“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 D
irector) 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.
“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 b
egan 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 JOCKETTY JEER FOR DEWITT’S CARDINALS
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.…
The Cardinals Way Page 17