The evening grew later. As Ty got near the top of his list, the conversation grew fuller, with most players seen not only by Boyles, but by Arango, the Southeast cross-checker, and often by Almaraz and Strong, the two national cross-checkers, as well.
That allowed for a deeper dive into not just what kind of player each prospect was, but what everybody thought about what kind of person each one was.
Take one player, who went on to be drafted in the first round, but not by the Cardinals:
“I mean, it’s a tough one ’cause he’s just dripping with tools that we like,” Kantrovitz said. “I think Ty said earlier, in terms of what kind of kid he is. And I didn’t talk to him, but I went down to the batting cage before he took it on the field, when he was in the cages, and there was another scout there that was just like grilling him. It was basically three of us and I’m just standing there listening. And I’ll give the kid the benefit of the doubt and say that he was immature. Because if you’re not saying he’s immature, he has no aptitude, no ability to really carry on a coherent, intelligent conversation. To give you any indication that he’s going to, like, make some adjustment. I mean, it was very unimpressive.
“I know he’s a baseball player, high school kid, and he doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist, but you talk to the other guys we’ve drafted like Mercado and Carson Kelly, high school kids, and these guys are like mature adults almost. And, I mean, I think when we invest a lot in a high school kid, that that’s the one thing we can certain of. We don’t know if he’s going to hit or not or all the other uncertainties, but we can know that he’s this mature individual. I didn’t get it from that. I mean, if you said otherwise ’cause you’d know better than I would, I would just go with that.”
But Boyles agreed; the player had a strange lack of confidence in his own ability.
“And that’s a strange combination, though, when you’re that talented and it’s a natural and you don’t have confidence in it,” Gonzalez added. “That’s a bizarre coupling of stuff. There could be complications somewhere. ’Cause you don’t have to be flamboyantly confident, but at least have some inner confidence.”
Almaraz spoke up: “All players, I don’t care where you play, all players have insecurities. Period.”
“Even the big leaguers,” Strong added, and he’d know—he was one.
“But the confidence of your tools that you have give you that confidence to play the game with some kind of confidence,” Almaraz said.
“Yeah, I mean, when Mercado, Carson Kelly, Rob Kaminsky, came to Busch Stadium after we signed them, and as I’m sure you guys were, I’m proud of them,” Kantrovitz said. “I might be afraid to leave this guy alone, with the media or front office.”
Yet, everyone agreed, the tools were undeniable.
“We can laugh about this now, but two years from now we might not be laughing,” Arango said.
Kantrovitz concluded, “I know. Yeah. Well, I don’t think we’re going to figure it out.”
But it was Kantrovitz’s job to figure it out—not just broadly, whether the kid would be a bust or mature, but precisely how much money to bet on whether he ever would. To determine whether even making that bet would be a good idea, or if the Cardinals should be placing their wager on another player altogether.
So the meeting continued until nearly 9:00 P.M., each scout getting full say on every player mentioned, Kantrovitz cross-referencing his data, speaking those two languages back and forth as he translated them in his mind.
“There was something with this guy,” Kantrovitz said about a player the Cardinals didn’t draft. “It wasn’t a medical. I don’t think he’s liked very well by the video right now. One of our worst. I’ll talk with those guys and see if there’s a reason why he’s—ends up being lower than you guys like him. That’s a pretty good bet.”
“So the video grade is incorporated into, like, an overall STOUT-type thing?” Gonzalez asked.
“No,” Kantrovitz answered. “I just did it in my head, and I can estimate where he’s going to come in relation to some other guys we’re looking at.” That meant Kantrovitz was capable of replicating the process created by the Cardinals over roughly a decade and apply it, balancing all the information—statistical, scouting, medical, and mechanical—in his own head.
It helps to have someone making the picks who can do that.
When Ty was finished, well after 8:00 P.M., Kantrovitz made sure to praise him for the presentation, as did the rest of the group. The other scouts also took the opportunity to needle Charlie Gonzalez.
DAN: Fair enough. Okay. Let’s go get dinner. Ty, that was an excellent job.
JAMAL: Heck of a job.
DAN: That was one of the best we’ve had.
JOE: Two hours.
DAN: You were concise. You were to the point.
JAMAL: Good job, Ty.
DAN: You spent time on guys that you liked and you were prepared. That was outstanding.
JAMAL: Charlie, take some notes.
DAN: Thank you, Jamal.
JOE: You weren’t elaborate, you know, unnecessarily.
May 27, Jupiter, Florida
Nearly fifty area players gathered on the main field at Roger Dean Stadium early Tuesday morning. This was the final chance for the Cardinals to ask questions and to observe, and for each player, it was the final chance to make an impression on the group of scouts and Kantrovitz, all of whom had been tracking the prospects for a year, often longer.
Charlie Gonzalez was utterly in his element. Gonzalez’s red complexion, honed through years in Florida sunshine on surfboards and in the stands at baseball games, actually paled in comparison to his bright red, button-down shirt, Gonzalez protected from that sun by a tan panama hat.
He seemed to be moving in every direction at once, lining up the would-be shortstops to make the throws from various distances at the position, along with the few second basemen. (Generally, if the players weren’t shortstops, they weren’t getting drafted. You could always move a shortstop to second, but not the other way around.)
A name is called, a coach hits a grounder, the prospect fields and throws. Everybody watches, none closer than Kantrovitz, standing in a striped polo shirt and dark Cardinals hat, a few feet from the first baseman.
A few of the prospects were moved to second base—those the Cardinals thought might have to move there sooner rather than later if drafted.
“Okay, we’re going two!” Gonzalez declared. “Game-time speed, fellas!”
Turco’s Gulf Coast day had been canceled. It was all hands on deck at the combine. A group of the coaches saw one shortstop’s throws that reminded them of Jeter’s at that age, and they speculated about whether Jeter would have enjoyed the same success on another team.
“How do you know he’s gonna be what he is?” Davis said. “Would he have wanted to be the shortstop for the Houston Astros?” Another intangible question they’d all gathered to answer.
A catching prospect, a switch-hitter and a Baseball America Top 100 amateur prospect who ultimately went to college, drew raves in the box. He wanted $2 million to forgo school. He wasn’t drafted high, as his skills warranted, because teams chose not to give it to him. And yet …
“That’s what you do,” Arango cooed, as the hitter connected, the ball sailing over the wall in right-center field.
“That’s a swing,” echoed Gonzalez.
Players grouped in the outfield for fly balls, getting called in groups of about a half dozen to take their turn at BP. The pitchers warmed up along the first-base line, where a pair of mounds served as the bullpen during the season in the Florida State League, and the final stage on this day.
“This is where the final conversations take place,” Kantrovitz said to me as we watched the batting practice. “We take final temps on how they feel, and we determine whether inquiries into signability prices are worth having.”
The shortstop with the Jeter arm hit three over the wall. He ultimately got drafted late
and didn’t sign. Signability—so many kids lost chances to be professional baseball players in 2014 because of poor advice within an NCAA system designed to deny them basic info, and to force teams to guess.
Dash Winningham, a burly, left-handed high school kid from up in Ocala, Florida, knocked a few home runs into the right-field corner. Kantrovitz and Gonzalez pay particular attention—this was another Gonzalez gut feel.
“Can he go opposite field?” Kantrovitz asks.
Fortunately, the Cardinals have a coach who specializes in instructing young hitters right there. Steve Turco puts a hand on Winningham’s shoulder when he steps out of the box.
“You ever go oppo?” Turco asks him. “You want to be able to use the whole field. You can do it—you’ve got a lot of bat speed.”
Winningham returned to the cage and hit everything to left center, as instructed. The Cardinals gathered two pieces of information from a quick exchange: he’s coachable, and it wouldn’t take long for him to be a more polished hitter than he is now.
By contrast, the kid with “Lenny Dykstra” in him, per Gonzalez, took some weak cuts in the box. Kantrovitz made a note of it.
Another lefty swinger entered the cage. The scouts perked up. He headed to college, though you could see why Charlie Gonzalez thought so highly of him. And I recognized his mom from the scouting report.
Up the first-base line, Arango was arranging the pitchers, instructing those who needed to show the Cardinals specific parts of their arsenal what to be ready to throw. Kantrovitz watched. Boyles took radar-gun readings, grabbing them from one pitcher, then the other, two throwing at a time. Davis recorded video to feed into the mechanics algorithm. Turco calmly talked them through the pen session—“Okay, third-place hitter up, what do you do?”
Then it’s Gomber’s turn. They know the fastball, they know the changeup. They want to see the curveball.
“I haven’t thrown it in a while,” Gomber cautions the group. Then in it comes, looping over the plate in textbook fashion at 75 miles per hour. Grunts of appreciation all around me. Another, just as good, 74. That’s the stuff. Good curveballs are like shooting stars when you witness them up close.
I asked Gomber a few weeks later, after he’d been drafted by the Cardinals in the fourth round, if he knew what was at stake when he uncorked that pitch.
“Yeah. It was a good one,” Gomber said, standing on the field in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, about to make his professional debut with the State College Spikes. “Actually, when I left, some people asked me how it went. I told them they were the best curveballs I’ve thrown in my life. So—that was a plus. Those were some really good curveballs I threw that day.” Gomber smiled. “A great time to do it. Good timing.”
After Gomber, Gonzalez had brought over a pitcher he hadn’t discussed the day before, but had been pushing Kantrovitz on since March, I learned later.
“This is Daniel Poncedeleon,” Gonzalez said. “He’s gonna throw for us.”
Everything about the presentation was designed to get the maximum attention for a guy Gonzalez wanted to flag. “This is my favorite pitcher in the state of Florida,” Gonzalez told me while Poncedeleon warmed up. A few hitters were kept around so he could pitch, off the mound, to live hitting.
Poncedeleon hit 93 with the fastball, impressed with the cutter. He hadn’t pitched since the end of the college season, one he’d had at NAIA Embry-Riddle after a near deal with the Cubs following the 2013 draft led the NCAA to rule him ineligible. This typical NCAA nonsense meant fewer eyeballs on Poncedeleon as a senior sign.
“The best part about this? We’re gonna get him for five thousand fucking dollars,” Gonzalez said. “For the best pitcher in the state of Florida.”
Gonzalez had a value of $1.75 million on Poncedeleon. A $1.75 million value for a $5,000 signing bonus: this is the mother lode, given the rules that govern the 2014 MLB draft.
When Poncedeleon finished, the combine winding down, Kantrovitz discussed his travel plans. He’d be getting on a plane that afternoon and going through this exact process at several other regional sites, then back to St. Louis for nonstop draft prep.
“What’s the last time you saw your family, Dan?” Gonzalez inquired.
The question caught Kantrovitz off guard, and for a moment the baseball man thought of his wife, of his two girls back home. He shook it off—he couldn’t afford to lose focus for a moment. Not right now.
“It’s been tough,” Kantrovitz said. “But this is also the most fun time of the year. It’s crunch time.”
June 5, St. Louis, Missouri
John Mozeliak sat at his desk, approximately four hours before the start of the 2014 MLB draft. An agent on the phone wanted to get Mozeliak to commit to paying $3 million to his client if he fell to twenty-seven.
“Yes, I’m saying that sounds good if it happens,” Mozeliak said. “That sounds real good to me.”
The agent brought up another player, and Mozeliak expressed some interest in him as well. Immediately, the agent steered the conversation to what it would cost for the pair as a package. The Cardinals had picks twenty-seven and thirty-four, but Mozeliak, who pounces on things cerebrally—sentences uttered as surely as opportunities—saw one here.
“We’d want some guidance from you about when we could expect each guy to go, so we know who we’d need to take first,” Mozeliak said.
You might think he was ironing out his final draft scenario. He wasn’t. Not even close. This was one of fifty calls he estimated he’d already had today. He expected that number to rise precipitously over the coming hours.
Draft day means your strategy is dependent on twenty-nine other teams, hundreds of high school and college players, and a budget that is unforgiving if you believe one player might cost one amount, only to discover, after picking him, he costs significantly more.
On the shelf were Cardinals player contracts going back a decade, Bill James Handbooks, along with The Fielding Bible and Baseball Prospectus, 2014. So, too, was a bottle of champagne from that World Series on-field celebration back in 2011. Mozeliak had a few more calls to make, so we reconvened later that afternoon in Bill DeWitt’s office, DeWitt and Mozeliak calm as their seventh draft as owner/general manager approached.
“I’ve been to the draft every year since I’ve been involved with the club,” DeWitt said, when I asked what his night would be like. “And it depends on the year, and as time has gone on, it’s changed somewhat. It’s more strategic. I get a rundown after they’re all said and done with their scouting. I mean, along the way I’ll hear about certain players. But there’s nothing more to do at this point except wait and see.
“There have been times over the years when Mo is your primary point person on the agent to particulate in the top picks. Where there’s a call to make on should we do this/should we do that, and we talk about that. More financially oriented.”
I said it seemed as if there were fewer decisions to make on the financial side, given the caps, and Mozeliak said there were “different decisions.”
“Before the pool system was in place, there was a system of slotting that if you wanted to go over a slot, you were required to check in with the [MLB Labor Relations Department],” DeWitt said. “And LRD would either talk to the commissioner or request that you talk to the commissioner. They couldn’t tell you what to pay a player. But they would try to give you information about what the market was and their opinion of the player’s value. So there was never a requirement to get permission, just a request that you get their opinion.”
Permission no, but as Mozeliak put it, “speed bumps. Cautionary advice.”
Realistically, though, the days ahead were going to be Dan Kantrovitz’s show.
“But Bill and I, our roles have typically been more strategic, more financial, and more of a sounding board,” Mozeliak said. “A lot of times it’s very fluid and a lot of things are happening. And so, we’re not that close to the players. We really don’t know A is better than B, or B i
s better than C. We just know that they’re highly thought of by our group. But, yes, we can be much more rational in thinking about the dollars and cents and, if we do X, will it allow us to do something else down the road and help think through that. That’s what we do.”
DeWitt echoed this: “Yeah, I mean, in the end the scouting director’s the one who’s managing the whole process all though the year, and when it comes time to draft, he’s the one that we’re looking to put the board together, make the decision on who the team should take. Unless there’s something beyond just a pure player that [serves as] a reason to talk about it.”
Having a system that, as Mozeliak put it, both “allows us to know how to value a player now … and knowing what we want to pay for” gives him a chance to focus on process instead, the way he was while talking to that agent on the phone earlier in the day. I mentioned that he had looked at his computer and come away with a skeptical expression.
“Actually I was trying to reverse engineer because he mentioned another team,” Mozeliak said. “And he was telling me that they were willing to pay X for that player, and I was just trying to see if they could really afford it. And the answer is no. So, I don’t think it was true.”
This is how the rest of Mozeliak’s draft day would go.
“My day today has been I met with you twice,” Mozeliak said. “I met with Dan probably four times. I need to go back and talk to him shortly in his office. And I’ve talked to a lot of agents today and just trying to get an understanding of what may happen.”
Then again, without any picks until number twenty-seven, Mozeliak was limited in how prepared he could be. Given the recent run of success by the Cardinals, he had gotten used to a late first-round pick.
“I’ve resolved myself in this particular draft to not overconcern myself with what may happen,” Mozeliak said.
“Just let it unfold,” DeWitt said.
The Cardinals Way Page 24
