The Cardinals Way (37 page)

“And on a personal level, I'm going to talk about it to the entire organization,” Mozeliak said. “So we will continue to emphasize this. There needs to be a specific curriculum we develop for our Latin American players. Because it is a different environment there than it is here. It's not to say these things can't happen domestically. But just the way that their infrastructure's designed, we have to be a little more aggressive in how we teach it and how we talk about it for that program.”

To lose a twenty-two-year-old man, no matter who he is, is heartbreaking enough. But it is impossible to be a baseball fan and not feel the loss of Oscar Taveras on a sporting level as well. A young man with talent like Taveras's simply doesn't come along often. Sometimes, not always, it is the precursor of someone transcendent. We'll never know whether Taveras could have done that, or if he would have fallen short while providing windows into what that talent might have been.

All there will be are memories of that vast, untapped potential that excited everyone who saw it, everyone who knew him. All else is lost, just as Taveras himself is lost to his family and friends forever.

The Cardinals Way is to communicate constantly, to express goals, in the hope that it will ultimately benefit a baseball team, but that process forges friendships that last for decades, and a family atmosphere that is palpable to everyone in the organization, and to millions who view it from the outside.

Not every family can save every member. The Cardinals know the fallibility of what they do. Oscar Taveras provided a particularly poignant reminder of this. And there'd be another reminder to come.

 

EPILOGUE: TRANSITION AND THE IRREPLACEABLE CARDINAL

There are no true counterfactuals.

We cannot go back in time and see what would have happened if Bill DeWitt hadn't hired Jeff Luhnow in September 2003 and given him broad powers that steadily increased. We cannot know what Walt Jocketty would have done had he continued the path he'd been using, successfully, to make the Cardinals into consistent winners. We cannot see how the Cardinals' path would have shifted if John Mozeliak, fed up with infighting, had left in 2005. We'll never know how the Cardinals, and baseball at large, would have responded to Jeff Luhnow, general manager, back in 2007, rather than in 2011, a huge time difference in the industry's embrace of analytics.

There are no true alternate histories. The definitive study of such things, Michael J. Fox's 1985 film
Back to the Future
, tells us so.

But as 2015 dawned, the dispersal of the principals in power during the great Cardinals' restoration of the past decade to the Branch Rickey ideal allows us to see, within limits such as revenue and ownership support, a number of those differing paths.

The John Mozeliak Cardinals entered their eighth season. Oscar Taveras was gone. The team planned a uniform patch to memorialize him in 2015. They would build a baseball field in his hometown: Oscar Taveras Field. Carlos Martínez changed his uniform number to 18, in Taveras's honor, and said he planned to wear 18 for the rest of his career. Mozeliak went out and traded for another right fielder—Jason Heyward, from Atlanta. Mozeliak gave up Shelby Miller and Tyrell Jenkins, draft/development products surplus to needs. Heyward had one year left on his contract when the Cardinals acquired him, and they gave him the Matt Holliday treatment—let him spend some time with the Cardinals, see what it is to play in St. Louis, then decide on his future. Heyward joined the Cardinals Caravan, the traveling Cardinals who meet with fans all over the wide swatch of Midwestern territory where Cardinals fans were seeded thanks to the reach of KMOX.

It was a two-way mirror. The fans got to know Heyward. Heyward got to know the fans.

But Mozeliak declined to spend big money on a starting pitcher. Instead, international scouting's Carlos Martínez and draft product Marco Gonzales would do nicely for a fifth-starter battle, with Martínez earning the job out of spring training, and becoming the team's best pitcher by August 2015.

The Walt Jocketty Reds entered their eighth season. For Jocketty, the language on analytics had changed, though it would be impossible to fully document how much of that was reflected in the way the Reds do business, and how much of it reflects the changing baseball landscape between 2007 and 2015.

“Well, I think it was something that was part of [my thinking],” Jocketty told me in January 2015 of incorporating analytics into what the Reds do. “They were working on their own system at the time, but it was just very primitive. And we worked to advance it.”

But while Jocketty himself had been a major impediment to the Cardinals' implementation of Luhnow's suggestions, Jocketty just five years later tried to bulk up the analytics side of the Reds operations. When asked whether the Reds had offered any resistance, Jocketty said, “Not really. There wasn't a lot of convincing to do to change people's mind-set. We were going to find a way to blend the two together. And I think everybody was okay with that.”

Meanwhile, the Arizona Diamondbacks hired Tony La Russa in May 2014 to oversee baseball operations. La Russa, in case you had any doubts about how he felt on the Jocketty/Luhnow split, hired Dave Stewart as general manager. In January 2015, Stewart said, relative to his pursuit of free agent pitcher James Shields:

“I think James is a throwback guy by the way he goes about his business and the innings he pitches. I think the fact that Tony [La Russa] is here and that we have more baseball people—he probably sees us as a true baseball team versus some of the other teams out here that are geared more toward analytics and those type of things.”
1

Leaving aside the problematic notion inherent in the idea of “a true baseball team,” nothing could more fully capture how much the ground had shifted since Bill DeWitt brought in Jeff Luhnow less than twelve years earlier. The Diamondbacks intended to make a case that they were unique, essentially, because they weren't embracing analytics. Forget what that might mean for the limitations the Diamondbacks would create for themselves. That's an astonishing statement on just how pervasive data had become, in a short time, within baseball.

The Houston Astros entered their fourth season with Jeff Luhnow as general manager and Sig Mejdal as director of decision sciences.

It was a rough 2014, at least publicly, for the Astros. They did improve 19 games over 2013, finishing at 70-92. A battle over television rights cost the franchise tens of millions of dollars.

In May 2014, Astros beat reporter Evan Drellich published a piece that described the view of the Astros around baseball this way:

The Astros have become one of baseball's most progressive franchises as they try to rebuild and avoid a fourth consecutive 100-loss season.

But general manager Jeff Luhnow's radical approach to on-field changes and business decisions has created at least pockets of internal discontent and a potential reputation problem throughout baseball.

“They are definitely the outcast of Major League Baseball right now, and it's kind of frustrating for everyone else to have to watch it,” said former Astros pitcher Bud Norris, now with Baltimore. “When you talk to agents, when you talk to other players and you talk amongst the league, yeah, there's going to be some opinions about it, and they're not always pretty.”

The criticism, through interviews with more than 20 players, coaches, agents and others, comes in two parts:

On the field, the Astros shift their defenders into unusual positions to counteract hitter tendencies more than any other team, including in the minor leagues. They schedule minor league starting pitchers on altered and fluctuating rotation schedules, what they call a “modified tandem” system, a development strategy unique in baseball.

Off the field, the Astros are said to handle contract negotiations and the timing of player promotions with a dehumanizing, analytics-based approach detected by some across their operation.
2

Drellich, an excellent reporter and anything but hostile to analytics, drilled down into what remained of the hostility toward Luhnow and his ideas within the industry. (Or so we thought, prior to June 2015.)

Then negotiations broke down with Astros top pick Brady Aiken, and Aiken ultimately went unsigned. The extent to which the pool links all negotiations with draft picks spilled over into public view as well: the reduced slot money after not signing Aiken meant that to sign Jacob Nix, the team's fifth-rounder, the Astros would have had to exceed their pool and forfeit a future draft pick.

There was plenty of positive press, too: a
Sports Illustrated
cover story called the Astros “Your 2017 World Series Champs,” and
Bloomberg Businessweek
went long on Luhnow and Mejdal, though oddly focused exclusively on the data, essentially providing half the equation of a maturing organization steadily adding Luhnow people on the player-development and scouting sides.

So what's followed in 2015 looks awfully similar for Luhnow's Astros to what 2011 was for Luhnow's Cardinals—contending, the integration of young players Luhnow drafted like shortstop Carlos Correa, and a hasty retreat from critics unable to argue with the results. Vindication. Again.

“I do think that when you're in an organization, and you're doing things for the long-term, it often takes a long time for those things to manifest itself,” Luhnow said to me in August 2015. “And in the meantime, it is difficult to be patient, and defend yourself. The longer it takes, the critics line up. We had a lot of that in St. Louis. And last year in Houston, we had a rough year, with the things that happened. It takes a lot not to react at the time, and believe you're doing the right thing. And ultimately, over time, you hope that things work out. I think there's an analogy, between the Cardinals players who began to filter in and help the team, same thing, a lot of the strategies we employed in Houston that people criticized are coming to fruition and helping the ballclub. So yeah, there's some satisfaction in that.”

One fascinating aspect of this antipathy to Luhnow came from treating the Astros' doing things differently as an inherent weakness, not a strength. A rival executive said to me of the Aiken issue, “I mean, that wouldn't happen in twenty-nine other organizations.”

The question is this: Should the Astros, should any team,
want
to do things like the other twenty-nine? Baseball is an industry where nearly the entire advantage Luhnow once brought to the Cardinals, with Luhnow and Mejdal shocking both themselves and Bill DeWitt by quantifying just how much analytics would give them an edge in the draft, has disappeared.

“To answer your question, the gap's almost gone,” Mozeliak told me in October 2014. “And that's because twenty-nine other teams are aggressively trying to get smarter. And [compared to where] we were from an analytical standpoint, there's not too many teams that have an advantage in making decisions than others. There might be a small one in how teams do that, but overall I think that the playing field is much more level. But that's where aggressive teams or teams willing to take risks have advantages now. And there's just far less fruit to grab than there was ten years ago.”

Everybody I talked to echoed this—DeWitt, Luhnow, Mejdal.

“Part of it, I wonder, is—because Jeff is a modern manager so he revealed what we were doing to the scouts,” Mejdal said. “To not only keep them inspired, but perhaps to encourage them to question convention. What they're doing. To make the system transparent. But you know how scouts go between organizations. So some of it may have come about because of that. I don't know. There's, perhaps, the press. I think when I got hired, there probably weren't but a few other teams that had analysts. And now, I think every team has analysts. So, I think it's just a case of it making it to the top of the list of the analysts, perhaps.”

If anything, that the Cardinals—who in the eyes of so many old-school baseball people represented the platonic ideal of old ideas—succeeded by becoming data-driven limited how much the critics could go after Luhnow for doing it.

“I'm not sure this is the fault of anyone in the A's, but I mean, I think we've been pretty quiet about [our success]—I guess it's the whole boastful thing,” Chris Correa said to me in January 2015. “A lot of people in the game viewed
Moneyball
as, for a lack of a better term, being boastful, right? That they had sort of outsmarted everyone. And I don't really feel like that's been the message that we've ever tried to promote.”

It was true. From DeWitt on down, the concern throughout my time reporting this book was the polar opposite of what I'm used to experiencing in the midst of reporting. The Cardinals don't believe they've figured out anything, nothing permanent, nothing that won't require continual innovation to stay ahead of the competition. The pushback came not when anything negative came up—the principals themselves often brought up their failings along the way—but, rather, against the idea that the team had created anything like a bulletproof methodology for building a baseball team.

“I don't really feel like that's been the message that we've ever tried to promote,” Correa continued back in January 2015. “I think, if anything, we've tried to be very quiet, close to the vest, about our decision-making processes and even what we're trying to accomplish here. In some ways it's too bad you're writing a book about it. I don't think that we should pretend that we have all the answers. We've been very fortunate to have some success. I think that a lot of our core decision-making processes are pretty sound, but at the same time, there are a lot of smart people all over the game trying to get better, and we'll see. We're going to do our best to make sure that we're the best that we possibly can be over the next decade.”