hartford, Connecticut, product, LaRocque stayed local for school at the University of Hartford. The Brewers drafted him as a shortstop.

“And I'm a fourteenth-rounder, senior sign,” LaRocque recalled when we chatted in a June 2014 interview. “I'm a college kid. There's not a big negotiation going on here. And they said—I'll never forget, because [Brewers scout] Dick Bogard, at the end of the conversation, he said, ‘Now we got your contract.' And they put the contract out and I said, ‘Well, Mr. Bogard, don't guys in a draft normally get some kind of bonus? Even five hundred dollars?'

“And he said, ‘Well, they do. But not in your case.' End of negotiations. So I signed the contract right away.”

LaRocque played a few years in the minor leagues, OPS maxing at .697 in A-ball, though he did steal 27 bases in 34 attempts. But he said of himself, “Looking back now with my scouting background, I was a Double-A player. I didn't have enough bat to carry me to anything higher.”

So LaRocque went home to East Windsor, Connecticut, taught mathematics at the local high school, and coached the baseball team. He'd been told by several people he should get into coaching.

“I decided I wanted to go from being an old player, twenty-four, twenty-five, to being a young coach,” LaRocque said. “In February of '79, I had written a note to the Dodgers vice president Bill Schweppe, a minor league man that's in charge of their system. So he called me back and said, ‘We have an opening.' This is in February. Spring training's coming. He said, ‘We've got an opening in Clinton in the Midwest league for a coach.' Keep in mind, back then you have one manager and coaches were just starting into systems. And I'm saying to myself, ‘This is an opportunity. This is the Dodgers. I'm twenty-six years old, whatever. I got to take this.' But I said to him, ‘I'm sorry, Mr. Schweppe. I can't do it.' I said that I made a commitment here. I'm coaching a baseball team in the spring. I can't do it. He said, ‘Well, I'm awfully sorry,' and I thought that was it. I get a call, April first, when camps breaks. And he said, ‘Gary. Bill Schweppe. We still have that opening in Clinton. We haven't named anybody.' And I said, ‘Well, Mr. Schweppe, I can't do it, you know? I'm coaching this baseball team. I'll be done in June. I made a commitment to the school. I can't do it.'

“So the year's up. He calls me. I thought for sure that I'd lost him. He called me in June and he said, ‘We have two openings. One in Clinton. Clinton still. And Lethbridge in the Pioneer League rookie league. We need a coach there, too.' He said, ‘Can you make it?' So I said, ‘I'll be there in two days.' He said, ‘Where do you want to go?' I said, ‘I want to go to Lethbridge. I want to start at the bottom and work my way up.'

“He said, ‘You got it.'

“Five years later, Bill Schweppe said to me in the car one day, we were riding to go grab a bite to eat. It was '83. I was doing the Gulf Coast League. We were talking about the old times. I said, ‘Why did you keep calling me back? I know you have hundreds of guys that will qualify. I had not coached. I had only played three years, two and a half years. Why did you call me back?' He said, ‘I only called you back for one reason. You said something to me that made a difference,' he said. ‘You said, ‘I cannot leave the high school. I won't break my commitment. That's the kind of people we want here.'”

LaRocque stayed for years, coaching, then managing in Vero Beach, another Dodger affiliate at a complex built by, yes, Branch Rickey. Then San Antonio, Double-A. Then on to scouting, with an eye toward eventually making his way to the front office.

“That's when I started to really realize I'd broadened my base,” LaRocque said. “I've got to use it to give back. And I've always cherished the idea of leading. Of management. I mean, to this day, I see how Mo handles things and I watch and I listen to how he does it. And I thought, ‘Okay, I'm going to make this my life.' And I thought, ‘How do you want to do it?' And so in the early nineties, I thought, ‘I want to be in the front office and manage that way.'”

Eventually, LaRocque got a gig as scouting director for the New York Mets before the Cardinals brought him over first to scout major league teams, then to work as an adviser to Vuch. In 2011, LaRocque took the reins as senior adviser in player development, before getting named director of PD in November 2012.

Notably, neither LaRocque nor Vuch had any conflict with the changes implemented by Luhnow, nor any issue with the Kissell way of developing players. Once again, the idea that a constant questioning and attempt to improve methods was a departure from Kissell's teachings proved to be a fallacy.

LaRocque and Vuch, in conjunction with longtime Kissell disciple and Cardinals minor league manager Mike Shildt, worked at revising the manual to most effectively instruct young Cardinals players and managers throughout the system.

Still, the Cardinals missed the play-offs in 2010, though they finished with 86 wins, and their Pythagorean expectation of 91-71 means they likely underachieved. Rasmus looked as if he'd taken the step toward becoming a star, with a 132 OPS+ in center field at just twenty-three years old. Jon Jay, a discovery of Charlie Gonzalez's down in Florida, posted a 113 OPS+ in his first extended big league look. Allen Craig surfaced at the major league level, as did Daniel Descalso.

But the 2010 Cardinals finished second in the NL Central to Walt Jocketty's Cincinnati Reds. While Jocketty now understands what the Cardinals were doing, those who wished to strangle analytics in the bassinet used Jocketty's Reds beating Mozeliak's Cardinals as some kind of referendum on it.

You might know Murray Chass as the
New York Times
reporter who did groundbreaking work at the paper on labor issues in Major League Baseball. You might know Chass as the guy who, for some unexplainable reason, refused to call himself a blogger when he left the paper and began a blog at
MurrayChass.com
. You might know him as the guy who continues to oppose Mike Piazza's bid for entry to the Hall of Fame based on having seen Piazza with “bacne,” something Chass seems to think proves definitively that Piazza used steroids, and something that, when I interviewed a half dozen dermatologists to ascertain this after Chass's crusade began, turns out to do nothing of the sort.

A consistent theme in Chass's work, like that of Madden, is a dismissal of anything that smacks of analytics. Accordingly, with the Cardinals finishing five games behind the Reds, here's what Chass had to say on his … blog.

A
J
OCKETTY
J
EER FOR
D
E
W
ITT'S
C
ARDINALS

Walt Jocketty has too much class, is too much of a gentleman to thumb his nose, stick out his tongue and say to the St. Louis Cardinals and their principal owner, Bill DeWitt Jr., “na na na na na.” So I'll do it for him: Na na na na na.

DeWitt deserves this rude treatment because three years ago, only a year after his Jocketty-built team won the World Series, he fired Jocketty. Now Jocketty's new team, Cincinnati, is on the brink of dethroning the Cardinals as National League Central champions.…

“It was philosophy, the direction they wanted to take the organization, how they put their team together,” Jocketty said. “I didn't necessarily go along with the thinking. We had a pretty good organization in place. I was given the right to run the organization the way I thought it should be, and I think people would say we had done the right job in scouting and player development and had the right people, quality people, to run it.”

 … Jocketty was probably the most notable victim of the modern-day baseball war between evaluation and analysis. It mattered not to DeWitt that Jocketty's belief in player evaluation had worked extremely well for the Cardinals. The owner was seduced by others in the organization into believing that statistical analysis was the way to go.…

Has Jocketty made any changes in his method of operation since becoming the Reds' general manager? “No, not really,” he said but acknowledged that “you have to use a certain amount of statistics.”
5

It's fascinating to hear Jocketty, three years after the fact, yet to fully embrace the direction of the sport. Jocketty had come to feel differently by the time we talked.

But it's also notable that as late as the end of the 2010 season, it was still possible to make a case that the Jeff Luhnow reboot had been something short of vital, or even successful.

That all changed in 2011.

It wasn't just that the Cardinals won another World Series, though that kind of victory, in Mozeliak's fourth full year as general manager, validated both his overall work with the major league team and the altered focus of the organization as a whole after Luhnow's hiring.

But the particulars of with whom and how the Cardinals won impressed even those most reluctant to accept the changing baseball landscape.

“I don't remember getting much kudos from the work in the draft until the 2011 World Series,” Mejdal said. “In the play-offs, when I think Craig and Jay and Descalso were needed and they hit the ground running. And then, there was a—‘Wow. These guys are useful.' I remember La Russa saying once that he was impressed with how these guys were ready to play. That they hit the ground running.”

Mejdal experienced something similar the night the Cardinals beat the Brewers in the NLCS to advance to the World Series. At the celebration dinner, shortstop Ryan Theriot came up to Mejdal, Luhnow, and others at the table, specifically to talk about the young players making a difference in St. Louis.

“‘These guys are great,'” Mejdal remembered Theriot saying. “‘They came up. They filled holes. And they didn't just fill the holes, they were valuable major leaguers.' I took great pride in that. That was wonderful to hear. You can imagine, after year after year, you guys are drafting, whatever, low—high-floor, low-ceiling, complementary players. And having that database saying, no such thing. You know? To actually begin to hear and see the results on a play-off stage and then, certainly, the World Series. You can imagine how rewarding that whole aspect was.”

Luhnow remembered La Russa saying to him, “If I'd known you were going to send me so many guys who can throw ninety-five-plus, I wouldn't have been so hard on you for so long!”

While the 2011 champions were, without question, driven by such players as Yadier Molina and Albert Pujols, those two had been stars in St. Louis for years. The difference between the earlier Molina/Pujols teams and this one, for the most part, came from player development, not to mention the team-high 151 OPS+ from Holliday, who couldn't have been acquired without the topflight prospects the Cardinals gave up in the trade.

Colby Rasmus began the year as the center fielder, but by year's end the man in center was Charlie Gonzalez's find, Jon Jay. Allen Craig started in right field for much of the 2011 World Series and homered in three different games. Lance Lynn pitched in relief throughout the series, too.

Game 3 was a fine example of how important the Luhnow products were in making the 2011 Cardinals into champions. Craig homered. Jay started. Daniel Descalso came on as a pinch runner and scored. Fernando Salas, who'd signed as an international free agent, came on in relief for an ineffective Kyle Lohse. Lynn got the win. Mitchell Boggs, from Luhnow's first draft in 2005, pitched the ninth.

Oh, and Pujols homered three times, too. Cardinals, 16–7.

But this team, while not quite the full manifestation of the new approach to drafting and developing, relied on those players to put them over the top. Four of the top eleven hitters, via WAR, came through the system. Jaime García, a twenty-second-round pick back in 2005, became the team's second-best starter. Jason Motte, a catcher the Cardinals converted to pitching in 2006, took hold of the closer's job late in the 2011 season.

Motte took the ball from Lynn, who'd pitched the eighth. When Motte induced the Rangers' David Murphy to hit a fly ball to left field, where Allen Craig caught it, there was no denying two things: The Cardinals were world champions. And the leadership of John Mozeliak, the revolution of Jeff Luhnow, and the counterintuitive approach implemented by Bill DeWitt Jr. had brought them there.

 

6

AFTER HE'S GONE

Even if the world at large didn't fully realize just how completely the baseball industry had changed by 2011, many of those inside the sport absolutely did.

One was Jim Crane, who bought the Houston Astros in May 2011 for $680 million. His goal, once he decided what kind of baseball team he wanted, was straightforward: he wanted the St. Louis Cardinals.