The Cardinals Way

by Howard Megdal

  “I think Gary was there all these times when we were up there,” Baker recalled, also noting the continuity with both his manager at several stops, Dann Bilardello, and pitching coach, Ace Adams. “And they all told us the same thing, that it’s an exciting time and we belong there and that they took us for a reason, and it’s exciting and it’s time for us to embrace the competition of professional baseball and enjoy the Cardinals. And they all stress the amount of pride they had in the Cardinals organization and that we are obviously extremely fortunate to be a part of it.”

  The Cardinals’ seventh-round pick in 2013, Chris Rivera, had experienced some of the travel, playing USA Baseball in high school. But he was being separated from his longtime girlfriend, Angie, and the two of them had to figure out how to make it work while a continent separated them, and Rivera’s time was spent on baseball fields by day and buses by night.

  “I’ve been dating the same girl for four years, so being with her every day at school and then after school on the weekends was every day,” Rivera told me. “So coming here was a little different, not seeing her every day.”

  Now?

  “She came out for a week and then that’s about it. So that’s a little hard. And then not knowing where we’re going to go in about two weeks is a little different, too, because she’s not going to know. And I would like for her to come out and see me, but then again, I don’t know.

  “People—they don’t know how much of a grind it is. They think you make all this money and they think you get an endless amount of money. And that’s not the truth at all.”

  Rivera is hoping he’ll get to State College. But that season doesn’t begin until June. In the meantime, Rivera remains with Turco in the Gulf Coast League.

  And even for loved ones who have been through the grind, have seen how hard it is, there’s still a transition from the off-season.

  “He’s there, but he’s not there,” one of the wives told me as we sat on the silver bleachers radiating the heat of the March Florida sun. “Like we don’t have a real conversation for six months. Just a different lifestyle.”

  Her husband is on the mound, facing some of the more advanced hitters. I hear her grunt with every pitch, as if she were delivering them.

  “Sixty-five pitches. He’s done.” She’s been keeping the pitch count in her head. “Today, he’ll really dissect it, then he’s done. But you should see his iPad. He has a scouting report on everyone he’s ever faced, from rookie ball to the majors. You know, ‘This guy can’t handle oh-and-two changeups.’ He’s really smart.”

  Smart will only get you so far. You’ve got to execute. And even then, it may not be enough, not with so many other guys around trying for the same finite number of jobs.

  Against some lower-level guys, a bright kid named Sam Tuivailala cannot find his changeup.

  Minor league pitching coach Ace Adams, ahead of coaching at Palm Beach in 2014, looked on with minor league pitching coordinator Tim Leveque, a Brent Strom disciple.

  “Best pitch!” Adams shouts to Tuivailala. Leveque told me later Tuivailala’s best pitch is “a fastball he keeps down in the zone.”

  Tuivailala was twenty-one in the spring of 2014. The Cardinals drafted him in the third round back in 2010 out of high school, not knowing whether he’d ultimately hit or pitch for them.

  “There were more than half the clubs that saw him as a pitcher, but we were one of the clubs that saw him as a position player,” Luhnow told me about the thinking behind taking Tuivailala. “Our area scout believed that he would be a successful position player. We wanted the talent here respected, and it’s much easier to go from being a position player to a pitcher than the other way around, so if you make him a pitcher, you’re never going to find out if he’s a position player.”

  But after Tuivailala struggled to hit with Turco in the Gulf Coast League—a .591 OPS in 2010 after signing, and a .661 OPS repeating the league in 2011—he was ready to make the switch to the mound.

  “When a player first comes to you, very first year of pro ball, it’s very easy to find flaws,” Turco, who once resisted a switch to the mound himself, told me in May 2014. “So you can try and tell them what they need to do to succeed there, right then. Or you can let them fail, and then when they do, they’re going to be far more receptive to change.”

  Accordingly, the Cardinals will not shift a player from pitching to hitting, or vice versa, without a full buy-in from the player. One such player, Rowan Wick, decided to stick with hitting after a 2013 season with power at Johnson City—10 home runs in 241 plate appearances, a .464 slugging percentage—but difficulty making contact as well, striking out nearly 30 percent of the time. The Cardinals moved Wick from catcher to right field, but Wick wasn’t ready to give up on hitting, though Turco said he thought Wick might throw harder than Tuivailala did. Wick returned to the Gulf Coast League ahead of a summer assignment to State College and told me he had his eye on full-season Peoria.

  Meanwhile, Tuivailala hit 95 miles per hour with his fastball once he transitioned, but control eluded him. He struck out 23 in 13 innings with Johnson City in 2012, short-season A-ball. But he walked 13 as well. The next year, in full-season A-ball Peoria, no one could hit him very well. The strikeouts were absurd—50 in 35⅓, 12.7/9. But the walks stayed high, 5.1/9. He hit four batters. His ERA of 5.35 was extremely high, considering all the strikeouts and that no one homered off him all season.

  So that’s where Tuivailala found himself in the spring of 2014.

  “I still feel like a position player trying to pitch,” Tuivailala told me when we sat on the bleachers and talked after his outing, Tuivailala still in uniform. “That’s what needs to change.”

  Leveque told him, the two of them standing just outside the makeshift dugouts surrounded in chain link, “Oh and oh, oh and one, you can’t be afraid to throw that curveball. It’s not just for you to throw it in safe counts, one and two. And that changeup, you might be able to get some quicker outs, pitching inside.”

  Leveque doesn’t know which of his pitchers will figure it all out. The point isn’t that the Cardinals identify those guys, though obviously more attention is given to the high-profile prospects. Everybody comes away from the spring knowing what needs to happen.

  “We’ll use last year as a baseline,” Leveque told me in the shadow of the Kissell plaque on that March day. They’ll send Tuivailala to high-A ball, to Palm Beach. Put another way, he’ll stay right in Jupiter. “Guys are cheating on Tui’s fastball, which sits ninety-five. Look, he’s a converted guy, so it’s more about progress than a specific benchmark.”

  The same is true for the guy hitting on a separate field, taking his cuts ahead of the highest-level minor league intrasquad game. It’s that man again, the one Albert Pujols cited, the one John Mozeliak called “the most prolific hitter I’ve seen in this organization since Albert.”3

  When Taveras steps into the batter’s box, helmet a bit loose on his head, he has a casual, jaunty air. Meanwhile, the world snaps to attention. Before his turn to bat, other hitters were preparing, coaches chatting, players examining their bats, playing catch. Taveras enters the box: coaches look up or gather. Several come from other fields. Red Schoendienst makes sure his golf cart is parked directly behind Taveras’s BP session, Mark DeJohn joining him in the two-seater. His teammates all watch.

  The unstated understanding is that we’re all watching something you don’t often see. Keith Butler, a pitcher, Tommy Pham, an outfielder, James Ramsey, the team’s 2012 first-round pick—all stand just beyond the black mini-structure set up for BP, taking a view from the third-base side to enjoy Taveras’s left-handed swing. Each drive impresses. The sound, as the baseball cliché goes, is different off his bat. I heard that sound twice last spring—off the bat of José Abreu of the White Sox, out in Arizona, ahead of Abreu’s 2014 of terrorizing American League pitchers and winning the AL Rookie of the Year.

  The other time I heard it was when Oscar Taveras hit the ball.<
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  “Yeah!” Ramsey says as Taveras drives one over the right-center-field fence. Taveras turns and acknowledges Ramsey’s enthusiasm, smiling, with a slight nod. Another ball clears the fence in right field, and another, Taveras like a red-and-white barber pole in perfect rhythm, twisting upon himself in that pristine Cardinals uniform.

  “Nice,” grunts Schoendienst, impressed when Taveras takes his next turn in BP and decides to go opposite field for a while, sending the ball on screaming journeys up the gap between what everyone can imagine are helpless left and center fielders on July days at Busch Stadium, and maybe October nights, too. Schoendienst knows a little something about great hitting—the Hall of Famer in his own right also roomed with a guy named Stan Musial. Schoendienst sticks around until the end of the Taveras BP. He doesn’t look away for a moment.

  Later that afternoon, Taveras comes up during the intrasquad game. Turco gives him some perfunctory advice. He smiles, about to enter the place where he knows precisely what to do, the batter’s box. Instructions for everything else is what Oscar Taveras seems to need, but not hitting a baseball.

  He taps the bat against the grass as he approaches the box, the weights dropping to the earth. Taveras seems to know how much he looks like a ballplayer. The world turns—both dugouts focused on him in a way they hadn’t been on the hitter just moments earlier. Coaches from other fields turn to watch. So do players in dugouts across the dirt path, all around the Kissell complex.

  Earlier, Taveras had struck out, but didn’t lose his smile, tossing his helmet nonchalantly to the side and heading out onto the field. This time, his final at bat of the day, he gets ahead in the count, 2-0. The pitcher, bowing to the inevitable, throws him a fastball. Another rope, this one right at the shortstop for an out.

  He stops a few steps toward first base. He thinks a moment, looks up into the sky, and breaks back into a huge smile. Coming off the field, he throws an arm around James Ramsey. It’s just one of many line drives, he seems to think. There are so many more to come.

  April 7, St. Louis, Missouri

  Opening Day came to St. Louis, and so did a thoroughly unwelcoming rainstorm that threatened to cancel festivities altogether.

  Bill DeWitt Jr. and his son, Bill DeWitt III, are monitoring the action from their offices inside Busch Stadium. The elder DeWitt makes a call, about three hours prior to game time, which revealed conditions had not yet deteriorated to the point the Budweiser Clydesdales would be forced to cancel their jaunt around the warning track to the familiar organ music theme and fifty thousand clapping fans.

  While the horses were ultimately rained out, DeWitt made his way down to the field for the opening ceremonies. Cardinals Hall of Famers stood in their red jackets. Other dignitaries, such as Mike Shannon (who’d be inducted in August), were on hand to shake hands as each player was introduced, over that organ music, standing in front of World Series trophies the team had won.

  “I like to head down when the Clydesdales march,” DeWitt had told me. “I like to see as much of the game as I can, in the seats outside. Usually, the weather’s better than this.”

  This is what a city looks like when no one since 1902 has reached the age of twenty-five without seeing a World Series parade. Thousands gathered ahead of time, lining up not merely to enter Busch Stadium and greet their defending National League pennant-winning heroes. They gathered by the thousands to enter Ballpark Village, a collection of restaurants and bars, highlighted by the St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame, to entertain those who are enthralled by the industry that is the Cardinals.

  You’ll find Rickey there, and Musial, and Kissell—the Cardinals museum has a Kissell manual from 1969—and everyone who came after. Kissell himself was inducted in August 2015. You’ll even find the Browns there, the team that almost owned this city, and even Eddie Gaedel, the three-foot-seven-inch man Bill Veeck hired to bat for the Browns in 1951, wearing little Bill DeWitt Jr.’s Browns uniform.

  Out they came, those products of the Jeff Luhnow and Dan Kantrovitz drafts, the next chapter in Cardinals history about to be written—“Number 26, Trevor Rosenthal!” Rosenthal, huge grin on his face, shaking hands with Whitey Herzog. During the 2013 play-offs, Bob Gibson had given Rosenthal some tips that he refused to share with the media.

  “Number 19, Jon Jay!” A Charlie Gonzalez special, Jay regained the center-field job in 2014, hit .303/.372/.378, and his on-base percentage topped .400 in a second half that seemed to find Jay in the middle of nearly every Cardinals win.

  “Number 31, Lance Lynn!” Lynn leaped out of the back of a blue pickup truck, embarking on a 200-inning season with a 2.74 ERA, quietly elite once again.

  “Number 33, Daniel Descalso!” The third-round pick from 2007 shared an alma mater with Sig Mejdal. Descalso shook hands with Tony La Russa, a Mejdal skeptic. Descalso and La Russa won a World Series together thanks to a system Mejdal helped build.

  “Number 40, Shelby Miller!” An excited Fredbird points at Miller, who had another 10 wins in him in 2014.

  “Number 44, Carlos Martínez!” Still just twenty-two, Martínez tantalized fans with the kind of stuff that led Matt Slater to tell his bosses to throw $1.5 million at a teenaged kid he’d just spent a few minutes watching. By 2015, he wouldn’t be wearing number 44 anymore, for a tragic reason.

  The wind whipped through the stadium. The game wouldn’t start for another forty-five minutes. The red, white, and blue bunting that signifies important baseball moments—Opening Day, the postseason—shuddered along the right-field wall. The stands, though, were filled already.

  The cheers got even louder for that pitcher Luhnow pushed for more than a decade ago, men and women in red ponchos roaring as the public-address announcer said, “Number 50, Adam Wainwright!” The veteran hurler waved to the crowd with a wide smile.

  Even the lesser 2014 contributors came mostly from the farm—Joe Kelly, traded to Boston with Allen Craig, Shane Robinson, Pete Kozma, Kevin Siegrist, Tony Cruz, Seth Maness, Keith Butler—so many players the Cardinals drafted and developed.

  And the roars, still louder, for the starting lineup, teeming with homegrown talent: “Number 13, the third baseman, Matt Carpenter!” Carpenter gives the crowd a businesslike wave, all focus, even amid the cheering. “Number 21, the first baseman, Allen Craig!” Craig jumps gingerly out of a white pickup, his movements still limited after a 2013 foot injury. “Number 32, the first baseman, Matt Adams!” The big man is noticeably trimmer and takes that extra second to soak in the handshakes, lingering with Red Schoendienst.

  Of course, another level for Yadier Molina, warming up the starting pitcher. And perhaps the crowd at its loudest, not for Molina, but for the Kantrovitz pick and Pujols compensation: “Warming up in the bull pen, Number 52, Michael Wacha!”

  Wacha pitched six solid innings. Martínez, Siegrist, and Rosenthal finished it off. Molina drove in three with a booming double in the first. Craig added an RBI single. Adams had two hits. Wong contributed a walk and a single. Carpenter, leading off, reached three times.

  The soaked fans went home happy. The Cardinals won.

  “It’s a lot of fun pitching in front of your home crowd, forty-thousand-plus fans,” Wacha told us, standing in front of his locker, when it was over. “I don’t know who wouldn’t thrive off those kind of situations.”

  The next morning, as I prepared to leave St. Louis, a man in his fifties rolled his suitcase toward the hotel elevator. He held one item apart—a stark white Cardinals Willie McGee jersey. It belonged to his wife, and he’d been asked to take particular care of it. “This is how she wants me to carry it,” he told me. Treating it as a holy item, he lifted it carefully away from his suitcase and body as we entered the parking garage. On the hook it went in the back of his SUV. The couple had come in from Illinois for the home opener, stayed over, and would drive home the next day. The last I saw of them was their license plate, an Illinois personalized GOKARDS.

  May 24, Jupiter, Florida

  Late May
in Jupiter is no place for the player who only suspects he wants the major league dream.

  Your clothes stick to your body the moment you step outside. Those Cardinals minor leaguers who aren’t in full-season ball are playing at the Kissell complex, awaiting assignments to Johnson City or State College. Otherwise, it’s Jupiter for the season, and the Gulf Coast League Cardinals.

  But they don’t have the same experience back at the Kissell complex the high-A minor leaguers do at Roger Dean Stadium, visible from the six back fields. There’s no shade. The one bathroom is augmented by a Porta Potti, labeled ALL STAR, which leads one to wonder about the Porta Potti that didn’t make the team. It’s not even 10:00 A.M. yet, and there’s Ramon “Smoky” Ortiz, with a weighted bat, teaching the handful of switch-hitters that old drill of Kissell’s I found written down on Ginny’s stationery.

  Running this team is Steve Turco, in his thirty-fifth year in organized ball. He’s not looking to reach the major leagues. He’s just carrying on Kissell’s work. We sat and talked about it all on a scalding day in late May, but he never once took his focus off the field while we chatted. Every single play was an opportunity to teach.

  “See what we did there, it was not right, either,” Turco said, breaking off from his own train of thought, not unkindly, just observing something he’d need to bring up with his youngest charges. “They played that sure double, and it wasn’t a sure double, it was cut off in the gap. We had nobody at second base. Actually, the shortstop should have been there. The second baseman went out to get the throw. Rivera looked to second because that’s where the play was.”

  No one had any question about Chris Rivera’s baseball IQ. Like George Kissell, a Cardinals minor league infielder signed in 1940, Steve Turco, a Cardinals minor league infielder signed in 1979, and Ollie Marmol, a Cardinals minor league infielder signed in 2007, Chris Rivera clearly had a future in coaching. But Dan Kantrovitz took him in the seventh round of the 2013 draft hoping for more than an eventual heir apparent to Kissell.