The Cardinals Way

by Howard Megdal

  So the three-man shop was down to two, but that had less of an impact on what the Cardinals were doing by 2009 than it would have years earlier for two reasons. One was the extent to which Mozeliak had incorporated analytics into his day-to-day operations. Chris Correa, hired in 2007 on the analytics side after Mejdal saw his work at Firstinning.com, described it this way: “When I came on and Tony was the manager, there were basically two customers for our work. It was Mo and it was Jeff.”

  Some of the fruit from the Luhnow changeover in the farm system began to ripen as well, giving both fans and the major league staff their first glimpses of what kind of players analytics-driven Cardinals drafting could produce. Jess Todd, Clayton Mortensen, and Mitchell Boggs all made appearances for the 2009 Cardinals, while Chris Pérez became an intriguing bullpen option, striking out 11.4 per 9. The Cardinals won 91 games and returned to the postseason, though they were swept in the NLDS by the Los Angeles Dodgers.

  The first regular player in the Luhnow drafting era, Colby Rasmus, earned the starting center-field job and held his own as a twenty-two-year-old, with an 89 OPS+ and flashes of far more. That jumped to a 132 OPS+ in 2010, and though conflict with Tony La Russa derailed his Cardinals career, Rasmus was still a regular in 2015 for the Houston Astros.

  But there’s essentially a five-year lag between any change in drafting and fully reaping its benefits, and the Cardinals were barely four years into the Luhnow draft era. Even then, those changes had been relatively limited at first.

  The Cardinals would continue to evolve, altering their processes with an aim on improving. STOUT continued to develop, as did how and when Luhnow integrated it into the final selection process. But 2009 could well be considered Peak Luhnow. It would be the final year Luhnow held both the position of scouting director and director of player development, giving him full control over the pipeline.

  No one could fully evaluate at the time what the 2009 draft produced. We, however, have the benefit of five years of hindsight.

  So how did he do?

  In the first round, the Cardinals took Shelby Miller, who pitched to a 133 ERA+ in his rookie year in 2013, finishing third in the Rookie of the Year balloting. He fell off a bit in 2014, but was still highly regarded enough to be the centerpiece in a December 2014 trade for Jason Heyward.

  In the third round, the Cardinals took Joe Kelly, a durable, versatile swingman who won 10 games in 2013, then got traded to the Red Sox in 2014 with Allen Craig to bring back John Lackey.

  Two notable things about these pitchers: both of them made the long journey from draft to the major leagues, then helped Cardinals teams into the play-offs. And both were ultimately used by Mozeliak to get precisely the kind of players the Cardinals used to get from other teams, a decade earlier, in salary dumps or via free agency. That was possible for Walt Jocketty in 2003. It wouldn’t have been possible for John Mozeliak in 2013—the marketplace had changed. The currency required was no longer currency—not when three subsequent collective bargaining agreements, 2002, 2006, and 2011 each flattened the major league playing field, thanks to revenue sharing, and with a boom in local television money making spenders of nearly every club in baseball.

  Young talent had become the coin of the realm. And the Cardinals received plenty of it in 2009.

  But wait, there’s more. In the fifth round, they took middle infielder Ryan Jackson, who made it to the big leagues.

  In the thirteenth round, they took Matt Carpenter. All he’s done is post a 125 OPS+ as a rookie third baseman in 2012, improve to a 140 OPS+ in 2013 while learning second base, a new position, for a team that won the National League pennant, then return to third base in 2014 for another Cardinals play-off team, then set a team record for leadoff home runs in a season by August 2015.

  In the twenty-first round, the Cardinals took Trevor Rosenthal, out of Cowley County Community College in Kansas. He grabbed the team’s closer job in 2013, carrying them to the 2013 World Series on the strength of nine scoreless appearances over three series, then followed up with a more difficult 2014 that still included a 111 ERA+, 45 saves, and a 11.1 K/9 strikeout rate, before a return to form in 2015.

  In the twenty-third round, they took Matt Adams, who hit 17 home runs and posted a 129 OPS+ in 2013, then a solid 115 OPS+ in 2014 as the regular first baseman. At the very least, the Cardinals have the strong half of a first-base platoon in Adams, if not more.

  Bonus major leaguer: twenty-fourth-round Keith Butler, who made brief appearances in 2013 and 2014. Though he had Tommy John surgery in 2014, he’s also a pitcher with a 2.22 ERA and 11.2 K/9 over six minor league seasons, and it’s far from certain his ability to help a major league team is at an end.

  But let’s stick with that five-year window. Just five years and four months after the St. Louis Cardinals drafted their 2009 crop, the Cardinals entered Game 4 of the NLDS leading the Los Angeles Dodgers, two games to one. A win would mean a berth in the NLCS for the fourth consecutive season. A loss would mean having to fly back for a deciding Game 5 against Zack Greinke. And they’d need to beat Clayton Kershaw, the best pitcher in 2014, to do it.

  The Cardinals started Shelby Miller, who pitched well into the sixth inning. (He was relieved by Seth Maness, an eleventh-round pick by the Cardinals in 2011, then Marco Gonzales, first-rounder in 2013.)

  But enough about other Cardinals drafts. This is the 2009 draft’s moment.

  In the seventh inning, trailing 2–0, the Cardinals placed two men on ahead of Matt Adams. Remember, Adams had struggled throughout his career against lefties—through 2014, his OPS against them was just .553, nearly 300 points lower than his robust .851 mark against righties. Kershaw is the toughest lefty of them all. Adams fell behind 0-1. Then Kershaw left one of his trademark curveballs up, and the bearish Adams launched it into the right-field bull pen, gloriously making a half-pirouette as he neared the first-base bag and the ball cleared the fence. “Big Matt Adams, jumping in the air with sheer delight,” Vin Scully described it.

  Trevor Rosenthal came on in the ninth to record the save and send the Cardinals to the NLCS.

  No, Matt Carpenter didn’t play a big part in that Game 4 win. But that was the only game in the series where he didn’t homer, and he finished with a 1.537 OPS against the Dodgers.

  And speaking of key 2014 contributors, let’s not forget Carlos Martínez, who came to the Cardinals officially in 2010, but was courted throughout 2009 thanks to the existence and maturation of the team’s effort in the Dominican Republic.

  Martínez had signed with the Boston Red Sox in 2009, but the contract was voided because of a discrepancy between Martínez’s identity and the one he used when he signed the contract.

  So the Cardinals needed to do more than figure out how much money they wanted to bet on a young pitcher, always a deeply speculative enterprise. They needed to find out first why Martínez’s first contract had been voided.

  “Mo gave me a call,” Slater remembered. “It was in May [2009]. And I already knew, obviously, we were in on this hotshot young kid. He used to be in the Red Sox system, who is now a free agent. He became a free agent because of a name discrepancy.

  “And one of the advantages we had with Carlos is Moises Rodriguez, our international operations director, used to work for MLB. So he had a lot of contacts, knew the rules, and looked into this case. And it was determined that Carlos did not have a birth-date discrepancy, which is the main reason why players down there did [get contracts voided]. He had a last-name discrepancy. Because he was raised by his grandma and his aunt and was going by their last name instead of his mom’s last name.”

  Having Rodriguez directing operations—to determine, for instance, that Martínez wasn’t secretly twenty-four—allowed the Cardinals to continue forward with their evaluation knowing that they didn’t have to worry about discounting any eventual valuation because of the voided Red Sox deal. They could also clear the red tape, thanks to a significant presence in the country.

  “Also,
when it came to signing him, there was some governmental protocol we had to get through,” Slater said. “With getting Carlos out of the country, because he had registered for a visa under the other last name of Matias. Carlos Matias was the name he was going by when this was all going on. And Moises and Aaron [Rodriguez], who’s our assistant in the Dominican, were able to work with the Dominican government to get through those issues. Whereas some other teams maybe had a little harder time with doing it.”

  So Mozeliak called Slater, still in California finishing up his law degree, and asked him to fly down to the Dominican with Dyar Miller, the minor league pitching coordinator, to see and evaluate Martínez.

  “He met me at the Miami airport, and Dyar and I flew down and we worked out Carlos at our academy in Villa Mella, the original academy we had,” Slater said. “Carlos came in and it was an incredible display of fluid arm action. I remember—I looked through my notes after you e-mailed the other day, and eleven of his first twelve pitches were fastballs for strikes that were at least ninety-five miles an hour. And this was a seventeen-year-old kid at the time. And you just don’t see that very often.”

  But Matt Slater needed to go back to his bosses, to Mozeliak and DeWitt, and tell him how much money he thought the Cardinals should commit to Martínez, echoing Rodriguez’s enthusiasm. To a person, not just to an arm action.

  “All of us, what we do is—we need to be careful with makeup and character,” Slater said. “So our scouts down there have told me about Carlos and where he came from. He came from a very poor background where he grew up in Santiago in Puerto Plata, the port of Dominicans. But Dyar and I wanted to get to know him ourselves. So after the workout, Dyar and I went for, probably, a twenty- to thirty-minute walk with Carlos by ourselves around the outside of our complex. And [I remember] speaking with him in our broken Spanish and his very, very limited English at that time, trying to get to know him better. He told us his favorite player was Pedro Martínez. I’ll never forget that.” (Probably because few pitchers since Pedro have looked more like him on the mound.)

  “He told us what pitches he wanted to use and so forth. And everything he dreamed about being was on the mound and pitching in the big leagues. So it was just—it was more of just trying to get his intentions. Because we did have questions. He was a very flashy kind of kid. And sometimes you worry what the flash means. So we need to really get down inside and get to know him better. And here’s a—a sixty-five-year-old, longtime, crusty, old pitching coach and a young scout from the US walking up to a seventeen-year-old Dominican kid, trying to get to know each other.”

  Imagine a therapist tasked with getting to know a patient in a single, fifty-minute session. Slater had half that much time to determine whether to pay Carlos Martínez $1.5 million. This is yet another challenge in scouting. Mistakes will be made. Having the smartest possible people available to evaluate in the time teams get with young players is paramount.

  “I think that walk, to me, is what solidified my call later that day on the phone with Mo and Mr. DeWitt. I remember saying, yes. We should give a guy a million and a half dollars.”

  Slater looks right. Martínez rocketed through the farm system, became the Cardinals’ bridge from starters to Rosenthal in 2013, and held his own as a starter in 2014 once given the chance. In 2015, he made the All-Star Game, and through August had been the Cardinals’ best pitcher.

  One bull-pen session. One walk. And Slater had to make that call, though he never gets the chance without the team’s presence in the country in the first place.

  “You have to be somewhat of a gunslinger,” Slater said, “in that the percentage of data you’re using to make your decisions compared to the intuitive nature of things may be a different ratio. And with Carlos, certainly, it was what we saw that day, what our scouts had seen the month or so leading up to that. And also that walk convinced Dyar and I that this guy has something inside of him that’s going to really push him to get to the big leagues. And maybe it was his background. That he came from such a rough upbringing that he would fight through it.

  “And there was some worries about his flashiness and his flair. And you still see that now in his game. But we kind of saw that as something that may be a positive. So it may make him an even better pitcher.”

  And Baseball America wasn’t rating Jon Jay and Dan Descalso and Allen Craig. Those guys were top of their prospects. It’s a lot of high-floor, no-ceiling guys is what they kept saying. We ended winning the championship. So pretty good high floor.

  —JEFF LUHNOW

  The hiring of Jeff Luhnow came at the conclusion of a whirlwind month, an e-mail from Bill DeWitt’s son-in-law to a few meetings to a memo announcing it all. That project, as 2010 dawned, was entering its seventh year. The project continued, to be sure. But neither internally, nor externally, was there any consensus that it was working.

  The skeptics weren’t simply those who opposed analytics.

  Baseball Prospectus ranked the thirty organizations. On March 8, 2010, Kevin Goldstein ranked the Cardinals … thirtieth:

  Why They Are Here: Their recent drafts aren’t awful per se, but they’re certainly boring and lacking as far as star power. The graduation of a few prospects and the trading away of even more (which happens when you are a perennial contender) leaves the system almost solely riding on the hopes for Shelby Miller’s right arm.

  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.3

  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.”4

  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 s
o 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.