“And let me tell you something. He can drive some balls out of the yard. I—he has a little bit of Lenny Dykstra, that tough kind of ‘Let’s brawl’ kind of thing. I think our player development people will love him. He’s an above-average runner. Let’s see what he’s got: 190 at bats. He hit .400. He hit three home runs. Twenty-six strikeouts. Fifteen walks. On base, .451. Slugging, .574. He stole twenty of twenty-three bags. He doesn’t play the game to be passive. You know what I mean? And he wants to be the guy in the box with the bat in his hand to win the game.”
Kantrovitz responded, “I want to point out, Charlie, those are not good numbers for—in the level of competition that he’s facing—to suggest he’s going to do well in pro ball.”
“Well, that I can’t argue, not with the numbers,” Gonzalez said. “The numbers are what the numbers are. I’m telling you this much, Dan. You watch that kid play five games, you want him on our team. I do. We can sign him for a hundred grand. One twenty maybe. Dan, he’s going to play center field or second base. He can spot you some third. He played short, third, second, and center field this year. Dan, let me tell you something. The strongest thing about this kid is his whole approach to the game. He hits. He hits balls hard. He’s not pretty. You might laugh when you see him in the box tomorrow. To me, big league teams need a guy like this guy, you know? It’s a no-brainer for me to want him to be in a Cardinals uniform.”
Arango was clearly enamored by the guy as well:
“He hit a triple the first time up through center field. And he hit a home run off of a curveball.”
“At a big park!” Gonzalez added.
“He run a four-two. He’s got a hose for an arm,” Arango continued. “And this guy comes to play. He’s going to try to beat you any way he can, okay? That’s all I got to say. Because this guy—the ball just jumps.”
Kantrovitz remained skeptical. “Is carry tool just intangibles?”
“No, man,” Gonzalez replied. “This guy hits, Dan. This guy hits. This guy hits. He runs and he’s got a plus arm. And then you throw the intangibles in there with it and—look at Eckstein’s tools. He used to hold the ball like a little trophy-case thing and frickin’ launch it. I mean, you know?”
The problem with a David Eckstein comp is that almost all players with Eckstein’s tools do not, ultimately, reach the major leagues, let alone have a long career.
“I’m trying to like him,” Kantrovitz said. “I mean, guys that we overlook the numbers on typically have loud tools. And it doesn’t sound like he’s got loud tools.”
Ultimately, he went to another team in the draft, but never hit minor league pitching.
“And don’t think I didn’t get the look from Charlie!” Kantrovitz e-mailed me shortly after it happened.
Gonzalez would not have much cause for complaint once the draft was complete, however.
Matt Pearce came up a few minutes later, and Gonzalez immediately declared Pearce would be “one of my gut feels.”
“You only get one,” both Almaraz and Arango called out. The other scouts needled Gonzalez throughout his presentation, but Gonzalez didn’t engage, kept brushing them off and charging forward, starting to sweat through his Hawaiian shirt. These were max-effort scouting reports.
“That’s the most frustrating thing every year for me,” Gonzalez said. “I swear to God. No. We usually get three, I’ll tell you. How do you do this? How do you do this? Okay. Listen. This guy here is a guy that—I knew him in high school and played for Frank Turco, Steve’s brother over there. And he’s got a really, really good delivery. He was a skinny kid, about six feet one, 180 pounds. He’s now six feet three, about 215 pounds. He’s got, in my opinion, I think [Cardinals minor league pitching coach] Paul [Davis] thinks the same way, one of the best deliveries on my list. He’s six feet three, about 215 pounds. He’s eighty-eight to ninety-three. I think he’s got a little bit more in there, but that’s not what this kid’s about. He throws—pounds the strike zone. He’s got a curveball, twelve to six, a slow roller. But it’s a get-me-over pitch. Go through the order once or twice and you start getting me over early. Eighty-two innings, seventy-three strikeouts, nine walks. I love that. Two point six one ERA … I went out and saw him early. I always knew the kid. I saw him in the fall. God, I just love his mechanics. He just reminds me of one of those old, high, three-quarter classic delivery pitchers that doesn’t blow you away with the velo, but it’ll get you downhill. And you know what? Everyone tell me, he never shows you his changeup is his best pitch.… Talked to the coach. He said, ‘Charlie, his changeup is his best pitch.’ He had a slider for Fernando and I, I think up at seventy-nine, eighty-one. The curveball is twelve to six. But we got there late and I talked to a few friends of ours who were sitting right there. They tell me the truth. They said he had a couple ninety-threes. And he had several ninety-twos for us. He’s always been eighty-seven to ninety-two for me and he’s throwing harder. He’s downhill.
“I love this kid. I love his delivery. There’s nothing electric about him, but he’s a starter and he’s like flipping a switch. He’s got one of the best deliveries I got here, and he’s got his stuff. And he doesn’t walk people. And he’s the one with the number. I go to the family, I say, ‘Listen, what’s the deal?’ And I’m sitting there with the parents and they say, ‘Well, we have a number.’ And I said, ‘What’s the number?’ They said eighty thousand dollars, and I about shit. He goes to the Padres’ workout the other day, and he throws for them and I heard he was lights-out at their workout in a bull pen. And they talked to him about the money and he said—he told them and he said—I told you the rest, Dan. They told him, ‘We’ll work something out. Tell people different. We’re going to take you.’”
Arango, too, talked about Pearce’s mechanics, and Kantrovitz reminded everyone that the mechanics grade is separate from the scouting grade.
“I want to make sure that we’re liking him because you see his stuff now, and know that he’s going to improve,” Kantrovitz said. “So at what point in the draft do I need to start thinking about him?”
“Well, for me, I think kid’s going to go,” Gonzalez said. “Guys like the—like the Padres and people like that. I would say the sixth round. Get him by the sixth round. And if I find out, Dan, and I feel that it’s later, I’ll let you know. You know, you start throwing eighty grand.”
“I’m hearing you,” Kantrovitz said. “And I want to try and get him.”
“This guy’s a strike thrower and he’s got four distinct pitches. I really—like I said, I would take a gut feel and slap it on this guy,” Gonzalez concluded.
It would not be his only gut-feel guy. Not even close.
Another player Charlie Gonzalez liked, Austin Gomber, almost got devalued by a stray news article and his coach’s preference for changeups over curveballs.
“Austin Gomber is a twenty-year-old, twenty-point-six junior. He’s a year ahead. Six-feet-five, 210–pound, left-handed starter. Eighty-eight to ninety-five is his range,” Gonzalez said. Then: “What happened?”
FERNANDO: Nothing.
CHARLIE: What?
DAN: Fernando just said Gomber got hurt?
FERNANDO: He was hurt for a week.
CHARLIE: Hurt?
FERNANDO: He was hurt.
CHARLIE: Oh, no.
FERNANDO: There was text by the coach that said his elbow has bothering him. And the way he hit the last time, he wasn’t here. We’ll talk about it later.
Gonzalez continued, painting the picture. “Yeah. No, no, no. He’s here. He’ll be here tomorrow. He’s throwing tomorrow. I talked to [Florida Atlantic coach John McCormack] about it. He was—he missed one start because he was sore and flu-ish, and then they said, ‘Do you want to miss the next start?’ But then he said no and he threw.
“Okay. Austin Gomber. Six feet five, 210–15 pounds. He’s a young kid. A year ahead. Eighty-eight—the range is eighty-eight to ninety-five. He probably pitches at around ninety. Well, used to pitch at a
higher level—a higher velocity. He’s got a curveball. It’s turned into a pretty good curveball. I don’t know, mid to higher seventies, and he’s got a good changeup. I don’t like the way this guy’s been used. I don’t like the pitches he’s used this year. I don’t like the way that they have groomed him. He had a good year last year. He was throwing the hell out of it this year in the fall. Ninety-threes, ninety-fours. And he’s now—we saw him last week and he was eighty-eight, topped out at ninety-two. And the curveball was good. He only threw seven curveballs in six innings.
“I talked to Mack yesterday for about forty-five minutes about him. He says there’s nothing there other than the fact that him and [Florida Atlantic pitching coach] Jason [Jackson] have come together with a game plan of what they think the way to attack people is. They thought they should throw more changeups than the curveball. He said have him throw as many curveballs as you want. He says curveball to death. Let it rip. Clean bill of health.
“Big young kid and he’s got decent delivery. He’s got a little bit of a leg jolt when he comes back. It’s a little different, but he’s clean from here throughout there. For me, he had a hard time keeping the ball down this year. He’s not a real finesse kind of dude. He doesn’t have a great feel for anything. But he’s a six-foot-five lefty that’s young and he throws hard and he throws strikes. I like Gomber. I’d like to get Gomber. He’s a country boy. Wants no part of school. He’s signing wherever the hell he is. He would take two grand.… But he’s not going to get near there.
“This guy can hold 245 pounds. So, some things about him I like. I’ve got any medical that he’s had. I talked to the people. I talked to Mack about him missing the start. They said, ‘No. In fact, we asked him, ‘Do you want to miss the next start? Are you feeling—’ He said absolute not, and they threw him out there on six days’ rest. I like this guy. We have to reinvent him and teach him how to pitch a little bit, but the package is there. But he’s signable. And that’s that. He’s a blue-collar kid from Orlando.”
But the concern had been planted—the FAU site had a story when he missed the start, “Gomber Lost for Season?” Now Gomber wasn’t throwing his curveball much. They’d have to see what the curveball looked like at the following day’s workout. Gomber’s entire future with the Cardinals might rest on it.
He also had to overcome that when Arango saw him, he didn’t pitch well.
“There’s a couple of things that I want to bring up, and I want to leave the last one that happened the other day, because there’s something that needs to be checked,” Arango said of Gomber. “I might be a jinx for this guy. Every time I go see him, in the third and fourth inning he had troubles. You were there. Remember that? Matt Slater was there. The same thing happened. Now, he’s got ability and he’s a young guy and all that. But I find out—Charlie and I are driving together—that he came out that he was sore. So I checked in their Web site and all of that and the question was “FAU wins. Is Gomber lost for the season?”
Gonzalez objected as Arango continued, returning to the questions about Gomber’s health, an emphasis of how the Cardinals project potential draft picks.
“And—that’s what it was, Charlie. I got it on the text. And then, find out there’s a text from the coach that says that he has sore body and a tender rib, okay? And they say okay. He’s going to pitch there. So I went to see him pitch. He touched ninety-two once. He mostly pitched with his fastball and changeup. He was eighty-eight, eighty-nine with the fastball. He threw four curveballs. Only one was a strike. In three innings. Which makes you wonder, too. Why isn’t he throwing his curveball more? And it wasn’t the curveball that he’s shown that’s better than that. And what I put on the report, relied on his fastball and change. His use was struggling in the third inning. He did it again. And I said, ‘Would have him checked by a trainer and doctor if possible.’”
After a discussion to drill down into precisely what the information was, how much credence to give the report, and precisely how to determine whether Gomber still had an issue, Gonzalez proposed the solution.
“Okay. Listen. I think the kid’s perfectly healthy. He’s going to be here tomorrow to throw. I spoke to Mack. I’ve known Mack for twenty-five years. He said, ‘Charlie.’ I said, “Shoot me straight. What’s with the seven curveballs?’ He says, ‘Charlie, I’m going to get the numbers and see how many curveballs.’ He said he’s perfectly fine. He goes, ‘Check him out. Bring him to any doctor.’ He’s throwing tomorrow at our workout. And he says clean bill of health as far as we know. He said check him out if you want.”
Arango agreed. “And listen. I’m not trying to kill the guy. All I say is have him checked out. That’s all I’m saying because that’s something that needs to be addressed.”
Gonzalez concluded, “I bet that writer got fired that put that on the Web site.”
Gonzalez finished around five fifteen; or more accurately, Kantrovitz waved him off at that point.
DAN: Okay. Well, we went a little bit over, Charlie, because you’ve got a great area and you talk so, you know. It’s great to hear you talk about your players.
JAMAL: You owe me a steak dinner.
DAN: Why? Because he’s over time?
CHARLIE: We didn’t go—we didn’t stay under fifty-five minutes?
JAMAL: He said fifty-five minutes.
DAN: You broke your old record.
FERNANDO: Holy shit. He did. It’s five fifteen. We started at noon.
After a five-minute break, it was Ty Boyles’s turn to present. This was his first season as an area scout, but he clearly knew the business well. If his presentation lacked the voluminous details of Gonzalez’s, he was ultraprepared and knew which questions needed answering on each of his players.
It started to get dark outside, and another player came up who looked good the previous summer, changed his approach with his high school coach, and saw his performance and projection suffer.
“We need to make a study of all the guys that we liked offensively in the summertime and then their performance in the [following] spring that changes our mind again,” Almaraz said. “Because he’s not the only player we talked about this [happening with], you know? We repeatedly talked about this. Then after that, to see how many guys go on to have success on the original mold that we had from the summer. Because this kid—I liked this kid.”
A few minutes later, Boyles began his presentation on another arm who’d eventually become a Cardinal.
“Jordan DeLorenzo. Left-handed pitcher at University of West Florida. Fell in love with this guy early. Left-handed pitcher. Plus command, plus pitchability. Average fastball, eighty-seven to ninety-one. Curveball’s a bit of a slurve pitch. Somewhere between a slider and a curveball. Seventy-six to eighty. Changeup, eighty to eighty-one. Just a guy that went out and pitched. I mean, he’s absolutely pitched. The stuff was average for me across the board. I liked the way that he went about it. He went about it like a big leaguer. But I think at the end of the day, it’s—he’s not a big kid. There’s not a lot of projection left in the body. He kind of is what he is, and I think that’s what he’s probably going to be. I think he’s always going to have that kind of stuff. But I think he can go out and do well. And he’s a competitor. Ultracompetitor. Keeps the ball down. Keeps the ball out of the middle. Knows how to pitch. Knows what he’s doing. I mean, I think he’s got a chance to go out and do well.”
Arango agreed:
“Tell you what. I like this kid. He goes after it. He pitched with an average fastball. His curveball, I think, is going to get better. He has one of those sweeping curveballs that goes into the back foot of the right-handed hitter. And his makeup is off the charts. I mean, I really liked him. And he’s a stocky—what, five-feet-ten, five-eleven guy?
“But I tell you what, he’s got that face on the mound. The mound presence. And he just stands there and says, ‘Let’s go.’ And I mean, he’s stocky. Not big, but he’s stocky and strong. So he’s one of those guys—we might be
able to get this guy in the fifteenth round. Around there. And if you want a lefty that can really come in here and win for you.”
Kantrovitz recalled the excitement in Boyles’s voice when they first discussed DeLorenzo on the phone and wondered what round the Cardinals would need to start thinking about drafting him.
“I think you got to take him in the top ten rounds,” Boyles said. “I think there’s been a lot of teams who have been there to see him. I know cross-checkers have been there to see him. The guys that have seen him, I think that’s what they’re asking for is top-ten-round slot money.… I mean, I would say seventh to ten, somewhere in there. But I don’t think he’ll slip after that.” Arango’s projection slipped a few rounds—all because of an inch of top height.
“I would wait until the eleventh or twelfth round. I think that’s where he fits. If he were a six-footer or something like that, maybe, more potential for his fastball. But I think this kind of guy’s usually taken after the tenth round.”
The Cardinals Way Page 23
