The Cardinals Way (36 page)

As for Corey Baker, he finally earned that promotion back to Double-A. Baker looked at it as a reward, though it meant pitching on three days' rest. Bilardello and Leveque were there in Palm Beach to give him the good news.

“I mean, I would hope that's what it was,” Baker told me when we talked about it a few days later. “I feel like I did earn it. It was described to me as I've kind of vocalized that I wanted this opportunity, and now I was going to get it and it was a chance to start, so it was guaranteed innings because one of my issues was if I was going up there for twenty games, I wasn't getting twenty games' worth of innings.”

But Baker understood the moment he received: a chance not only to pitch at a higher level after a strong season with Palm Beach, but to Yadier Molina.

“I think it was—he's probably going to be a Hall of Famer. And this is something I want to be able to soak in and enjoy. As opposed to ‘Hey, it's just another game. I'm going out there. It's the same thing as A-ball.' And it is. That's the approach that I spoke to you about and I wanted to take.

“But I wasn't throwing to a Double-A catcher. I'm throwing to the best catcher in the game. Probably a Hall of Famer. And so I think that changed a little bit. But I did think I did a good job with my approach.

“We went up there, last home stand of the season. Ten thousand people. Yadi's there. Wacha [also rehabbing] was there. Just the environment was so much, and I think it was good for me to prove that, yeah, I can handle that. It was no big deal.”

Baker pitched 4 innings, striking out 4, though he did allow 3 runs. A few days later, pitching in relief, he picked up his first Double-A win.

Baker knew if this is going to happen for him, needed to graduate permanently to Double-A in 2015.

“Yeah. I think twenty-five in A-ball would be—at least for me. I can't speak for anyone else. It's hard to make these statements because there's guys that are twenty-five in A-ball and have no problem with their timetable, their career path. For me, I don't think twenty-five in A-ball would be something that would be good for what I want to do. I'm not saying if I go camp in high-A, I would be, like, ‘Okay. I'm done.'

“But I would have to think about it. I would have to talk to them and see where they see me and—yeah, it would be tough. I think at this point, not only have I earned it, I think it's time. I think they should want to know, too: ‘Hey, can he do it or not?' And obviously they're probably not going to find that out with another go-around in the Florida State League. So, yeah, I would think that Double-A is where I need to be.” In March 2015, Baker found out: he'd be getting his chance to prove himself at Double-A Springfield. Not only did he stay all season, he held his own, pitching in every role possible, to a respectable 3.86 ERA through August 2015, and with the best strikeout rate of his career, 8.8/9.

Baker is, at once, the embodiment of the positive and the negative that goes along with participation in the St. Louis Cardinals farm system. The consistent communication allows him to set goals, and coaching continuity allows him to pursue those goals wherever he's assigned.

But Baker is in a system overstuffed with young pitching. Through 2014, he's pitched 109⅓ innings at high-A ball. His ERA is 2.80, his strikeout rate is a reasonable 6.6/9, the walk rate is an excellent 2.1/9. Baker's worked hard at his craft, and his fastball is up to 92/93, the kind of velocity that can at least get him in the door at higher levels. He's working hard at improving his slider, that third pitch. He showed throughout his career that he can start, he can relieve, and now at his highest level, he even struck out some hitters.

It just all might not be enough.

“I think it's not something we talk about too much, because I don't think she would ever sit there and say, like, ‘Hey, you're struggling. I don't think you're going to make it. I think it's time for you to stop,'” Baker said back in 2014 of his conversations with Jenna about his career. “But I think we haven't touched on it because I think she knows where I am in terms of being realistic and that I don't want to play in the minors until I'm thirty. You know, if I don't think I'm going to make it, if I'm doing terrible over an extended period of time at a level where I need to do well and I think the end is coming, I don't think I'll have any regrets at that time. We'll see and say, ‘All right. I gave everything I had.' So we haven't talked about it too much.

“Like I said, I'll be twenty-five next season. I don't think she's, like, ‘We're so old. I think you need to move on.' But I think it's something she thinks about. I think she thinks about more in terms of, like, ‘You're not really starting your career until you're twenty-seven. How is that going to affect us, more so now than in ten years? Are you going to have enough money if we want to buy a house?'

“And things like that. But, for now, she is behind me. This season, she got really into it. She watched every game on her phone. She still, last night, she was looking up the Florida State League championships to see who won. So she's really into it, and I think if I quit now, she would disagree with that.”

Every player, whether a prospect such as Taveras whom the Cardinals planned to make their right fielder in 2015, or Baker, who continues to fight against the odds a forty-ninth-round pick faces, understood precisely what he needed to do to take the next step in the Cardinals system.

That's particularly notable for Baker—Taveras received guidance from a face-to-face meeting with Mozeliak and Matheny at the end of the season. But Baker, too, heard from his manager, coaches, and LaRocque.

Are the major leagues a long shot? Absolutely. No one believes otherwise, Baker included. But they also were for Nick Greenwood, a swingman who came up and pitched 36 innings for the Cardinals in 2014, debuting at age twenty-six.

“I think someone like Nick Greenwood getting called up this year did a lot for me,” Baker said. “I think he was a guy that in my head, I would never vocalize to anyone, ‘Man, he is really good and probably deserves a chance.' And to be honest, I was one hundred percent wrong. 'Cause in my head, I was, like, ‘There's a zero percent chance he'll ever pitch in the big leagues with the Cardinals.' And then he got called up and it was, like, ‘That's how I'm going to get to the big leagues.' It's force their hand. Get to Triple-A. Prove I can help, you know? And I think Nick Greenwood making it is the most inspiring.”

LaRocque, too, had Greenwood in mind when he discussed Baker with me in September 2014: “Can Corey Baker be another Nick Greenwood for us? Absolutely, if he continues to grow and develop. Mo, our GPS, told me about a month before we called him up, ‘We're going to need some relievers who can stretch, go long innings, maybe even spot start. So we discussed who we had at Triple-A, and soon enough Nick got the call.

“I tell the older guys, in the lower levels, it's about projection and talent. Once you get to Double-, Triple-A, it's about production, period. How your fastball moves in the zone. Once you get to Double-, Triple-A, it's time to get outs. We don't just plan a path for future stars. We have a plan, a way forward, for everybody in our system.

“We thought that Corey deserved it. We knew we had an opening for a start that week, and we wanted to make sure Corey got that chance.”

So Baker continues on, battling the odds, with that vision of Busch Stadium in his mind. “I don't know if it'll happen with the Cardinals, but I hope it does,” Baker said. “But I don't think I'd be playing if I didn't think I could see it anymore. Minor league baseball is an awesome job and a great experience, but I'm not playing minor league baseball to play minor league baseball. So I think if I couldn't see myself in St. Louis, I would probably end my career.”

For Oscar Taveras, the results on the field in 2014 were mixed. His first call-up in May lasted just under two weeks before he returned to Memphis. He came up on July 1 for good, and on July 31, Mozeliak traded away Allen Craig to open up right field for Taveras. Still, though, Taveras wasn't hitting in St. Louis the way he had at each minor league level. Matheny would sit him at times (with Mozeliak's full support), infuriating the Cardinal fan base, with a long-term goal of trying to instill better habits into Taveras ahead of what everybody hoped would be a long career in St. Louis.

Yet, Taveras hit a game-tying home run in Game 2 of the NLCS against the Giants. After rounding the bases, he slapped hands with all of his teammates except for one: Carlos Martínez, his fellow Dominican, who gave him a half chest bump, half hug.

“My one takeaway for Oscar this year is I hope you learned a lot,” Mozeliak told me on October 23, 2014. “I hope he saw how Matt Carpenter, Matt Holliday, work every day. And he realizes, well, if they have to do it, maybe I should. There is that cultural expectation of how we play the game up here. And if a young player does not quite understand that, it's not the end of the world. But they better learn it quick.”

Mozeliak made it clear this wasn't some kind of Cardinals holier-than-thou attitude. Your starting right fielder should be a defensive asset for some pretty sound reasons. And the Cardinals have a clubhouse built around certain principles, making for a difficult fit should Taveras earn a regular spot in the lineup.

“I don't want to feel like that there's only one type of player that can play here,” Mozeliak said, “because that's not true. But we do look for players that do carry high character or have regard for high character. But we also are looking for really good baseball players. Talented players. And one of the fundamental things that we try to do as we're developing players in the minor leagues or recruiting or scouting to bring into our system, we try to have common threads. But we make mistakes. It's not all perfect. And the moment we start acting like we have it perfect, it's probably going to blow up on us. So that's why we're hesitant to do that now. Some would say it's also one of those things that continually need to be nurtured or evolving. And we don't act internally as if we've got this thing figured out. We're always pushing the envelope just to figure out a way to do it a little better, a little more efficiently, a little more effectively.”

The Cardinals have a standard they try to reach, and no one is more aware of the possibility of human error, that those standards won't always be reached by players or even the front office than the Cardinals.

The Cardinals planned to have Oscar Taveras return to Jupiter in November, begin a training regimen, and get in the kind of shape come spring training that would make it clear to Mozeliak on down that he was ready to be a Cardinal.

“I think the defining time for Oscar is going to be the next four months, frankly,” Mozeliak said on October 23. “It's not to say that it's irreparable, where he couldn't, again, find a way to fix it. But I will say we've been pretty clear on what our expectations of him are when he shows up in spring training, so it would be quite defiant if he didn't do it.”

As I listen back to this conversation, John Mozeliak sounds like a disappointed father. Just days later, he sounded like a grieving father.

Oscar Taveras was driving with his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Edilia Arvelo, at home in the Dominican Republic. Edilia had just instagrammed a photo of the two of them, smiling, in the car. Taveras had been drinking. He lost control of the vehicle and crashed. Both Taveras and Arvelo were killed. Taveras was twenty-two.

“We were absolutely stunned to learn this last night,” Mozeliak said from the Dominican Republic on October 27. “My first thought was ‘Could this be true?' To see Oscar a week and a half ago, so full of life, and then to see this end so tragically in a car accident. I'm utterly shocked and saddened.

“When you think about how much has been written about him, how much has been spoken about him, and he never got to show it at the major league level.”

By January 2015, Mozeliak had had a chance to think about Taveras, about what had happened, about what, if anything, he could have done to prevent the tragedy.

“I'm going to answer this in how I feel,” Mozeliak said. “I have thought about it a lot. And my biggest takeaway from this is—and perhaps this is what we focus more on moving forward—is taking responsibility or ownership for yourself. Because we can certainly explain to you the risks. We can certainly try to position you to not make poor decisions. In the end, you decide what decisions you make.

“He could have had that same accident in Jupiter, Florida. And what did he do that day that was wrong? He drove too fast. May have been tired. Had alcohol. I mean, all these things factor into that outcome. And when you think about children or players or young players and you're trying to mitigate risk for them, it's all we can do. Is try to explain to them what these things can lead to.

“My saying to my kids all the time is ‘Nothing good happens after midnight.' There's a reason for that statement. 'Cause nothing ever does. And isn't that a limit, though, of what a parent can do? Isn't that a limit of what an employer can do? Isn't that a limit of what a baseball team can do? I mean, I'm looking at this holistically in the sense of, how do you prevent these things? And frankly, it's about education and it's something that we do provide. And candidly, we understood who Oscar was. He was in the higher-risk category than others. That's why we wanted him to come to Jupiter in November. But when you look back at something like this, it still comes back down to the decisions people make.”

An overwhelming sorrow blanketed everything Mozeliak said about Taveras. He wasn't talking about personal responsibility as a means of avoiding blame for what happened to Taveras—just the opposite. He'd spent the months since Taveras died searching for a way to prevent the next Taveras, or the next Josh Hancock, a Cardinals pitcher who'd killed himself while driving drunk back in 2007. Mozeliak's sadness was for Taveras, and for how little Mozeliak believed he could do to prevent the next tragedy.