The Cardinals Way (26 page)

“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 working. 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.

“I think Gary was there all these times when we were up there,” Baker recalled, also noting the continuity with both his manager at several stops, Dann Bilardello, and pitching coach, Ace Adams. “And they all told us the same thing, that it's an exciting time and we belong there and that they took us for a reason, and it's exciting and it's time for us to embrace the competition of professional baseball and enjoy the Cardinals. And they all stress the amount of pride they had in the Cardinals organization and that we are obviously extremely fortunate to be a part of it.”

The Cardinals' seventh-round pick in 2013, Chris Rivera, had experienced some of the travel, playing USA Baseball in high school. But he was being separated from his longtime girlfriend, Angie, and the two of them had to figure out how to make it work while a continent separated them, and Rivera's time was spent on baseball fields by day and buses by night.

“I've been dating the same girl for four years, so being with her every day at school and then after school on the weekends was every day,” Rivera told me. “So coming here was a little different, not seeing her every day.”

Now?

“She came out for a week and then that's about it. So that's a little hard. And then not knowing where we're going to go in about two weeks is a little different, too, because she's not going to know. And I would like for her to come out and see me, but then again, I don't know.

“People—they don't know how much of a grind it is. They think you make all this money and they think you get an endless amount of money. And that's not the truth at all.”

Rivera is hoping he'll get to State College. But that season doesn't begin until June. In the meantime, Rivera remains with Turco in the Gulf Coast League.

And even for loved ones who have been through the grind, have seen how hard it is, there's still a transition from the off-season.

“He's there, but he's not there,” one of the wives told me as we sat on the silver bleachers radiating the heat of the March Florida sun. “Like we don't have a real conversation for six months. Just a different lifestyle.”

Her husband is on the mound, facing some of the more advanced hitters. I hear her grunt with every pitch, as if she were delivering them.

“Sixty-five pitches. He's done.” She's been keeping the pitch count in her head. “Today, he'll really dissect it, then he's done. But you should see his iPad. He has a scouting report on everyone he's ever faced, from rookie ball to the majors. You know, ‘This guy can't handle oh-and-two changeups.' He's really smart.”

Smart will only get you so far. You've got to execute. And even then, it may not be enough, not with so many other guys around trying for the same finite number of jobs.

Against some lower-level guys, a bright kid named Sam Tuivailala cannot find his changeup.

Minor league pitching coach Ace Adams, ahead of coaching at Palm Beach in 2014, looked on with minor league pitching coordinator Tim Leveque, a Brent Strom disciple.

“Best pitch!” Adams shouts to Tuivailala. Leveque told me later Tuivailala's best pitch is “a fastball he keeps down in the zone.”

Tuivailala was twenty-one in the spring of 2014. The Cardinals drafted him in the third round back in 2010 out of high school, not knowing whether he'd ultimately hit or pitch for them.

“There were more than half the clubs that saw him as a pitcher, but we were one of the clubs that saw him as a position player,” Luhnow told me about the thinking behind taking Tuivailala. “Our area scout believed that he would be a successful position player. We wanted the talent here respected, and it's much easier to go from being a position player to a pitcher than the other way around, so if you make him a pitcher, you're never going to find out if he's a position player.”

But after Tuivailala struggled to hit with Turco in the Gulf Coast League—a .591 OPS in 2010 after signing, and a .661 OPS repeating the league in 2011—he was ready to make the switch to the mound.

“When a player first comes to you, very first year of pro ball, it's very easy to find flaws,” Turco, who once resisted a switch to the mound himself, told me in May 2014. “So you can try and tell them what they need to do to succeed there, right then. Or you can let them fail, and then when they do, they're going to be far more receptive to change.”

Accordingly, the Cardinals will not shift a player from pitching to hitting, or vice versa, without a full buy-in from the player. One such player, Rowan Wick, decided to stick with hitting after a 2013 season with power at Johnson City—10 home runs in 241 plate appearances, a .464 slugging percentage—but difficulty making contact as well, striking out nearly 30 percent of the time. The Cardinals moved Wick from catcher to right field, but Wick wasn't ready to give up on hitting, though Turco said he thought Wick might throw harder than Tuivailala did. Wick returned to the Gulf Coast League ahead of a summer assignment to State College and told me he had his eye on full-season Peoria.

Meanwhile, Tuivailala hit 95 miles per hour with his fastball once he transitioned, but control eluded him. He struck out 23 in 13 innings with Johnson City in 2012, short-season A-ball. But he walked 13 as well. The next year, in full-season A-ball Peoria, no one could hit him very well. The strikeouts were absurd—50 in 35⅓, 12.7/9. But the walks stayed high, 5.1/9. He hit four batters. His ERA of 5.35 was extremely high, considering all the strikeouts and that no one homered off him all season.

So that's where Tuivailala found himself in the spring of 2014.

“I still feel like a position player trying to pitch,” Tuivailala told me when we sat on the bleachers and talked after his outing, Tuivailala still in uniform. “That's what needs to change.”

Leveque told him, the two of them standing just outside the makeshift dugouts surrounded in chain link, “Oh and oh, oh and one, you can't be afraid to throw that curveball. It's not just for you to throw it in safe counts, one and two. And that changeup, you might be able to get some quicker outs, pitching inside.”

Leveque doesn't know which of his pitchers will figure it all out. The point isn't that the Cardinals identify those guys, though obviously more attention is given to the high-profile prospects. Everybody comes away from the spring knowing what needs to happen.

“We'll use last year as a baseline,” Leveque told me in the shadow of the Kissell plaque on that March day. They'll send Tuivailala to high-A ball, to Palm Beach. Put another way, he'll stay right in Jupiter. “Guys are cheating on Tui's fastball, which sits ninety-five. Look, he's a converted guy, so it's more about progress than a specific benchmark.”

The same is true for the guy hitting on a separate field, taking his cuts ahead of the highest-level minor league intrasquad game. It's that man again, the one Albert Pujols cited, the one John Mozeliak called “the most prolific hitter I've seen in this organization since Albert.”
3

When Taveras steps into the batter's box, helmet a bit loose on his head, he has a casual, jaunty air. Meanwhile, the world snaps to attention. Before his turn to bat, other hitters were preparing, coaches chatting, players examining their bats, playing catch. Taveras enters the box: coaches look up or gather. Several come from other fields. Red Schoendienst makes sure his golf cart is parked directly behind Taveras's BP session, Mark DeJohn joining him in the two-seater. His teammates all watch.

The unstated understanding is that we're all watching something you don't often see. Keith Butler, a pitcher, Tommy Pham, an outfielder, James Ramsey, the team's 2012 first-round pick—all stand just beyond the black mini-structure set up for BP, taking a view from the third-base side to enjoy Taveras's left-handed swing. Each drive impresses. The sound, as the baseball cliché goes, is different off his bat. I heard that sound twice last spring—off the bat of José Abreu of the White Sox, out in Arizona, ahead of Abreu's 2014 of terrorizing American League pitchers and winning the AL Rookie of the Year.

The other time I heard it was when Oscar Taveras hit the ball.

“Yeah!” Ramsey says as Taveras drives one over the right-center-field fence. Taveras turns and acknowledges Ramsey's enthusiasm, smiling, with a slight nod. Another ball clears the fence in right field, and another, Taveras like a red-and-white barber pole in perfect rhythm, twisting upon himself in that pristine Cardinals uniform.

“Nice,” grunts Schoendienst, impressed when Taveras takes his next turn in BP and decides to go opposite field for a while, sending the ball on screaming journeys up the gap between what everyone can imagine are helpless left and center fielders on July days at Busch Stadium, and maybe October nights, too. Schoendienst knows a little something about great hitting—the Hall of Famer in his own right also roomed with a guy named Stan Musial. Schoendienst sticks around until the end of the Taveras BP. He doesn't look away for a moment.

Later that afternoon, Taveras comes up during the intrasquad game. Turco gives him some perfunctory advice. He smiles, about to enter the place where he knows precisely what to do, the batter's box. Instructions for everything else is what Oscar Taveras seems to need, but not hitting a baseball.

He taps the bat against the grass as he approaches the box, the weights dropping to the earth. Taveras seems to know how much he looks like a ballplayer. The world turns—both dugouts focused on him in a way they hadn't been on the hitter just moments earlier. Coaches from other fields turn to watch. So do players in dugouts across the dirt path, all around the Kissell complex.

Earlier, Taveras had struck out, but didn't lose his smile, tossing his helmet nonchalantly to the side and heading out onto the field. This time, his final at bat of the day, he gets ahead in the count, 2-0. The pitcher, bowing to the inevitable, throws him a fastball. Another rope, this one right at the shortstop for an out.