The Cardinals Way

by Howard Megdal

  “We have four picks tonight, though, so there’s a pretty good chance you and I are in that room all night,” Mozeliak said to DeWitt.

  “I think in a way I would approach tonight, if I were in your shoes, one is, just understand it’s very fluid,” Mozeliak said to me. “But it’s a slow fluidity tonight. And so, like, your takeaway might be very little. Tomorrow, pace picks up and you can watch the board interaction change a little bit quicker. And then our system will benefit from that. And tonight, Bill sitting in there, me sitting in there. That’s just the nature of the beast. Because we have a seven-and-a-half-million [dollar] pool and we’ll spend four of it tonight.”

  The largest conference room in the Busch Stadium offices had been prepared for the draft. Multiple televisions played, one with the MLB Network broadcast of the draft, another with the Cardinals game in Kansas City against the Royals. Red, white, and blue bunting had been placed on walls around the room wherever there weren’t individual draft magnets, each representing a player who’d been scouted on the field, talked to off it, analyzed statistically, mechanically, and medically.

  With all the scouts, front office members such as Gary LaRocque and Matt Slater, a table in the far corner for DeWitt, Mozeliak, Kantrovitz, Michael Girsch, and Chris Correa, forty people were in the draft room.

  And there was no getting away from all the magnets, separated into these categories: 245 college pitchers, 185 college position players, 51 junior college pitchers, 22 junior college position players, 118 high school pitchers, 150 high school position players, those with signability issues, those with medical issues. Separate from these, within easy reach of Kantrovitz’s seat, was a kind of “next up” grouping: RHP, LHP, C, SS, CF, 2B, 3B, and simply BAT.

  I asked a pacing Joe Almaraz what was going through his mind, his year of nonstop travel and evaluation leading up to this.

  “You can’t think right now,” he said. “The game’s about to start. Just want to put some runs on the board.”

  Everyone’s in jacket and ties—I feel underdressed in a polo. Mozeliak’s wearing his bow tie, Kantrovitz has on a black suit, gray-checked tie. Even Charlie Gonzalez has a sports jacket and tie, though over jeans.

  Before it’s even started, Dan patrols the carpet back and forth directly in front of his board, wearing a path as the first magnetic strips, with full info on players, come off the board as they are picked. At pick seventeen, Kantrovitz and Mozeliak confer with Almaraz, and Mozeliak disappears from the room to make some calls about potential outcomes just ten picks away. Now Mozeliak is mirroring Kantrovitz’s movements, in and out of the draft room. At pick twenty, Mozeliak counts the picks left, then leaves again, while Kantrovitz doesn’t even sit down, tapping a rolled-up sheet of paper against his right hip as he walks.

  By pick twenty-four, the strategy is set. Mozeliak sits down next to DeWitt. The Cardinals are about to draft someone they’ll spend $1,843,000 on. But Mozeliak taps DeWitt on the shoulder, gestures at the television. The two men are transfixed instead by an Oscar Taveras at bat. A few days earlier, in his Cardinals debut, Taveras launched a long home run into the right-field seats at Busch Stadium. The crowd reacted disproportionately to a run that put the Cardinals ahead 1–0 in the fourth. Everybody there believed they were seeing the beginning of history, like watching Musial’s first home run, or Pujols’s. Taveras received a curtain call from the Busch crowd. I ask Gary LaRocque how he will place these about-to-be-drafted guys in the player-development ladder. He breaks it down simply:

  “Wait till you get them, then you listen a lot, then you figure out where to put them.”

  The Cardinals’ pick is Luke Weaver, a pitcher near the top of Ty Boyles’s board. Mo gets off the phone and nods. The room erupts in congratulations, fist bumps from everyone given to Ty, who sees the Cardinals pick one of his players first in his very first Cardinals draft. The MLB Network has a draft board with twenty-six players on it. For three minutes, the Cardinals’ draft board is ahead of the rest of the world.

  The pick hasn’t even been made public yet, but Slater and LaRocque are already combing through every bit of data they have on Weaver.

  “It’s not just about innings,” Slater explains. “It’s stress innings. It’s pitch counts. It’s more than just innings, whenever we can get it.”

  Slater loaded up video on his laptop, analyzing the workload for Weaver over the last three years. For the video of Weaver pitching, each pitch registered in a white number superimposed on a blue box—velocity out of the hand and at the plate.

  When the pick is announced on MLB Network, Mozeliak is back out in the hall, preparing for pick thirty-four. Kantrovitz resumes his pacing. DeWitt is relaxed, taking it all in. Later he told me the experience now is fundamentally at odds with how he felt back in 2005, when Luhnow was just getting started and the future of his ball club rested on this new process’s working.

  Once the Red Sox take Michael Kopech thirty-third, the Cardinals are on the clock. Kantrovitz has a final discussion with Michael Garciaparra, an area scout out west, and Jeremy Schied, the West Coast cross-checker. Mozeliak, meanwhile, is talking it over with Correa. It’s the final mingling of pure scouting and analytics into the team’s process.

  It produces the pick of Jack Flaherty, a big, right-handed pitcher out of Harvard-Westlake High School in California, and fist bumps all around for Garciaparra. Slater and LaRocque repeated their analysis of Flaherty’s usage, trying to determine what schedule to set for him.

  Then, a bit of a lull, with the Cardinals not picking again until sixty-eight. Of course, as LaRocque, who used to be the architect of drafts, said as he went to grab some food from the buffet just outside the draft room, “The second through seventh rounds: that’s where you build your draft.”

  One shortstop who wanted too much money is ruled out by the Cardinals—too many other places to spend that money, and they’d eventually need it to sign Weaver at slot and Flaherty above slot.

  By pick sixty-six, Kantrovitz and Gonzalez confer. DeWitt and Mozeliak are interested, but this is Kantrovitz’s show now, his jacket off, sleeves rolled halfway up his arms.

  “Two guys in the queue,” Kantrovitz said to Gonzalez. “If one of those guys goes, your guy is next, but that has to happen first.”

  It did. Right-handed pitcher Ronnie Williams, one of Gonzalez’s favorites, gets his magnet tossed onto the big board, as Kantrovitz says, “All right, Charlie, you got him.”

  No needling of Gonzalez here, all congratulations come his way instead.

  Three picks later, the Cardinals choose Andrew Morales, a right-handed pitcher out of UC-Irvine. He’ll ultimately sign for a bit below slot, but it doesn’t quite balance out how far over slot the Cardinals had to go to draft and sign Flaherty.

  John Hart on MLB Network suggests the Cardinals need to get creative, under slot, to get more cash freed up, now or later.

  “Later!” Mozeliak says back at the television.

  Shortly after, Day 1 was over. “Great job, boys!” Mozeliak said, dismissing everyone for the night. A group of scouts, exiting Busch Stadium, discussed where to go at 11:00 P.M. on a Thursday night in St. Louis. They’d all just participated in choosing the next four St. Louis Cardinals, and now they walked past the statues of Brock, Musial, Gibson, into the St. Louis night.

  June 6

  “They laughed at me for having Plan C and D,” Dan Kantrovitz told me as we sat at the main table, about fifteen minutes before Day 2 of the draft began. “And then last year, one round, we needed D. So they don’t laugh anymore.”

  It’s more casual, but LaRocque is right: this is where you build out your draft.

  Mozeliak is calmer—back in his chair, rather than leaning forward or up and out into the hall to talk with agents, as he was last night. He described his role today as “making sure everybody’s getting along.”

  And Kantrovitz, too, isn’t pacing with quite the same amount of consistent intensity. His march is more of a stroll. But
even when he sits, Kantrovitz stares at his board when he thinks a team might steal one of his favorite picks, as if trying to keep it on there by force of will. Mozeliak stares, too, but his focus on the competition is for different players.

  But for some teams, I notice Kantrovitz and Mozeliak barely look at their own board.

  All over the country, final bluffs were getting called. Of one catcher, I heard a scout say, “He could’ve been taken in a better spot today if he’d been more realistic yesterday.”

  The Cardinals took Trevor Megill, a tall righty out of Loyola Marymount with injury history, in the third round. Kantrovitz would need to spend much of the next six weeks figuring out if he should go over slot to get Megill, or if another of his plans would carry the day. Ultimately, Kantrovitz decided after a trip to the Cape Cod League to see Megill for a single inning.

  By pick 135, it was time to reward Austin Gomber for those fortuitous curveballs. Immediately, LaRocque and Slater open up the Gomber file, trying to determine where to place him in the system.

  “To be determined, but he profiles as a New York–Penn League kid,” LaRocque told me, even as he and Slater look over the data. “We have three different places to put kids, and I love them all for development. So much of it is also based on estimated workload, and determining where a kid is going to have some initial success. That first year and a half is so important.” Gomber eventually signs for slot plus $800, and heads to State College. He pitched to a 2.30 ERA there over 11 starts, a strong debut, then improved his peripherals while impressing at full-season Peoria in 2015, a 2.93 ERA through August 2015.

  One round later, the Cardinals decide to take Darren Seferina in the first round Gonzalez said they’d have to consider him, the fifth round.

  “Under two hundred, Charlie?” Kantrovitz verifies. They need to save money somewhere.

  “Under two hundred,” Gonzalez answers. Seferina heads to State College, where he’ll be the regular second baseman and debut nicely, for a $100,000 bonus in a slot that recommends $280,100. Seferina steals 20 bases in a short season, posts a .724 OPS, a solid beginning, then an even better jump to full-season Peoria in 2015, with a .793 OPS through August 2015.

  Andrew Sohn, a shortstop, is another senior sign in the sixth round, gets slot.

  “We’ve got a really advanced college catcher. Where do you think he fits?” Kantrovitz asks LaRocque as the seventh-round pick approaches.

  “He fits really nicely at State College,” LaRocque answers.

  “Good, he’s from up that way,” Kantrovitz replies.

  The magnet for Brian O’Keefe is grabbed the moment after the Red Sox pick. He’s out of St. Joseph’s University, Pennsylvania, at a slot of $163,200, and the Cardinals give him $150,000. Now the Cardinals are starting to get some maneuverability.

  The Cardinals aren’t getting everybody they want, of course. Charlie Gonzalez pushes back despairingly in his chair as Dash Winningham, the one Steve Turco taught to hit opposite-field home runs in a few sentences, is drafted by the Mets.

  “He could have come home with us, but they absconded with him,” Gonzalez tells me just outside the draft room, as he takes a small walk to recover from the disappointment. He’ll be happier soon, though.

  Meanwhile, Matt Blood, another area scout, is finding the Cardinals a hitter and some savings. The slot is $152,400. Blood makes eye contact with Kantrovitz and holds up fingers—1, 3, 5.

  “Good work,” Mozeliak says. And just like that, Nick Thompson, a college hitter out of William and Mary, is the team’s eighth-round pick.

  LaRocque is putting the rosters together, sees Thompson will profile as State College’s designated hitter.

  “There’s no chance of expectations being a problem about where he’ll be playing?” LaRocque asks Blood.

  “No, he knows he’s a hitter,” Blood responds. LaRocque nods and places Thompson on his provisional roster sheet loaded up on his laptop.

  When I spoke to Thompson about it a few weeks later, just before he made his professional debut with State College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, he revealed his surprise that the Cardinals ended up drafting him, a sign that Blood hid his cards well.

  “Well, actually, it was interesting because going into the draft, I felt that there were two teams—there was sort of a two-horse race of teams that were going to draft me, and the Cardinals weren’t one of those teams,” Thompson told me in June 2014, standing in his Spikes uniform in front of the door leading to the visitors’ dugout at historic Bowman Field. “And so the Cardinals, as you know, pick last in every round. ’Cause they had the best record last year. And so after the two teams that I thought were going to pick me in that round had already picked, I was actually getting in the shower to go to a Luke Bryan concert. And as I was hopping in the shower, my phone rang and I saw ‘Cardinals Matt Blood.’ And I answered it and he said, ‘Hey, we’re going to take you here in three picks.’

  “I was shell-shocked for a second and then I ran downstairs and pulled up the computer and was watching it with my parents down in the kitchen.”

  One round later, the Cardinals decided they could wait no longer to take Charlie Gonzalez’s top gut-feel guy: Daniel Poncedeleon. This wasn’t a system pick Kantrovitz knew if he selected Poncedeleon, he would have to answer to questions from higher-ups about being too subjective, but he had too much faith in Charlie to let that stand in his way. Adding to the drama, there were also red flags on the medical side.

  “Frankly, Charlie sold me the first time he called me about him in March, and we could’ve stopped there,” Kantrovitz said in a January 2015 e-mail.

  Poncedeleon was at home in La Mirada, California, watching the draft with his family and his girlfriend, Jennifer Beatty, a volleyball player he’d met at Embry-Riddle. He was receiving constant updates via texts from Charlie.

  “Dealing with Charlie is great,” Poncedeleon told me a few weeks later, as he prepared for his first game with the State College Spikes. “You know, it felt like he wanted you on the team. You want to go to a team that wants you. You don’t want a team that drafts you just because you have talent, you know? You want a team that wants you and builds you up. So Charlie was the guy. Like, he was always—he calls me every other day like my father. He was there, you know? And it felt great to talk to him all the time. And he told me things to help me out and stuff and what he thought and his point of view. It was great.”

  Charlie recalled for me in a December 2014 interview the moment in St. Louis, just ahead of the draft, when Kantrovitz decided to pick Poncedeleon: “He says, ‘We’ve never taken a guy inside the tenth round without ever having been seen by anyone in our organization other than the area guy.’ And I looked and I said, ‘Dan, I’m not trying to be an ingrate, but is that supposed to make me feel good? Had we not taken him, I would have been on your ass.’

  “Scouting started becoming a lot more fun when I could tell that my guys listen to me and they believed in me, expressly after the round six to ten to thirty. And that’s when scouting really starts getting good. You know what I mean? The top dogs, taking the top guys, okay. That’s pretty much—we can figure that out, you know? But you start going with the ‘Take this guy and take him here. If you don’t take him by there, he’s going to be gone and he may be a big leaguer. I’ll worry about time.’ Tony Cruz, you know?”

  Back in June, the Dash Winningham disappointment had disappeared for Charlie Gonzalez, Wearing a cream-colored, button-down shirt, he had his man, Poncedeleon.

  “If I had to win one game in the state of Florida, going up against Wainwright, I’d pick this guy,” Gonzalez told me. “I have one point seven five million dollars on him!”

  The Cardinals would go on and get Matt Pearce, too—five Charlie Gonzalez players in the top thirteen rounds, and they signed them all, including Poncedeleon for “five thousand fucking dollars.”

  June 13, Williamsport, Pennsylvania

  Just days after the scouts had spent hours just trying
to watch a few innings or four at bats for a possible target, and analytics had completed a survey of what often amounted to a few hundred at bats, roughly three dozen players were now St. Louis Cardinals. A good number of them get sent here, to the State College Spikes in the New York–Penn League, and manager Oliver Marmol. By opening night, they make up fully a third of Marmol’s roster.

  “The first thing we try to communicate is that you’re part of the St. Louis Cardinals family, and with that comes certain responsibility, and certain accountability,” Marmol told me as we sat in the visitors’ dugout at Bowman Field. “And there are certain expectations, a certain level of professionalism.

  “But also, they’re here for a reason. A scout saw something in them that made him believe they can play at the big league level.”

  Marmol and LaRocque, since the draft, have been in contact nearly every day, by phone, by e-mail.

  “Personality traits, anything that can be useful. Not a whole lot is communicated about what their tools are. It’s about who they are as people. They couldn’t care less what you know about baseball until they know you care about them as people.”

  The personality-based scouting reports allow Marmol to begin to build a bond with his players, something vital to help guys get through their first professional experience.

  “I was just in here with Nick Thompson, and he kind of looked over at me and asked, ‘How do you even know to ask these questions?’”

  In Thompson, Marmol had a particularly perceptive new player. He’d graduated from East Carolina in two and a half years—while playing varsity baseball. It’s a stunning academic accomplishment. He continued playing ball at William and Mary while going for a master’s degree.

  “And then eventually I would have gone to medical school. So I think the master’s is kind of just a segue into professional baseball,” he joked.

  Thompson reinforced that there isn’t one kind of Cardinals player, but the Cardinals are definitely among the teams who saw his intelligence as a virtue.

  “I think there were absolutely some teams that fit both those criteria, that were kind of turned away because I was a good student and were afraid that I would go right back to school after a year or two of professional baseball,” Thompson said. “And then I feel like some organizations, like the Cardinals, who really appreciate professionalism, they were teams that were really interested and kind of made that extra effort to make me a part of their club.”