The Cardinals Way (15 page)

That wasn't the process Sig Mejdal was building, though. Here's how you know.

“You know, my background is in research,” Mejdal said. “I'm a scientist, and so wherever the data comes from, if it has predictive ability, I'm attracted to it, and the reports that the scouts generate provide a tremendous amount of predictive ability. And so we traded processes such that we squeezed every ounce of predictive ability out of the scouts' expertise. And in my opinion, in the first draft, 2005, that was my first experience at the draft, much of the scouts' passion came from their confidence to speak during the draft. And so [there are] different personalities and different desires of the scouts. A different personality is a person who may be more quiet. Different desire is a person who really wants more players. [This] was playing a role in the draft. And neither of those things were related to the player's underlying skills.”

This was a concern echoed by Turco, by the way. But Mejdal's solution was radically different:

“And so we created processes that would combine all the scouts' orders into a single overall list. And that was the goal of squeezing every last ounce of predictive abilities from the scouting reports, and not simply relying on the scout who happened to sit closer to the scouting director on draft day. We didn't want to ignore the scout who's perhaps a little less confident to speak up to contradict the area scout or the cross-checker.”

But making sure the scouting recommendations aren't skewed was only a part of the reason for such a long list. Ultimately, the rankings used by the Cardinals were a combination of what the scouts who saw a player thought, and what the analytics said a player could be based on regression analysis of that player's high school, college, and/or summer league stats.

Many times, the statistics would highlight a relatively obscure player—or maybe a player whom a scout in a given area didn't ultimately like. But without a scouting report, the Cardinals would have half the needed data to plug into their system to determine the value of a player. They could always go back and get the stats for someone off the radar that one of their scouts liked. The reverse wasn't the case, unless the lists were dramatically expanded.

The personnel in scouting changed, too. Luhnow didn't just use his evaluative tools to understand who was best; he didn't hesitate to move people and find additional scouts who he thought could do better. Luhnow scouts did look somewhat different from the guys who'd been in the department before he arrived.

“As we started to bring in new people, the profiles felt different than the guys who had been there, and I knew that in order to be successful I was going to need to not only retain but motivate and get a lot out of some of the veteran guys. Roger Smith. Mike Roberts. You know, Chuck Fick. Joe Rigoli. Marty Maier. So I put those guys in leadership positions. But as we started to backfill for the area scouts, we started to bring in a new breed of area scout. Which is, typically, someone that is younger, played the game. They all played the game. Had a passion for the game. But also have a appreciation-slash-understanding that things were changing, and they're willing to do things new ways. Incorporate new ways of managing their jobs and managing information.”

To find them, though, Luhnow followed a process that differed from the closed system that had dominated scouting hires for years. He used, believe it or not, a computer.

“So this is a funny story, but first time I had an area scout opening, I posted the job on the Internet and Chuck Fick came in and said, ‘You've got to be kidding me. You can't find a scout on the Internet. That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.' I said, ‘Maybe not, but we just got 250 résumés and so we're going to go through them all and we're going to pick the best ten and we're going to interview them and we're going to see.'

“And sure enough, the number of scouts that we found on the Internet, they now are not only with the Astros and the Cardinals, they're in other organizations as well. So you can find a scout on the Internet. It's just a way of telling people you have a job opening. In the past in baseball, and this is very common [in all industries], people hire based off of recommendations from people they know. I got an area scout job. ‘Oh, I got a guy. A perfect guy. He's…' You know, and that's it. You interview him and you give him the job and that's it. To me, that's ludicrous. And so, we went out and we hired people that we had no connection with.

“And sure enough, there's a lot of people that were recommended still, and we put them in the process. If they end up being the best candidate, then they're the best candidate. But they're going to have to go through the process. So each candidate went through three or four rounds of screening, and in the final rounds they would be interviewed by four or five people.

“And then we'd get together and we'd say, ‘Okay, here's the criteria. Who's the best guy?' But there was no litmus test as far as can they run numbers, because we weren't thinking that the area scouts were going to actually do any analysis. That's not why we were hiring them. We got analysis guys at HQ. We wanted guys that could do the job of evaluating with their own eyes, but be aware that they were going to be measured in a certain way. That there's certain ways to doing this job that appear to be best practices. They're going to have to hustle. They're still going to have to travel a ton of miles. And they're going to have to appreciate that when they come to the draft, that their guy may not get drafted because there's another guy that's done a better job in his [playing] career that deserves that spot more.”

Yet, despite this attempt to incorporate scouting data in a uniform way, one scout Luhnow hired in 2006, Charlie Gonzalez, would play a vital role in how the Cardinals drafted for years.

“So, I felt like we were not covering Florida properly,” Luhnow recalled. “Our area scout lived in Tampa, and he was getting [beaten] in Miami. We needed someone in Miami who understood the Cuban thing. Run with the Cuban scouts. And so I told our area scout, Steve Turco, you've got to hire a part-time guy. So find a couple guys. It's in the budget. Find a couple guys and go interview them.

“And he goes through this whole process and finds a couple guys and we interviewed them and I remember Charlie—I interviewed him by phone, and Steve Turco told me that Charlie was fluent in Spanish, and so I interviewed him in Spanish. And I wish I had seen Charlie over there on the phone. I'm sure his face was red, and he was mumbling and stuttering. His Spanish wasn't that good.

“And so I got off the phone and I was, like, ‘Turc, I got to tell you. This guy's kind of a liar.' I said to Turc, ‘This guy's a fraud. I can't believe you want to hire this guy.'

“And he said, ‘I've got to tell you, Jeff, I don't think he's a fraud. I think he's actually a good dude and he was so nervous.' Because Turco was there watching him do this interview.

“I said, ‘Okay, Turc. It's just a part-time job. That's fine. I'll let you hire him.' And I think it was one of the best decisions we've ever made because he is relentless. There's no question that he pitches his guys harder than anybody, and he also advocates for his guys once they get drafted.”

I talked to lots of people about Charlie Gonzalez. The response I got, across the board, when I asked about Gonzalez's background, was “Yeah, what is Charlie's background?”

“Well, I know some stuff about him,” Luhnow said. “I don't know how much I can tell you for the book. All I can tell you is when I told him we needed to do a background investigation, he got really, really nervous.” (Gonzalez says his nervousness stemmed from a lack of professional playing background.)

Charlie Gonzalez will be sixty-one years old in 2015. He's a bear of a man, ruddy complexion over seemingly constant movement. You cannot watch him, out on a field directing a scouting combine, or in a boardroom discussing the minute details of every player entirely from memory, without understanding that Charlie Gonzalez was born to be a professional scout. Yet he didn't start doing it until he was well into his forties.

“Charlie's incredible,” Luhnow said. “He really is incredible. He had a surfer body back in the day because he used to surf a lot.”

“I'm not quite sure what Charlie's educational background is, but I can tell you he is brilliant,” Kantrovitz told me in a July 2014 e-mail. “He can be Jewish, Latin, an intellectual, a car salesman … whatever is needed in any given situation to relate to a player and family. It's one of those rare cases where I'm not sure if he could get a job outside of baseball, but he is elite at his job in baseball.”

Charlie Gonzalez was born in Chicago in 1954. His first baseball game was in the stands at old Comiskey Park with his father, Brice, a public-school teacher.

“Mine was the old White Sox,” Gonzalez told me in a December 2014 interview. “Minnie Minoso. Louie Aparicio. Nellie Fox. All those guys. I mean, I love the black Sox hat with the White Sox logo with the little red trim on it.

“Used to hate the Twins and Norm Cash and Rocky Colavito and Harmon Killebrew because I was a die-hard fan. Later on, I really liked the Bull, Greg Luzinski, and—what the hell was his name? Used to wear the big teardrop sunglasses. The big teardrop glasses. Dick Allen.”

His second-favorite team, which he developed an interest in after moving to the Miami area as a child, was the St. Louis Cardinals.

“We had some college friends of my dad's that lived in St. Louis, and I remember in the summertime we would go,” Gonzalez said. “My parents divorced when I was about twelve, and I remember I went to a game at old Busch. But I really, really, really liked the Cardinals. Again, they were just on the heels of the White Sox, and the White Sox were my team.”

Gonzalez played baseball, but he says his real passion as a teen was swimming.

“I went to high school down here [in Florida],” Gonzalez said. “I swam competitively. I mean, you have no idea. Practice in the summer twice a day, you know? Six to eight in the morning. Sometimes three times a day. And then we would do long-distance swimming, work on endurance at night. I was at a very, very, very high level.

“I swam with special coaches. A guy named Wally Spence. I swam basically with a—it boils down to and equates to today's terminology or mind-set, it would be like travel ball.” (Spence, incidentally, was one of the Spence brothers, who were all inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1967.)
4

“Come ninth grade, I went to an all-boys Catholic school and I immediately made the swimming team as a freshman, and I was still very good, but you know what? My enthusiasm was dwindling because really my heart wasn't in it. I was offered a scholarship to Catholic University. Basically, if I kept my times and everything stayed the same—but I was burnt out, you know? I went to a high school that was about thirty-five miles away. And I would take the bus out there. And after school I would have swimming practice and I would have to take the metro bus all the way back home where I lived.”

So as swimming faded, Gonzalez took up surfing.

“I started surfing about when I was about twelve years old. And it definitely became a passion and a love. And deep down inside, that was what I did on a feverish level. Surfing's not real good in South Florida. We would go up the coast all the time to Fort Pierce and Melbourne Beach and stuff like that. And I surfed all the time. I finally gave up swimming and basically through high school—though high school, I surfed. And we would surf everywhere in Florida. I really, really knew sports. I really knew baseball. I would pay attention to baseball and everything. But surfing was my passion.”

The idea of working in baseball?

“Not a thought. So I went to Miami-Dade Community College out of high school. Graduated. And I went to junior college and then I went to the University of Florida for a few years, but all of that was really working around surfing. I would go to school. We would take jobs, and me and my friends, we would save our money and we'd go on surf trips.

“We'd go to Puerto Rico. We worked at UPS washing trucks. I basically would go to school and surfed as much as I could. We would take trips in the summertime. I'd spend the whole summer in San Diego one summer. I think it was in '73. I went and saved up money working all year, surfing, going to school. Da da, da da. And we went out and spent the whole summer out there in San Diego, all in Southern California. And then we shot out to Hawaii. I would work in a surf shop. Sanding boards, fixing things, whatever. Kind of a nomadic life.

“So I ended up doing that for a few years in the summertime, when I could. And I would go out to Hawaii in the wintertime. You know, when the waves were—the whole winter season in the North Shore. And I would surf all the places you hear about. I would surf Southside Beach. I'd surfed some pipeline and Hanalei. Go to all these places. And several winters, I would save my money and go back there for the winter as long as I could. And go to Puerto Rico. All those kind of trips where there was good surf. 'Cause like I said, in South Florida, there's surf, but it's not really good surf.”

Charlie said this is essentially how most of his twenties passed.

“I think I was twenty-seven years old at that point in time. And I basically had just been surfing and going to school and enjoying life. And I didn't really have a plan, you know? I really did not have a plan at all.

“I found that I would think about it. I thought about law school. I would think about things, you know? But I had a hard time just trying to figure out—in fact, I used to scratch my head. I mean, you talk to some of these kids and they're going, ‘Well, what's your major?' And they're, ‘I got a major in this. I got a minor in this. And when I'm done with this, I'm going to go to grad school.' And I would just—I would kind of envy them, at the same time thinking, excuse my French, that they're full of shit.