The Cardinals Way

by Howard Megdal

  “It started with Mike Witte, a cartoon illustrator from Princeton,” Kantrovitz remembered. “I remember when I picked him up from the airport for his first meeting with our staff down in Jupiter, and he literally packed close to a thousand VHS tapes of old-time pitchers that he had studied. He was kind of like a brilliant mad scientist.

  “Bill turned us on to him. What started out as a favor [by meeting with him] became the genesis for our focus on classic mechanics.”

  While Witte put together some of the intellectual underpinnings for what would ultimately lead to wholesale changes in how the Cardinals trained their pitchers, Mejdal was hard at work determining how to configure the team’s process for evaluating players in the draft. Now armed with data on both college and high school pitchers, Mejdal had approximately two months to put those together from his first day on the job in April 2005 to the June 2005 draft.

  “I was the only one doing this and so there was going to be models for everything, but I reported to Jeff because Jeff was responsible for the draft and he was the biggest customer of this [work]. It wasn’t the others. So with the drafts, whatever, eight or ten weeks away after my first day, that’s were my energies went.

  “I was the one creating the models. But Jeff was aware of the steps throughout. And so was Dan. But at that time I was the analyst doing the modeling, the database work.”

  That doesn’t mean Mejdal was certain his methods would work. After all, even the best processes don’t always yield expected results. In a room full of skeptics, after the debacle of 2004, Mejdal and the rest of the group worried about what that might mean for the analytics team.

  “I remember it well,” Mejdal said of his apprehension that spring. “Like—the analysis we had done, that I had done, in those two months were showing that you can increase the output of the draft in a very significant way. I think I’m as insecure as anybody when it comes to standing up in a room filled with expertise with a contradictory position when you have not analyzed every imaginable interaction and their attributes. And, frankly, in those two months, we had good reason to believe that we could have wonderful results. But there was still a giant insecurity because there simply hadn’t been enough time to throw rocks from every angle at the model.”

  Ultimately, 2005 saw the Cardinals incorporate analytics into their decision making—but it was a far cry from where the team ultimately arrived, which was making analytics the primary decision driver, with scouting a key component of those overall values on each amateur player. Still, the forward progress is clear, with the 2005 Cardinals draft yielding eight major league players, twice as many as the 2004 draft, and guys such as Colby Rasmus in the first round and Jaime García in the twenty-second round enjoying sustained major league success.

  “The difference between ’04 and ’05 was twofold,” Mozeliak said. “One is, obviously we had more confidence in our analytical strategy for the draft. But we also ramped up that department with personnel and went to a more traditional structure.”

  The draft could have been even better, though. The Cardinals could have taken Jed Lowrie.

  “The model loved Jed Lowrie,” Mejdal recalled, “who was this undersized—he was playing second base—undersized second baseman at Stanford who was not—he was well liked by the scouts but not nearly as much as with the model. And I had made my arguments that Jed Lowrie was a better pick with our thirtieth pick than Tyler Greene. And I remember having this sort of sick feeling, like, what if we actually take him because of my work and he fails? So this would be a wonderful anecdote for people that talk to and point to how we [in analytics] have little to add. Because, I was insecure with an undersized player from such an elite school and just [lacked] the confidence that he was as good a bet as the more athletic Tyler Greene.”

  Greene reached the major leagues, but collected only 746 plate appearances over five seasons while accumulating a career WAR of -0.6 through 2014. Lowrie, meanwhile, reached the major leagues in 2008 and has been a solid starter at shortstop throughout his career, with only injuries holding him back. With 8.4 career WAR already through 2014, Lowrie signed a three-year, $22 million contract with the Astros prior to the 2015 season.

  So though it may seem as if the Cardinals remade themselves quickly—to go from no analytics team in the fall of 2003 to essentially a full analytics operation in every level of team operations in less than a decade is remarkably quick for any company, let alone one in the tradition-bound game of baseball, let alone in a hypertraditional structure within baseball such as the St. Louis Cardinals—to Mejdal it still felt slow.

  “Jeff was very smart and he brought this in very gradually,” Mejdal said. “To me it was frustratingly gradually, but perhaps looking back on it, it was the optimal way of implementing this change. So, no, we didn’t pick Jed Lowrie, and, no, we didn’t do much in ’05 with the model.”

  Encapsulating the challenge of Luhnow’s job is that what Mejdal saw as a slow, subtle difference felt jarring in the more traditional corners of the Cardinals’ front office.

  “Sig was in the room. Sig was vocal and I was trying to adjust as much as I felt comfortable adjusting given the audience,” Luhnow said. “And what happens is you end up with players in this order. And then this scout will vehemently argue that this guy needs to move up, and this guy’s scout believes he’s probably too high because he’s more of a performance guy than a scout guy so he’s not going to argue. So then you’ve got to sit there and the room is kind of expecting you to move that guy up and you have to determine what [to do]—pick your battles, right? And a lot of it comes out of how you massage the conversation in the room and how much time you give each player and all of that. One thing you don’t want to do—and this happened the year before—was have the scouts leave the room. And then when they come back in, the order’s changed and they didn’t have anything to do with it. That did not go over well.

  “You have to make everybody feel like their input is valued, but you have to avoid double counting and that’s what happens. Because that player’s already up there because the scout loves him. So if you allow that scout and his voice to push him up even higher, you’re damaging your total output. No question about it.”

  Put simply, scouts arguing passionately for their own guys wasn’t just a different way of drafting from what Luhnow was recommending, and now implementing. It was an impediment to it, once that scouting enthusiasm had already been incorporated into a player’s overall grade.

  The resulting turmoil meant that John Mozeliak had two jobs. He was the assistant general manager, with a hand in virtually every area of Cardinals operations, very much the Walt Jocketty–trained executive. But Mozeliak was simultaneously among the most receptive members of the front office to the ideas of Luhnow, Mejdal, and Kantrovitz.

  “It ate up a lot of time just because we were a fractured company,” Mozeliak said. “But I still had my day-to-day job, which was as assistant GM, which was paying attention to waivers. Obviously contract negotiations. Obviously all employee contracts went through my office at that time. Consulted with all the department heads on their annual planning and all that. So that part of the job was very consistent. Very normal.”

  Meanwhile, the Cardinals moved to implement some of the ideas Mike Witte first brought to their attention. And while Kantrovitz and Luhnow “baseball-ized” the draft ideas that Mejdal came up with, as Kantrovitz put it, they had someone with a long history in the major leagues to do the same on the pitching-mechanics side, someone recommended by Witte. Fortunately for the Cardinals, he was ready to ditch the things he’d been teaching for decades, realizing that he’d been doing more harm than good. Brent Strom, you see, had a pitching-mechanics epiphany of his own.

  I did nothing to offend anybody. It was just the message. They didn’t like the message because what happened—being a traditional game, they didn’t like the fact that there may be a different thought process about how to go about things.

  —BRENT STROM
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  The first man to have Tommy John surgery, as you probably know, was Tommy John.

  The second was Brent Strom. He calls himself “the Buzz Aldrin of Tommy John surgery.”

  “I came to spring training in [’78 with the Padres], my arm was bothering me,” Strom told Evan Drellich of the Houston Chronicle in March 2014. “I tried to medicate it with the hot stuff that you put on your arm and cortisone shots. Actually, I was in Yuma, Arizona. I left about nine o’clock one night and met a doctor at midnight in San Diego to get a cortisone shot without the club knowing, came back, tried to [pitch]. I was hanging on by my fingernails and was released at the end of spring training.

  “Trying to see what I can do to make this club, I get released the last day of spring training, I contact—somehow I get in touch with Dr. [Robert] Kerlan, who is alive at the time.… Jobe worked under Kerlan. So then I go out to LA and they look at it, they do the testing, they decide to try the Tommy John surgery again … it was within weeks they wanted to do the surgery. I was a free agent.

  “They were looking for another candidate [for the surgery], I think. Obviously, I was at wit’s end, desperation time, they performed the surgery. I remembered they tried to take [the tendon] out my left wrist, I still have the scar right here [but they needed to look elsewhere for a tendon]—so they took it out of my left leg. I came back and pitched at the Triple-A level and won [ten] games that next year with Houston.…

  “It’s probably a good thing it’s called Tommy John surgery and not Brent Strom surgery. Tommy John wins 288 and I win 22. So it depends on which surgery you get, I guess.

  “It’s one of the reasons I’m so adamant about the mechanics, we have a better understanding now of why this happens. So we try and do things to help eliminate that. Now medical [advancements] allow Tommy John surgeries—I hate to use the word routine—but it’s a lot easier to work on an elbow with this than it is a shoulder. Shoulders are more difficult.”

  So for Strom, keeping pitchers healthy was personal. He remembered when his career ended. He remembered why, what it felt like. And he’d spent a career trying to keep guys from the same fate. He’d joined the Los Angeles Dodgers as Triple-A pitching coach the year after his playing career ended in 1982. And he’d spent most of the subsequent two decades as a pitching instructor at both the minor and major league levels—in Houston, he was the pitching coach for Terry Collins in 1996, and with Tony Muser’s Royals in 2000–2001. And he was working as a minor league pitching instructor with the Montreal Expos in 2004, about to give a speech at a pitching clinic in Seattle.

  A man named Paul Nyman spoke just ahead of him, and Strom realized he’d been going about his profession all wrong for twenty years.

  “Probably the biggest influence that I’ve had is a gentleman named Paul Nyman, who’s out of Connecticut,” Strom told me in a September 2014 interview, sitting in the visiting dugout at Citi Field. “And this is an engineer who, when I was doing a clinic one time and I had my eureka moment and he spoke ahead of me. I mean, it was like an eye-opener. To understand that momentum is important. That how the body moves through space and how you can re-create tension and a little tension at the right time. These kind of things. Because before that, I was a dude that would lift the leg, lean balance. Do all this stuff. I was one of the culprits. And I never intentionally hurt anybody, but I know I did.”

  Added Strom in a January 2014 e-mail, “With my philosophy in mind I then sat back and listened to this engineer show me a whole new way to look at how we throw, how the body moves and so much more. In essence it created a thirst for additional information.… The rest is history as they say. One thing for sure … as I write this, I am still finding out new [things]. I have always realized … ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’”

  The resulting shift in philosophy created several problems for Strom. One was that he suddenly found himself teaching differently from the way that had gotten him hired by the Expos and other teams in the first place. It was also different from what his fellow coaches were teaching.

  Ultimately, it cost him his job. The Nationals (after the Expos moved to Washington) let Strom go on the last day of spring training, 2006. He thought he would catch on elsewhere, but it didn’t happen. He spent the summer at home with his wife, Carrie, in Tucson, Arizona.

  “When I’m home, for the last seventeen years, I take care of my [family],” Strom said. “I have my ninety-seven-year-old mother-in-law living with us, I have a seventy-two-year-old sister-in-law that lives with us. I have three bulldogs. That’s my family. So I’m taking care of a lot of people in that regard.”

  Eventually, Strom decided to take his new ideas directly to teams. The Cardinals needed someone who was thinking along the lines of Witte to implement the ideas Strom had come to through Nyman’s work. So when Strom gave his presentation to Luhnow, Mejdal, and Kantrovitz, he’d found precisely the organization where his new way of looking at things was an asset for hiring him, rather than a liability. When I asked him whether he’d have been hired by the Cardinals if not for the Nyman epiphany, he said, “No, I don’t think so.

  “And so eventually they hired me that year. They brought me down to the instructional league. Just kind of talked to a few people. And I had dinner with Bill and Jeff and showed them what I thought I could do, in terms of injury prevention and increasing velocity and developing pitchers. And they apparently liked what I had to offer, and then they offered me a job as a mechanics coach on the pitching side.”

  This represented a further incursion of the Luhnow changes into what had been a tradition-bound Cardinals operation. Exactly how poorly that was received finally revealed itself to Strom in the person of Mark DeJohn, who you might remember as George Kissell’s self-described adopted son.

  “Well, I remember coming in as an outsider,” Strom recalled. “And I remember Mark DeJohn, who I became very close with—I remember one day in St. Lucie where the Mets were training. We were in instructional league. It was spring training or something and I’m working with the guy, and Mark is kind of watching me from the side. He called me over the side. He makes this comment. He says, ‘You know what? You’re a pretty good guy!’ He says, ‘You’re not the asshole that everybody tells me you are.’ And so I looked at him and I said, ‘I really don’t know how to take that.’ And he said, ‘Yeah. You’re a hell of a guy, man. You’re fun. You’re funny. You like the same music I do. Why doesn’t everybody think this about [you]?’ I didn’t know what they thought of me. But obviously I was not thought of very highly.

  “But I think what happened is, the message was different than what people had heard before. And maybe they didn’t like the message. Maybe they didn’t like the fact that they may have to rethink what they taught. Which I had to do, too. [Coaches like] Tom House. There was an array of people that as you pick and choose from the fruit that you want to use and create your own idea of what the delivery should be like, the training should be like. That kind of thing. [Coaches like] Eric Cressey. And I’m still doing that today. I mean, I’m changing now. I’ll be different tomorrow than I am today, as new information comes forward.”

  For Strom, working under Dyar Miller and alongside Tim Leveque, the principles are easily explained. In essence, a career of educating young pitchers allowed Strom to maximize the delivery of what became a new set of guidelines.

  “I did nothing to offend anybody,” Strom said. “It was just the message. They didn’t like the message because what happened—being a traditional game, they didn’t like the fact that there may be a different thought process about how to go about things. Creating an athletic pitcher. Stop doing long-distance running and do sprints instead because of the energy system in pitching, which is one and a half seconds to throw the ball, you wait twelve seconds, you do it again. You do it fifteen times. You do it nine times a game. Total outburst: six minutes, five seconds. Well then, why go out and run an hour when it’s not in the same energy system? You’re better off doing explosive-t
ype stuff. Okay?

  “Things like that. Long toss to develop arm health. Elevated fastballs, which we’re doing now. Strength-training-for-the-arm-type stuff that’s a little bit different. Learning how to decelerate correctly. Things like that. And are we on top of things? We still have a ways to go. But the beauty of working with Jeff and working with the group that I have now that I’m fortunate to work with is that they’ll listen.

  “And the one thing about Jeff, don’t be subjective. Be objective. Show them, show me the numbers. Show me the money, so to speak. And with that he’ll look at, review it, and give you a chance if he believes in it. So I’m fully appreciative of that, instead of those people blowing you off.

  “Because had it not been for Jeff, I think I’d have been gone after the first year. You know, there were people kind of looking at me sideways. What’s this guy doing? I had long-toss going. I had the velocity enhancement. I had people being more athletic in their deliveries. And as I told everybody, I like the sinkers as much as anybody, but a pretty good pitcher one day told me—my favorite pitcher, Sandy Koufax—he told me, “The people that throw sinkers are those that cannot throw fastballs.”

  Meanwhile, as the Cardinals altered their pitching instruction and program, they took another step toward integrating analytics into their drafting—“a big step,” according to Mejdal. “I think that as time went on, it was more systematic, but even to this day, there is, in general, two methodologies, and while we combine them into a single number, you can still see the remnants of each methodology. Right up to performance base, that takes some of the scouting attributes, and the other methodology, [which] is completely scouting. And so, the Jed Lowries of the world, for instance, score much higher on the first method than the second. And although we had an overall way of combining them, there was still an anchoring to the conventional method. And it was a gradual de-anchoring to the current method and re-anchoring to the method that combined all the information that took place over the years.”