The Cardinals Way

by Howard Megdal

  “In terms of realizing the gravity of the Pujols decision, I knew that history was not on our side when looking at the odds of cashing in on a comp pick,” Kantrovitz recalled. “And I certainly didn’t expect we would get as quick a return as we did.”

  But before the Cardinals even made their picks on June 4, 2012, one factor already made the call by DeWitt and Mozeliak not to match the Pujols offer from the Angels look prophetic: Pujols himself. His numbers had dropped a bit in 2011, in his final season for the Cardinals. His OPS dropped below 1.000 for the first time since 2002, and his OPS+ of 148 was the lowest of his career, if not dramatically below a few other seasons.

  But despite a still-excellent 138 OPS+ for the Angels in 2012, much of that production came in the second half of the season. He failed to homer in April, and on the day Kantrovitz made the two compensatory picks, Pujols had an OPS of .694.

  Still, a declining Pujols was only part of the equation. The players Kantrovitz drafted, particularly Michael Wacha, took a very fast track to the major leagues.

  “While we had him high on the list from day 1—it’s not like he all of a sudden became a good pitcher,” Kantrovitz said in a January 2015 e-mail. “But, I will say that his first couple outings were not against good competition. As a result, he didn’t need to use his changeup or breaking ball much, if at all, and it was tough to get a thorough scouting evaluation. Then, I remember one of our national cross-checkers, Jamal Strong, texting me while watching Wacha against Pepperdine, a good hitting team. And, Jamal, who played in the big leagues, said it was the best changeup he had ever seen. I’ll never forget that.”

  They sent Wacha to Steve Turco in the Gulf Coast League. He didn’t stay long, with 5 innings, 1 walk, 7 strikeouts. To challenge him further, they moved him up to high-A Palm Beach, skipping two levels. That didn’t prove to be much of a problem for Wacha: 8 innings, 1 walk, 16 strikeouts, no runs allowed. On to Springfield and the Double-A threshold that proves difficult for many pitching prospects: 8 innings, 1 run, 3 walks, 17 strikeouts.

  Across three levels, Wacha posted an ERA of 0.86. Walk rate was 1.7/9. Strikeout rate 17.1/9.

  Pujols struggled to even stay on the field in 2013, playing in just 99 games, while his OPS+ dropped to 116. And by May 2013, less than a year after getting drafted, Wacha was in the big leagues. He threw 7 innings against the Royals, allowing just 1 run, didn’t walk a batter, and struck out 6.

  “The day Wacha got called up—you know, the first big leaguer technically that got called up from a draft when I was scouting director—Jeff was the first person to e-mail me saying, ‘Nice work. Only forty more to catch me,’” Kantrovitz told me in October 2014. “So it’s definitely something that I won’t forget, that e-mail. And I’m going to e-mail him once I get to forty-one so I can tell him—I got you.”

  Nor was this an anomaly for Wacha: he finished the 2013 regular season with a 135 ERA+, 2.6 walks per nine, 9 strikeouts per nine. He went out and won Game 4 of the NLDS against the Pirates, pitching into the eighth, before Carlos Martínez and Trevor Rosenthal closed out a 2–1 win.

  And in the NLCS, Wacha twice outpitched the Los Angeles ace, Clayton Kershaw. In both Game 2 and Game 6, both times surrounded by a red wall of sound at Busch Stadium, Wacha didn’t give up a run. In Game 2, that was vital, in a 1–0 win. In Game 6, his teammates picked him up offensively. Wacha gave the ball to Martínez, who turned it over to Rosenthal—two draft picks and an international signing. At the end of the game, a 9–0 win, the Cardinals were National League champions. And Michael Wacha was the NLCS MVP.

  “It’s funny because I ran into his agent at the playoffs in L.A. and we got on the topic of Wacha and he asked me what I was thinking as Wacha was falling in the draft,” Kantrovitz recalled in a January 2015 e-mail. “I said I was thinking, ‘Holy shit, what do other teams know that we don’t?’ According to our performance metrics and scouting opinions, there were only a few higher-ranked players … and it didn’t seem plausible to me that he would get to 19 without some sort of issue … him being hurt, a signability issue, or something similar.”

  Meanwhile, Stephen Piscotty has made steady progress through the Cardinals’ system, debuting in 2015 and posting an OPS+ of 132 over his first 72 plate appearances with the Cardinals through August 2015. “Piscotty was actually a pick that was not consistent with our system, if you can believe that,” Kantrovitz said. “He was more of a ‘subjective’ pick, more of just listening to our scouts. When that 3rd pick rolled around, we had just taken a ‘performer’ in Ramsey with our 2nd pick and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to get a high ceiling hitter like Piscotty. I looked at Roger Smith, our nat’l cross-checker and asked him what he thought [pointing to Piscotty’s magnet], and Roger in his deep Georgia accent said, ‘You betta f@#%$@#‘n believe it.’ Then, I looked at our area scout, Matt Swanson, and asked him, and he actually said he’d prefer Carson Kelly. I didn’t think that was a bad thought but at that point, we also figured Kelly was sliding and would likely be around later.”

  The Cardinals got both Piscotty and Kelly that year. By the beginning of 2015, Piscotty had ascended to the third spot in Baseball America’s Cardinals prospects.1 Then Kantrovitz in 2014, with a pair of first-round picks in 2013, went out and got even more topflight pitching, taking Marco Gonzales and Rob Kaminsky. Gonzales, Steve Turco explained to me back in May 2014, was on “the Wacha Plan.” Sure enough, he debuted in June, and by October was one of Matheny’s trusted relievers.

  “As I suspect is a lot more rare than I even realize, we identified Marco as a top target in our preseason scouting meetings,” Kantrovitz said. “Somebody with a chance of getting to our pick who already had a lot of ‘scout love’ coming into the year. Marco checked a lot of boxes. He had the performance, so the model liked him. He had stuff, so the scouts liked him. And he had the top mechanics grade in the class. As long as he didn’t lay an egg his junior year and somebody completely unexpected didn’t fall, Marco would be in consideration for our pick. In fact, he was probably the top pitcher on my personal pref list. Realizing that he could be in play for us, I explicitly told our area scout not to contact his agent. In fact, during the draft, Mo and I went into his office to call Marco’s agent somewhere in the teens … just a few picks before ours. And the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘Shit, I didn’t think the Cardinals were interested!’ I smiled. He also said there was interest in the top ten from more than one team and we got lucky he fell … that also made me smile.”

  As for Kaminsky, the high school product out of Montvale, New Jersey, held his own with Turco in the Gulf Coast League after getting picked in 2013.

  “I remember meeting our area scout, Sean Moran, to go watch Rob pitch,” Kantrovitz said. “It was an incredibly efficient outing, and afterwards I remember talking with Sean and it was clear how much he liked Rob and wanted us to draft him. Agreeing with Sean and having complete trust in his evaluation ability, we agreed the best strategy was to downplay our interest and not sound any alarm bells.”

  In 2014, Kaminsky pitched in full-season ball with Class-A Peoria, a jump of two levels, and his 1.88 ERA proved he was certainly ready for the challenge. Pushed another level to high-A Palm Beach, Kaminsky posted an ERA of 2.09 over 17 starts, before the Cardinals traded him to Cleveland for Brandon Moss, a straight one-for-one deal for a hitter the big club needed.

  “For a starting pitcher, best season in my 11 years with the Chiefs,” Peoria Chiefs play-by-play man Nathan Baliva told me about Kaminsky in January 2015. “Number 2 SP ERA/Avg against, and #5 Whip in franchise history.”

  The final reason Cardinals fans rested easier about the loss of Pujols, a generational talent, was simple: the heir apparent was coming.

  That $145,000 spent on acquiring Oscar Taveras by the international department quickly turned into one of the best investments by any team. Taveras held his own as a seventeen-year-old in the Dominican Summer League in 2009. But in 2010, the numbers began to look a lot like th
ose of another great young hitter whom the Cardinals had once developed: Albert Pujols.

  Taveras went to low-A Johnson City, and hit .322/.362/.485. He got promoted to Quad Cities in the Midwest League, a pitchers’ circuit, but not for those facing Taveras: .386/.444/.584, in his age-nineteen season.

  By the spring of 2012, the torch even had a physical manifestation, with a bat that Pujols gave to Taveras, one that Taveras put aside as a memento. He did too much damage to his bats to use it more than once.

  “The fact that he almost hit .400 kind of had my attention,” Matheny told Derrick Goold back in the spring of 2012. “You play a full season and you hit .380, I don’t care if it’s T-ball, you’ve done something pretty special. To see a nineteen-year-old that is doing things that he’s been able to do … it’s legitimate.”

  Taveras hadn’t gotten to major league camp yet, but Goold reported Matheny kept requesting him personally for Cardinals major league spring games.2

  Pujols had only spent one season in the minors. Surely, Taveras would be in St. Louis soon as well. The Cardinals would have their draft picks and their franchise bat. He was the third-best prospect in baseball, according to Baseball America in 2013. A foot injury limited him to 47 games in 2013. That kind of thing sends prospects farther down the list. Some questions also arose about how hard he worked on the rest of his game, one reason he didn’t get promoted as readily as Pujols.

  “There’s no reason you can’t work as hard on your baserunning and work as hard on your defense as you work on your hitting,” Vuch recalled saying to Taveras back in 2012, from that same Derrick Goold profile of Taveras. “You appeal to his pride.… The goal is not just to be a good hitter. He has the potential to be a really good player. We’re not doing our job if we can’t extract everything out of him.”

  And yet. He entered 2014 at … third in all of baseball, according to Baseball America.

  “I will remember the lengthy interview for a long time, where I sat, where he did … The bat given him,” Goold recalled in a January 2015 conversation. “It was clear he’d be a special hitter. Question was dedication to other parts of the game. Kid had crazy obvious talent.”

  “You always have this feeling that he’s half a level ahead of where he’s playing,” Luhnow said in 2012. “You get the feeling he’s the best player on the field when he comes up to bat. He’s the guy you want to watch. He’s the guy who sells tickets in the future.”

  Or as Taveras recalled Pujols saying to him, “I’m looking forward to seeing good things from you.”

  2014

  March 23, Jupiter, Florida

  Ask every one of the hundreds of Cardinals prospects what they’re thinking about as spring training days dwindle to a few, and it’s where they’ll be going for the summer, and what level they want to reach by the fall.

  “I have to prove I can get lefties out in Peoria,” Joe Scanio told me as we stood at the nerve center of the George Kissell complex, a group of six fields surrounding a small tower that holds a restroom. There’s no shade here. The fans are elsewhere. Later that day, the Cardinals in major league camp will play on the main field at Roger Dean Stadium.

  Scanio was a sixteenth-round draft pick in 2012, Dan Kantrovitz’s first season as scouting director. He isn’t a top prospect—he’s a minor league reliever and was from the moment he started playing in Batavia, where he was old for the league. Just a fastball and a breaking ball.

  But this is what the Cardinals do: they make sure every prospect of theirs knows precisely what is expected of him. I encountered this, over and over, whenever I spoke to one of their players. Nothing is left unsaid so that players will know what they do well, what they need to work on, how they progress.

  “I pitched at that level last year,” Scanio told me. “I know I can do it.”

  Lefties posted a .795 OPS against Scanio in 2013. A broken wrist held him back in 2014, but across three levels, he lowered the lefty OPS against him to .590.

  The activity was constant across four fields, every player equipped with his information, every player desperately hoping to show enough to get the choice assignment, one step closer to the major leagues.

  On a fifth field, outfielder Devante Lacy is facing Nick Frey. The Cardinals took Lacy in the twenty-fourth round in 2013, Frey in the thirty-third round. Paul Davis, minor league pitching coach/coordinator of pitching analytics, supervises. It’s what Brent Strom used to do, but Strom went off to Houston to work for Jeff Luhnow, promoted to the major league side.

  Davis is guiding Frey, but Lacy and Frey took the opportunity to debrief each other as they left the field. The conversation isn’t just vertical in Cardinals camp.

  “That two-seamer, I thought I was right on it, then it dropped,” Lacy told Frey.

  “Yeah, I was leaving some of those up, but down, they can’t hit those,” Frey responded.

  Lacy’s rehabbing a hamate injury. Frey’s rehabbing from Tommy John surgery.

  “Eventually, we’ll be a bunch of guys pushing each other,” Lacy told me as we walked toward the minor league clubhouse. “For now, we’re all trying to work together. He tells me what I’m doing wrong, I tell him what he’s doing wrong.”

  And of course: “I’m hoping to be at State College in June,” Lacy tells me. “It’s in God’s hands.”

  This happens with the most promising prospects, too. The two first-rounders from the 2013 draft were Marco Gonzales and Rob Kaminsky, a college pitcher with a changeup scouts compared to Johan Santana’s, and a high school hurler with a plus curveball to go with his MLB-ready fastball.

  Get them together, and what do you think happened in the spring of 2014? Gonzales taught Kaminsky the changeup. Kaminsky taught Gonzales the curveball. Then they both went out and excelled.

  As for promotion, Lacy didn’t have it quite right. It wasn’t God so much as a chess game played by Gary LaRocque, in conjunction with the rest of the front office, though LaRocque is given a free hand to use his decades of expertise to make the final call on where everybody begins.

  “We, in our structure, look at each roster and we try to set certain parameters,” LaRocque told me in a July interview. “You know, they’re not hard caps, but they certainly are benchmarks. And if a player gets to that and takes himself above the level of the league, then we consider how to move him, when to move him [up]. It’s more of a timing issue. We’ve done that throughout our system. We have a series of benchmarks. A lot of that’s driven just by my own initial conversation way back in April following spring training.”

  That’s even communicated to Corey Baker, who by any benchmark is at the very edges of the Cardinals system.

  It didn’t matter that Baker was selected in the forty-ninth round back in 2011, a round that no longer exists in the MLB draft—the total was dropped to forty rounds in 2012. Or that Baker was a senior sign, getting a bonus of not much more than LaRocque did all those years ago.

  Baker didn’t even think he’d get drafted. He’d been a mideighties fastball guy at Clarkstown South High School in the northwest suburbs of New York City, then an upper-eighties fastball guy at the University of Pittsburgh.

  “Yeah, I was back home,” Baker recalled in a June 2014 interview. “I was back in Rockland County. And, you know, it was the forty-ninth round.

  “So I obviously know I wasn’t going in the first day. I obviously knew I wasn’t going early in that second day. But I was watching on the computer. I had teammates go. We had two guys from Pitt go in the seventh round, and watching a bunch of guys that I had played with. So I was just watching on my computer. I didn’t get drafted the second day. I was, like, no big deal. Tomorrow you have [rounds] thirty-one through fifty, you know? Maybe I’ll get drafted tomorrow. And I was watching on my computer and around round thirty-five, I stopped watching. I was like, man, this is terrible. I see all these guys getting drafted. Why am I not getting picked? And I stopped watching. And I was home. Me and my mom and my brother were at home and my dad was wor
king. And I remember I turned it off, and I had just, like, had enough. And I called my girlfriend, who was in Florida at the time, and I was just, like, ‘Well, I guess I’m not getting drafted. Time to start figuring out some other stuff.’”

  Baker has alternatives. He was a history major at Pitt, minor in political science. He’d interned in both Pittsburgh’s and University of Central Florida’s Sports Information Departments, the latter to be closer to his longtime girlfriend, Jenna, an up-and-coming industrial engineer at Disney.

  “And I was sitting on my front porch for a while. And in my head I was, like, ‘All right,’ you know? ‘It’s probably the fortieth round by now. It’s got to be the forty-fifth round by now. All right. It’s over. I might as well go check and just see if anyone else I know got picked.’ And I walk inside and the forty-ninth round was still going on, and I was, like, all right, I guess I’ll watch. And then about thirty seconds later, it was the Cardinals’ pick and they took me. And I called my dad right away, and me and my mom and my brother were there. We were all excited about it. So it went from a pretty low time for me to wow, you know? I didn’t get drafted. It just came and went. And then it was awesome ’cause I found out it wasn’t over and I got picked.

  “And then I had to leave in, like, three days, but my girlfriend flew up from Florida to spend the time with me and my family. And it was a lot of joy but it was also sobering. Now it’s time to get back to work ’cause I’m starting from the bottom again.”

  This is the year ahead for hundreds of Cardinals prospects. The team needs to figure out how to keep them focused, get their needs met within the financially restrictive confines of Major League Baseball’s guidelines on minor league salary, per diem, and other logistical difficulties that come with long bus trips and daily games. The staff need to make sure they’re connecting with their players as people—these guys, for the most part, haven’t been away from home very often, and certainly not for months and months at a time.