The Cardinals Way

by Howard Megdal

  But the scouts, too, were vital in assessing the players’ overall grades. As Kantrovitz described the system to me that day, “We’re hoping to come away with a single value for each player going into the draft. How many runs do we think this guy will be worth to us?”

  Across from Kantrovitz sat Charlie Gonzalez, in a Hawaiian shirt adorned with pineapples, and jeans. He, too, sat in front of a computer, but the machine was off—he was using it to charge his iPhone. Gonzalez himself is a computer, every member of his pref list committed to memory. This is not just names and physical descriptions—it is everything. Each player who came up—and Charlie Gonzalez, per the preferences of the St. Louis Cardinals, had ninety-three people on his pref list, ranked from those he wanted most to those he didn’t think highly of at all—became a story for Charlie to tell.

  Not that Charlie was alone in this—that’s the coin of the realm in scouting, to see a player in snippets, and to piece together not only what you think he is today, but what he will be in two, three, five years.

  Joining Dan and Charlie around the table were Joe Almaraz and Jamal Strong, two of the national cross-checkers, Fernando Arango, the Southeast cross-checker, Ty Boyles, who covered the Southeast beyond Charlie’s Florida, and Mark Ellenbogen, a local product who’d assisted Charlie.

  It was up to Charlie, Ty, and, when they’d seen the players, Fernando, Joe, and Jamal to paint a picture of what they thought would happen if a player got drafted by the Cardinals. They frequently disagreed. They often thought more highly of a player than what the stats on the computer in front of Dan told him, or mechanics said about a player, or medical said about a player.Dan had to speak two languages at once—the analytics and the scouting, and to translate back and forth—to the scouts, who spent the better part of a year working ungodly hours to collect this information, and to determine how to input what his scouts were telling him into STOUT, all in the hope of arriving at one value.

  “The plan is to talk about everybody on your list as if we’re not going to talk about them again,” Kantrovitz said to open the meeting. “’Cause that might be the case. In St. Louis, we’re going to get there and probably line up the top fifty to sixty guys. So, I guess, Ty, Charlie, I would figure, talk in depth about everybody except your top two or three guys. And those, we’ll still talk about as well, but just know that we’re going to touch on them again in St. Louis.

  “So, the other thing I want to talk about before we get going—all season long, we operate as very close-knit group and we’re considerate of each other’s feelings. I’m going to go out of my way, over the next week to ten days, to be very inconsiderate of your feelings in the draft room. I think that’s how we’re going to have the best draft. We’re not going to worry about who’s getting what player when. We’re not going to worry about somebody having to get a player in the draft room. We’ll worry about having the best draft for the Cardinals.

  “And, Ty, this is worth emphasizing for you. It’s your first draft in St. Louis. Those of you that have been in St. Louis for a few drafts know the deal. But because of our process, our system, which is different than every other team, you’re going to walk out of that draft room, hopefully, feeling a little uncomfortable with the picks. If it was intuitive or obvious to all of you what our picks should be, how it should go, then we’d be like everybody else and our process wouldn’t be helping us at all. The best drafts happen when you guys are a little uncomfortable with what’s going on. And that goes for me as well. It’s not obvious how we should weigh performance when we take a player. It’s not obvious how we should deduct based on some medical issue. Again, if it were obvious, then everybody would be doing the exact same thing.

  “So our list is not going to be a direct reflection of my personal pref list. And we might, along the same lines, Ty, take a player that you have a little bit lower on your list than—and you might be saying, ‘Well, wait. I’ve got this guy higher? Why aren’t we considering him? Well, it’s because we’re weighing Joe’s report, Jamal’s report, my report. The performance, the medical, the mechanics. So it’s natural, normal, for you guys to walk out of that draft room being a little uncomfortable and to be a little perturbed, in some cases, with me. My goal is not to appease all of you guys in the draft room. My goal is to have the best draft and use our process as wisely as I can. And again, if we all walk out of there just a little bit uncomfortable, I think we’re going to have the best draft.

  “So having said that, I want you guys to, again, talk about these guys—I know you guys have spent a lot of time this year traveling, driving, staying at hotels, going to see them. Talk about them. Take whatever time you need. I’m going to play devil’s advocate and ask you questions about them. And pretend that we’re not going to talk about them again. Because that might be the case.”

  No one seemed to mind. As Joe Almaraz put it, “What you said, the key word for me was you walk out, ’cause, hey, there’s some places you don’t get to walk in or out.”

  “Most teams don’t bring everybody into the draft,” Kantrovitz agreed. “I can’t imagine a scenario where you guys aren’t all in there. I can’t imagine doing the draft without everybody in there, but like Joe said, I think the majority of teams out there bring very few guys in.”

  With that, Charlie began to run down his list of players. He’d made a bet with Jamal—Charlie’s presentation would last no longer than fifty-five minutes. If Charlie lost, he owed Jamal a steak dinner.

  Charlie lost. He spoke starting a bit after noon, stopping only for a five-minute break at three, until five fifteen.

  The conversation ran along a pair of tracks, and it’s vital to understand both to fully comprehend the task at hand in a major league baseball draft room.

  One part is what you’d assume: it’s how good is this kid. Can he hit for power? What’s his time, home to first? Will his arm keep him at shortstop at higher levels? Or for pitchers: What’s his fastball look like? How consistent is his velocity? Does he throw strikes later in games?

  But that’s only part of the equation. The other thing scouts need to determine about the players they like is, to the last possible dollar if possible, just what it’s going to take to sign a kid. They need to do this while the players themselves, if they are staying true to amateur rules, do not employ an agent. Not before getting drafted, not before getting signed, because if a player enlists an agent, but fails to come to terms, he’ll have forfeited his amateur status.

  It’s an insane system. It doesn’t help the players at all, and many of them get around it by making deals with “advisers,” who are a kind of agent on contingency fee, or flat out hire agents and hope they won’t get caught. It might be the only payout they’ll ever get from playing baseball. It’s the only reasonable thing to do.

  For the teams, too, this cloak-and-dagger nonsense is especially problematic since 2012, when Major League Baseball instituted pretty strict slot amounts for each team to pay out in bonuses. Now, a team drafts a player in, say, the third round, only to find out it will cost much more than the team anticipated to sign that player. The team is left with three options: blow through the cap and forfeit a future draft pick; give up on the player and lose that infusion of talent into their system; or sacrifice some other pick made elsewhere in the draft.

  So the Cardinals have every scout put a financial value on every player—what the scout believes the Cardinals should spend on him, based solely on talent—and also give as much information as possible on what it will probably cost to get that player.

  With every team dealing with their own slot amounts—it varies based on where a team drafts and whether it’s forfeited any picks or accumulated extras—the sweet spot of the major league draft is the player who not only provides the most value, but does it at the lowest actual cost. Sign a $2 million player for $2 million, and you received value for your money. Not bad! But sign a $1,000 player worth $2 million, and you not only have that $2 million player, but you can go out and spen
d almost $2 million of your draft pool on other players.

  So Charlie Gonzalez had a pref list ninety-three players long. It didn’t mean the guy ranked fiftieth was necessarily worse than the forty-nine above him. It meant something more complex: the guy ranked fiftieth, taking both cost and talent into account, was less likely to provide excess value to the Cardinals than the forty-nine players above him.

  Here’s an example of what I mean, about a player the Cardinals ultimately didn’t draft.

  “He’s the kid that’s—he’s a very questionable bat,” Gonzalez said. “He may run a six-two-five for us tomorrow. He’s got a fifty arm. He’ll flash you a fifty-five arm. He can catch it in center field. The bat has never really played for me. My feeling is he’s going to be a two-year rookie-ball guy. And I would give him a hundred grand and put him out here and just cross our fingers and hope he hits. I would turn him around to the left and hope that works. And let it be. You know, his feeling is, and he’s told me, and we’ve talked. I’ve talked to his coach. He said, you know, give baseball a few years and see if he can hit, if that works. If not, he can go and he can run and go to school as a track guy. He’s got Olympic-class feet.”

  But for many players, scouts play well beyond the dual roles of talent evaluator and financial analyst. Psychology comes into play, the way it did for Moises Rodriguez, Matt Slater, and Carlos Martínez. Here’s an example of another player the Cardinals ultimately stayed away from.

  “He’s a left-handed pitcher, slash, you know, right fielder. Definitely, the only interest I have in him is a left-handed pitcher. Six feet. About two hundred pounds. Very loose, elastic. We’ll get to the baggage first. Get that out of the way. He had issues and attempted an assault with a baseball bat to one of his roommate’s girlfriends was in the dorm. Got arrested. Da da, da da, da da. He’s had shoulder surgery already years ago.… Now, the tools … he’s got big raw power. He’s super, super strong. Reminds me of a bigger Billy Wagner kind of body. But bigger. He’s six feet. Maybe six feet one. I didn’t touch him last year. He’s been up to ninety-four. Didn’t touch him. This year, I watched him. I watched the way he handled himself. I stayed in touch with the coaches. I’m very close with the guys over there. He really minded his p’s and q’s. He’s done a lot better and he’s pitched well. We saw him the other day. He probably was hitting ninety, ninety-one. He’s got a workable curveball. He’s got a changeup. He’s the Friday-night guy [for his school] … sixty-nine innings, sixty-two strikeouts, seventeen walks, two point seven RA. Good lefty—and he’s got a loose delivery. He’s a crazy kid. He also had medication for the ADD type of thing. He’s got crazy eyes. But he’s a lefty and I wouldn’t take him before the tenth round.”

  Dan returned to the whole assault thing.

  “I mean, one thing we have not done, and I can’t see us doing, is sending [player development] projects off the field. I mean, if he’s a project on the field, it’s one thing. You think that was ‘He’s a good kid. He made a mistake and he’s over it?’ Or is there something there?”

  “As I found out more about that thing with the baseball bat,” Gonzalez responded, “his roommate was bringing a girl in that wasn’t supposed to be in the room, you know, and he was, like, ‘Get her the hell out of here,’ you know?”

  “He threatened her with a baseball bat?”

  “He lifted a bat. Yeah. Listen, Dan. That’s our call what we want to do. Those are the facts. It’s not like I pounded the table for this guy. I put him in just because I said, you know what? This arm’s too good to just leave off my list. You know?”

  Kantrovitz asked Gonzalez flat out, “Would you want to put your name on this guy?”

  “Well, let’s put it like this. I would leave him as, like, the lowest-priority guy out there. There’s been a lot of other guys that are better.”

  The world is filled with people who have trouble accurately diagnosing the people they live with every day. It is part of a scout’s job to do this about players they see a handful of times. It’s usually not as extreme as this case, but this kind of temperature-taking allows scouts to arrive at opinions—opinions the Cardinals want, need, and are vital to overall scores—about a player’s ability to thrive in the difficult world of minor league baseball and claw to the top of it.

  But there’s so much more. There’s scouting of family.

  “He’s six feet six, two hundred, and he’s a baby, okay?” Gonzalez said of one pitcher the Cardinals didn’t draft. “He’s going to put on thirty pounds more. His dad is six feet five, two hundred thirty, you know? And the thing about him I like about the most? He’s aggressive. He thinks he can get anybody out. I love that.”

  Or: “His mom is in the picture. They’re very academic oriented, you know? I think he might come down to two seventy-five or something.”

  Even the circumstances and attitudes of some parents were taken into account and committed to memory by Gonzalez, who threw them into the scouting reports to add to the picture: “A blue-collar mom, beer-drinking mom.” “Parents aren’t really baseball people, grasping at pitching gurus.” “The mom is gorgeous.”

  I also heard the following player comps: Steve Cishek, “the Ron Gant dude,” “Jeff Kent–looking body,” Hunter Pence, and Gomer Pyle.

  About two hours in, Charlie got to Darren Seferina.

  “He’s a second baseman. Lean, small-bodied kid. Quick twitch. Solid average defender. Has a chance to be an above-average defender. Still a little unpolished. Has a superquick left-handed bat. Short to the ball. Tries to hit balls up in the air a little bit. He’s hit a home run here and there. Can’t, you know, he’s going to learn that. He’s also from Curaçao. He’s a seventy, at times seventy-five runner.” Eighty is as high as the scale goes, so that means he’s really fast. “Three-six on bunts. Four point oh five down the line. Four-two on turns. Really, really good first-to-third. Really like this kid. He’s an electric player. I wish he was a little bit bigger, but he’s bigger than a lot of guys that play in the big leagues that are probably as big as Omar Vizquel.… I like this guy quite a bit. And I think he’s going to turn into a really good ballplayer.”

  Clearly, the computer showed Kantrovitz something because his response was “Okay, well, I want to spend some time talking about this guy.”

  Arango didn’t have as much money on Seferina:

  “My biggest concern about him, this guy’s not very physical. And he can run. He’s got good hands. His arm—his double-play turns are not that great. A guy small, to me, has to be physical, you know?… This kid has got some authority.… Now this guy is a seventy runner. At some point—I understand that. And he hits his ground balls and line drives here and there. [Another prospect] can drive the ball. Okay? And he’s got a plus arm.”

  What followed was a colloquy designed to figure out how strong Darren Seferina would eventually become.

  DAN: Do you think this guy can drive the gaps?

  FERNANDO: He’s going to need some more strength. That’s the thing, you know?

  CHARLIE: Well, I mean—

  JOE: Is he big-boned or is he just—is he big-boned?

  FERNANDO: He’s just thin. Just thin.

  CHARLIE: He’s about five feet ten and a half and he’s lean. But he’s well-leaned muscled and he’s young. He’s going to get a little bit stronger.

  JOE: Does he have a good arm?

  CHARLIE: He has plenty of arm for second base. He’s a second baseman.

  FERNANDO: Forty-five [out of eighty] arm at best.

  At this point, Charlie returns to the weaver-of-dreams role, what every scout in that room did at some point: made himself into Don Draper giving the Kodak Carousel pitch.

  “You know, he had a really good year. He hit .402. He had 164 at bats; .402. On base, .482. Slugging, .494. And he stole thirty-two bags. Okay? He’s a top-of-the-order guy and he can get things nutty out there when gets on the bases. Now, can he drive a ball? Listen. He’s not real strong, but to win the game, you got a
guy throwing a ninety-two or a ninety-five and he took a ninety-four-mile-an-hour fastball and went oppo with it over the shortstop’s head. He doesn’t back down and I got the money on him that I have, and every bit of that I leave on him. He’s another guy that says, Dan … he would like to get a little more than the hundred thousand bucks. Maybe two hundred or something like that. I think it’s a little bit of a smoke screen. And we can get him for around the hundred or a hundred whatever. He’s got an agent. He has no problems going back to school next year at Miami Dade. He even said to me, he goes, ‘Well, if I go to school, I can get a little stronger and come back.’ And I think he’s completely right. I mean, too bad he’s not going to be here [tomorrow]. He’s in the World Series right now.”

  “We’ve got a guy from California watching him right now in the World Series,” Kantrovitz replied. “So we’ll get a report on him in his final games.”

  The consensus, Gonzalez included, was that Seferina didn’t have the arm for shortstop.

  “Everything else is there,” Gonzalez continued. “The hands are good enough. The range is good enough. But he doesn’t have the arm. He’s perfectly suited for two places. Second base and center field. But I think this guy can stay on the dirt at second base. I know he can. I’ve seen him do too much there.”

  The question then turns to how long they can wait and still get him.

  “Well, if we’re interested in this guy, and not without me getting any new information that I should get plenty more before the draft, I would say we wouldn’t have to take him before the fifth, you know? Start talking about him at the fifth. And I would say between the fifth and the ninth round.”

  On the other hand, Kantrovitz appeared unmoved by the enthusiasm from Gonzalez and Arango on another prospect, one the Cardinals ultimately didn’t draft.

  “Yeah, I love this kid,” Gonzalez said. “He’s one of these guys where—okay, let me break down his tools first. He’s about five feet ten. He’s a blond-headed Cuban kid from Key West. Talks with a Cajun accent. For some reason down in Key West, they do that. And this kid—he was around last year. He played at Key West High School. Was a tough, tough kid. Pitched. Closed games. Up to ninety-one. Played shortstop. He’s not a shortstop. He played shortstop a lot this year, too. He’s definitely not a shortstop. And he’s good enough to hang at second base. And he might hang there for his whole career. He can definitely go out and play center field, too. He’s got a plus arm. He’s a plus runner. This guy’s got some pop in his bat. He’s got an approach like Pete Rose. You know, Pete Rose and the guy—[David] Eckstein. Kind of Eckstein-y. He kind of—he crowds the plate. Loves to get hit. He’s just a dirtbag, and I love this kid, the way he plays the game. I don’t really care where’s he’s going to play. I think he’s got a chance to stay at second base. He is not as good a defender as Seferina at second base. He doesn’t have as soft hands. However, I’m not saying he can’t stay at second base his whole career. You talk to him and he says, ‘Well, you know, I play at second base, but you’re wasting my arm, you know? ’Cause I got such a—’ You know? He hits. He hits on base. He runs. He’s superaggressive.