The Cardinals Way (16 page)

“Like, how are you going to tell me—it sounds like something was bred into them by their parents. Like, ‘This is what you're going to do.' I definitely was not one of those guys.

“So I was moving along, da da da, da da. And that was that. Turned out I was about twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old. I started doing just odd jobs for work, investing in stuff. My dad and I would do some things together with some homes, some real estate. Things like that. I got a car dealer's license. I started doing stuff, like, I'd go to auctions and just dabbling in different things.”

He didn't lose touch with the game, though. Through it all, getting married, having a son, Dylan, at thirty-one, he said he found himself at University of Miami games, surfing, making a living in a thousand different ways. But Dylan turned out to be Gonzalez's pathway into scouting. He didn't go to scout school. He was a Little League dad.

“He got to be four years old or five and started with the T-ball thing and he really loved it. And my involvement with him, I was a very, very hands-on father.

“And so I coached all of his teams and all that. He was growing up out there in Miami Lakes and some T-ball to whatever the different levels were; the Pony League was the affiliation that we played for. And that started bringing me back more into it through him.” Not only that, Gonzalez saw Dylan had a chance to make it.

“He's very tall. He's six foot three now, but he was a tall, rangy kid. Pretty athletic. He could hit. He could pitch. He could play. Catch. He could play short—that type of thing.

“So we started—then that started sprouting, and [I was] coaching the kids. And I started doing that very, very heavily. Kind of like how Jeff—I think Jeff got involved in baseball a lot through his—what's that, those leagues, those fantasy-baseball things?

“Whatever. I never did any of that kind of stuff. But the hands-on coaching and all that, and I really knew a lot about the game as far as technique and things like that. I had a really good eye. So I started coaching the kids when they were young and I never stopped. I coached him from when he was four years old to when he was seventeen years old and he was in high school playing.”

By then, though, Gonzalez himself had caught the eye of some scouts in the area. He found himself at baseball games all the time, games Dylan wasn't even playing in.

“Going out there and going to games and watching, knowing personnel was a big thing with me—knowing who were the great players there in South Florida. I loved watching the guy who was supposed to be the guy, you know what I mean? And that completely captivated me.

“You follow them to the play-offs, just as a fan-type thing but a little bit more than that, and watching players. Watching players. Watching games. Watching players. I would just sit and get engrossed in the game and the personnel. The players. And you can tell a lot watching them. Who's a guy that's just got a great body and he's got tools, but he really can't play, [as opposed to] that little, scruffy, five-foot-nine, little left-hander over there who can really play the game?

“I would get the sense of who really can do it and who can't and who's the pretty boy. So I started just doing a lot of that. And then I started helping guys out, kind of like a bird dog, and I knew all the scouts. I knew all the coaches and I would get to so many games that guys started asking me stuff. ‘Hey, listen. Are you seeing so-and-so?' or ‘Whatever happened in that game there?' Well, da da da, da da. And I would start to break down players at that point in time and talk. And some of the guys that knew—had a clue, they can kind of tell. They'd come to me a little bit more often.”

And with an unconventional professional life—“my baseball passion flourished because of the work that I did, I didn't have to be anywhere at nine. You know what I'm saying?”—Gonzalez began to do some part-time scouting work for the San Francisco Giants. Brice had come down from Chicago by then, he and Charlie living together down there, flipping houses and raising Dylan, Gonzalez said.

“I knew every coach. I knew every player. I knew which coach would have trouble. I knew which program was good, which one wasn't. I mean, at this point, I'm really plugged in.”

Johnny DiPuglia, now director for international scouting for the Washington Nationals, was then a scout with the Cardinals. He covered an international area, along with some Florida territory as well. He'd ask Gonzalez to cover the Florida area when DiPuglia went overseas and catch him up when he returned.

“So I would bring him up-to-date on everything that was going on here now,” Gonzalez said. “‘He gets by here. That kid's hurt. The hell with him. You know, I think he's soft,' whatever. So I did that. And he leaned on me pretty heavily. Pretty heavily. And it was nothing but great for me.”

Even still, this far along, Gonzalez didn't imagine baseball could be a career for him. “Yeah. No,” Gonzalez said when I asked if he thought this could lead to a full-time job. “I had a fever. Big-time. Big-time. And you want to know something, Howard? I don't think there was ever a point—because, listen. There's not a whole lot of money in scouts. And I had done some things. I'd flipped some homes with my dad and stuff like that. And things are going pretty comfortably. I opened up a business with another guy, a friend of mine, called Sky Shop International. We did that for a while in the Miami free-trade zone. And we would import silk from China. Different stuff like that. Stuff that I had absolutely zero heartfelt passion for. And we would import some motorcycles. He brought in a partner from [China] who was a professor—I think it was Miami, whatever. So that was our connection to China. So we imported some silk. We'd design scarves, you know? And beautiful scarves. Silk scarves. And we had go to Federated. I don't know if you're familiar with Federated stores. So Federated is one of those big giants. We did the scarves. We had to go to Federated. You have to pitch your stuff to them. And you do this and that and then they sign you on an account and then you're set. So we did really well with these scarves. I had them in, like, ninety stores and, you know, it was a joke. Because, I mean, I'm not into that stuff. But, hey. We made some money doing that. Imported some Chinese motorcycles. That kind of stuff.

“So really, it was going pretty good. Money was going pretty good. But my passion, Howard, was always—I couldn't wait to get out to the field and coach my kid. Coach my kid and go to my high school games at night and my junior college games and all of that. I did really well. I was a really, really, really good coach.”

This was the man Jeff Luhnow hired. He wasn't the kind of hire you'd customarily expect to find in an analytics-driven department. He isn't even your typical scout. I asked Gonzalez if he thought that gave him an advantage in a field that requires so much reading, ultimately, of people.

“There's no question, Howard, that my background, surfing, traveling,” Gonzalez said. “You know, you want to broaden your horizons. You want to become more aware, you know? Grab a couple hundred dollars and hitchhike up the coast. And you're living off that or you plan a trip and you're in—you're in Manzanillo, Mexico, and you got eighty dollars left to your name and you take a job somewhere for a few days. You get to know people. You meet people. You think you're on the run, you know? So, yeah, I've seen a lot. I grew up in a place—I mean, South Florida back then, Howard, it wasn't like living in Columbus, Ohio, you know? Nothing against Columbus, Ohio, but you know what I mean?

“It's more choreographed for you. You either work in a factory or you don't, or you do this or you don't. The rules and all that. So, yes. Part of that really allowed me to get to know people. It allowed me to get to feel people.

“Jeff used to say to me, ‘Okay, Charlie, we're in Venezuela.' We'd go there and we'd sit down and talk about a player that might require a million, couple million bucks. And he said, ‘Get over there and talk to that agent and feel him out. Come back and tell me, is he full of shit?'

“Travel and all those kind of experiences doesn't do that to everyone. There's people that have been through everything I've been through and they're just kind of narrow-minded. They don't have a real good sense of feel. I'm a pretty perceptive person and I definitely believe that it allows me to think and see things and to feel people out and certainly—I mean, listen. I'll be honest with you. If it was a football scout when I was going, I'd pick up the nuances in football and look for them. Or basketball. You can feel it out. I think that I would probably do well in that as well. And it's just feeling people. Feeling players out. Like I said, you can just see and tell. You can feel it out. Who can play and who can't.”

But that Luhnow hired Gonzalez and came to rely on him more in the subsequent years as he discovered the nerves from Gonzalez's initial interview were just part of the epic package that is the Charlie Gonzalez Experience is yet another reminder that the idea of some disconnect between the analytical changes Jeff Luhnow engineered with the Cardinals, and an appreciation of scouting, is an utter myth.

“The Cardinals do a very good job of it,” Gonzalez said, back in an October 2014 interview, of the combination approach. “I mean, you see it, everyone's using that model, as I believe they should. And able to still let the scouts be scouts. Chris Correa and Sig Mejdal and those guys who are fantastic at what they do. And let me tell you something. Any old soul like myself or any other scout that comes from the old—well, I never to went to scout school—and says that [analytics doesn't] have something to offer, they're blowing smoke. 'Cause it's very interesting what they come up with. And I believe in a lot of what they say. But the key is to stay in the middle. Let your scouts be scouts. And then utilize that great stuff that those guys bring to the table, and then Dan and the department and overall can employ the both of them.”

Or as Luhnow said to me via e-mail in January 2015 when I asked him about this straw-man argument, “The anti-analysis people will often revert to the argument that stats alone aren't optimal, which is of course correct, and nobody as far as I know ever said they were! I certainly haven't!”

So the Cardinals hired Gonzalez and instantly understood they'd made the right hire.

“I remember our first encounter like it was yesterday,” Kantrovitz told me in a June 2014 e-mail. “He picked up Jeff and I from our hotel—we must have hired him just months earlier—and after somehow squeezing in four games in one day, Charlie looks at us and says, ‘I can make a call and get this lefty to throw a pen … but its like three hours on the other side of the state.' Jeff and I looked at each other, and we knew Charlie was perfect for the job.”

Yet, it's worth noting that as Luhnow moved forward on this front, along with his work revamping the team's international program, the grumbling was frequent, both internally and to the press.

Mozeliak's office was where complaints were commonly heard, with the assistant GM serving as therapist—along with assistant GM, a monumental job itself. Luhnow would hear about these complaints, usually in meetings with Jocketty. These complaints wouldn't tend to be about the big ideas—though no one doubts that's what the conflict really turned on.

“A lot came up, and it's not clear to me where it came from necessarily, but there were several times when Walt and I would have a meeting and he would have a list of things that he had heard from people that worked in baseball operations or elsewhere in the organization,” Luhnow said. “I'm not sure I want to characterize this necessarily as complaints, but ‘Jeff is doing this. Jeff is doing that.' Stuff like—we were trying to get a van for the Dominican Republic, and vans—we were on a very tight budget and buying a new car or a used car in Dominican is very expensive. So we were going to buy a car in St. Louis and have it shipped to the DR, which was going to save us some twenty thousand bucks.

“The guy who was going to give a deal on the car—he was going to give us this car for way under what he could sell it for. All he wanted was a Yadier Molina–signed baseball. So I asked the person who worked for me to go, she's Puerto Rican, to go to down to the clubhouse and get a Yadier Molina ball signed so we could save, like, all of this money on this van. That ended up being on the list [of grievances]. You know, somebody said you're running around getting signatures from ballplayers. So it was stupid things like that. I'm a vice president. I can go ahead and get—I sent Maria in there because Yadier seemed to be fond of her and I figured why not. Plus, it was her area because she's helping out with internationals, her area—to get a ball signed by Yadier. You know, is that all? The guy loved it and gave us a good deal on the van, and the van still runs to this day. But it was stuff like that, that would come back to Walt. People felt like they needed to tattletale on whatever I was doing, question whatever I was doing.”

So the struggle had shifted, in terms of where the battles were being fought within the organization. Luhnow was drafting the players he wanted. Great. The question became, would those players get a chance to play?

“I felt like we were doing the right thing and that the integration of scouting and player development was working well,” Luhnow said. “But quite frankly, a lot of the advantages we were starting to accumulate in the scouting area were not going to be successful unless the integration to player development was smooth. It wasn't smooth for a few years there. I mean, pitching or hitting aside, it was more about how you manage the pipeline of players and who you give the playing time to, and who you give the promotions to, and who you release in order to get the most output.

“It's raw material coming in. That raw material has now changed. Composition has changed. And so the manufacturing process, if it doesn't adjust, it's going to spit out inferior end products, unless it adjusts. And it had to adjust because a lot—the draft was starting to produce guys like Shane Robinson, who were small. Like Allen Craig, who were slow. They weren't sexy prospects like the ones that we had been trying to get before. There had to be a nurturing and developing of these prospects. Appreciation of why these guys came in and that they need a certain type of development to get there and reinforce the things that made them good in college or that brought them into the draft and allow them to maximize their chance of becoming big leaguers.”