The Cardinals Way (27 page)

He stops a few steps toward first base. He thinks a moment, looks up into the sky, and breaks back into a huge smile. Coming off the field, he throws an arm around James Ramsey. It's just one of many line drives, he seems to think. There are so many more to come.

April 7, St. Louis, Missouri

Opening Day came to St. Louis, and so did a thoroughly unwelcoming rainstorm that threatened to cancel festivities altogether.

Bill DeWitt Jr. and his son, Bill DeWitt III, are monitoring the action from their offices inside Busch Stadium. The elder DeWitt makes a call, about three hours prior to game time, which revealed conditions had not yet deteriorated to the point the Budweiser Clydesdales would be forced to cancel their jaunt around the warning track to the familiar organ music theme and fifty thousand clapping fans.

While the horses were ultimately rained out, DeWitt made his way down to the field for the opening ceremonies. Cardinals Hall of Famers stood in their red jackets. Other dignitaries, such as Mike Shannon (who'd be inducted in August), were on hand to shake hands as each player was introduced, over that organ music, standing in front of World Series trophies the team had won.

“I like to head down when the Clydesdales march,” DeWitt had told me. “I like to see as much of the game as I can, in the seats outside. Usually, the weather's better than this.”

This is what a city looks like when no one since 1902 has reached the age of twenty-five without seeing a World Series parade. Thousands gathered ahead of time, lining up not merely to enter Busch Stadium and greet their defending National League pennant-winning heroes. They gathered by the thousands to enter Ballpark Village, a collection of restaurants and bars, highlighted by the St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame, to entertain those who are enthralled by the industry that is the Cardinals.

You'll find Rickey there, and Musial, and Kissell—the Cardinals museum has a Kissell manual from 1969—and everyone who came after. Kissell himself was inducted in August 2015. You'll even find the Browns there, the team that almost owned this city, and even Eddie Gaedel, the three-foot-seven-inch man Bill Veeck hired to bat for the Browns in 1951, wearing little Bill DeWitt Jr.'s Browns uniform.

Out they came, those products of the Jeff Luhnow and Dan Kantrovitz drafts, the next chapter in Cardinals history about to be written—“Number 26, Trevor Rosenthal!” Rosenthal, huge grin on his face, shaking hands with Whitey Herzog. During the 2013 play-offs, Bob Gibson had given Rosenthal some tips that he refused to share with the media.

“Number 19, Jon Jay!” A Charlie Gonzalez special, Jay regained the center-field job in 2014, hit .303/.372/.378, and his on-base percentage topped .400 in a second half that seemed to find Jay in the middle of nearly every Cardinals win.

“Number 31, Lance Lynn!” Lynn leaped out of the back of a blue pickup truck, embarking on a 200-inning season with a 2.74 ERA, quietly elite once again.

“Number 33, Daniel Descalso!” The third-round pick from 2007 shared an alma mater with Sig Mejdal. Descalso shook hands with Tony La Russa, a Mejdal skeptic. Descalso and La Russa won a World Series together thanks to a system Mejdal helped build.

“Number 40, Shelby Miller!” An excited Fredbird points at Miller, who had another 10 wins in him in 2014.

“Number 44, Carlos Martínez!” Still just twenty-two, Martínez tantalized fans with the kind of stuff that led Matt Slater to tell his bosses to throw $1.5 million at a teenaged kid he'd just spent a few minutes watching. By 2015, he wouldn't be wearing number 44 anymore, for a tragic reason.

The wind whipped through the stadium. The game wouldn't start for another forty-five minutes. The red, white, and blue bunting that signifies important baseball moments—Opening Day, the postseason—shuddered along the right-field wall. The stands, though, were filled already.

The cheers got even louder for that pitcher Luhnow pushed for more than a decade ago, men and women in red ponchos roaring as the public-address announcer said, “Number 50, Adam Wainwright!” The veteran hurler waved to the crowd with a wide smile.

Even the lesser 2014 contributors came mostly from the farm—Joe Kelly, traded to Boston with Allen Craig, Shane Robinson, Pete Kozma, Kevin Siegrist, Tony Cruz, Seth Maness, Keith Butler—so many players the Cardinals drafted and developed.

And the roars, still louder, for the starting lineup, teeming with homegrown talent: “Number 13, the third baseman, Matt Carpenter!” Carpenter gives the crowd a businesslike wave, all focus, even amid the cheering. “Number 21, the first baseman, Allen Craig!” Craig jumps gingerly out of a white pickup, his movements still limited after a 2013 foot injury. “Number 32, the first baseman, Matt Adams!” The big man is noticeably trimmer and takes that extra second to soak in the handshakes, lingering with Red Schoendienst.

Of course, another level for Yadier Molina, warming up the starting pitcher. And perhaps the crowd at its loudest, not for Molina, but for the Kantrovitz pick and Pujols compensation: “Warming up in the bull pen, Number 52, Michael Wacha!”

Wacha pitched six solid innings. Martínez, Siegrist, and Rosenthal finished it off. Molina drove in three with a booming double in the first. Craig added an RBI single. Adams had two hits. Wong contributed a walk and a single. Carpenter, leading off, reached three times.

The soaked fans went home happy. The Cardinals won.

“It's a lot of fun pitching in front of your home crowd, forty-thousand-plus fans,” Wacha told us, standing in front of his locker, when it was over. “I don't know who wouldn't thrive off those kind of situations.”

The next morning, as I prepared to leave St. Louis, a man in his fifties rolled his suitcase toward the hotel elevator. He held one item apart—a stark white Cardinals Willie McGee jersey. It belonged to his wife, and he'd been asked to take particular care of it. “This is how she wants me to carry it,” he told me. Treating it as a holy item, he lifted it carefully away from his suitcase and body as we entered the parking garage. On the hook it went in the back of his SUV. The couple had come in from Illinois for the home opener, stayed over, and would drive home the next day. The last I saw of them was their license plate, an Illinois personalized
GOKARDS
.

May 24, Jupiter, Florida

Late May in Jupiter is no place for the player who only suspects he wants the major league dream.

Your clothes stick to your body the moment you step outside. Those Cardinals minor leaguers who aren't in full-season ball are playing at the Kissell complex, awaiting assignments to Johnson City or State College. Otherwise, it's Jupiter for the season, and the Gulf Coast League Cardinals.

But they don't have the same experience back at the Kissell complex the high-A minor leaguers do at Roger Dean Stadium, visible from the six back fields. There's no shade. The one bathroom is augmented by a Porta Potti, labeled
ALL STAR
, which leads one to wonder about the Porta Potti that didn't make the team. It's not even 10:00
A.M.
yet, and there's Ramon “Smoky” Ortiz, with a weighted bat, teaching the handful of switch-hitters that old drill of Kissell's I found written down on Ginny's stationery.

Running this team is Steve Turco, in his thirty-fifth year in organized ball. He's not looking to reach the major leagues. He's just carrying on Kissell's work. We sat and talked about it all on a scalding day in late May, but he never once took his focus off the field while we chatted. Every single play was an opportunity to teach.

“See what we did there, it was not right, either,” Turco said, breaking off from his own train of thought, not unkindly, just observing something he'd need to bring up with his youngest charges. “They played that sure double, and it wasn't a sure double, it was cut off in the gap. We had nobody at second base. Actually, the shortstop should have been there. The second baseman went out to get the throw. Rivera looked to second because that's where the play was.”

No one had any question about Chris Rivera's baseball IQ. Like George Kissell, a Cardinals minor league infielder signed in 1940, Steve Turco, a Cardinals minor league infielder signed in 1979, and Ollie Marmol, a Cardinals minor league infielder signed in 2007, Chris Rivera clearly had a future in coaching. But Dan Kantrovitz took him in the seventh round of the 2013 draft hoping for more than an eventual heir apparent to Kissell.

“He was alongside the top high school players on every draft board,” Kantrovitz recalled. “He slipped to the second round, and my guess is all assumed he was unsignable. Because of his relationship with [Cardinals scout Michael Garciaparra], he texted him in the sixth round and said he wanted to forgo his commitment to Fullerton. After hearing that, we did not hesitate.

“He runs the largest scout-ball setup in SoCal,” Kantrovitz said of Garciaparra. “Some people in baseball view that as a negative in that it can take some time away from scouting. Frankly, that is a big reason
why
I hired him. In addition to being an excellent evaluator, his relationships and knowledge of high school players is as good as it gets. And, I guarantee you, Chris Rivera was not texting the same information to twenty-nine other clubs as he was to Gar during the draft.”

Rivera stayed with Turco in the Gulf Coast League and put up an .820 OPS in June, a .722 in July, and then cratered—a .456 OPS in August. As Turco pointed out, he'd done this while learning a new position—the first-round pick Oscar Mercado took over at shortstop, so Turco had Rivera move to second. But Rivera believed he could do better.

“It really frustrated me because I was starting out hot,” Rivera told me after the morning game on May 24, as we walked toward the minor league clubhouse. “Really hot. I was just hitting the ball. Hit. Took a couple home runs the beginning of the year. And so—and then leveling off, I just—I don't know. I mean, mentally, it was okay 'cause I've learned to become mentally strong with that. My dad has taught me that over the years. So just physically, you want to get that hit so it's frustrating not getting your hit. But coming into this year, I have a lot of confidence going up to the plate. I feel like I was hitting the ball a lot better. Driving the ball with power into the gaps. So I feel a lot better this year.”

Turco also had Rowan Wick with him. It had been a rough spring for Wick, who wasn't yet showing Turco or the rest of the Cardinals decision makers that he'd been right to keep pursuing the major leagues as a position player.

“I believe I'm going to State College,” Wick said as we traveled that same path from the field to the minor league clubhouse. “And—I mean, I'd like to finish in Peoria by the end of the season. I was hoping to break spring training in Peoria. I did well last year in Johnson City so I was hoping to just jump to Peoria right away, but there's a lot of outfielders in the Cardinals organization obviously, so…”

It was true—I'd had a scout from a rival team tell me back in March that he'd trade his team's major league outfield for the Cardinals' Triple-A outfield of Oscar Taveras, Stephen Piscotty, and Randal Grichuk. Tommy Pham, who hit .324 and eventually earned a big league look, couldn't break into that Triple-A starting outfield. James Ramsey, the first-round pick from 2012, was stuck at Double-A, despite an OPS above .900, because of the talent glut.

Wick grew up in the Vancouver area, and he saw himself similarly to how his supporters in PD did.

“I definitely think that's the kind of player that I am,” Wick said, referring to his strong Johnson City numbers in 2013. “Hit for power and play in the corner with a solid arm. I have power potential.”

Or as Kantrovitz put it, encapsulating the Wick conundrum, “Wick is polarizing. He has a legit fallback on the mound if his bat does not play at higher levels. And obviously you don't want to wait too long to make the switch. But his power is rare, and I'm a strong advocate of being patient with his bat. I'm still betting on the bat, and him being a high-K guy with twenty-five-plus bombs. But as hard as it is to believe if you haven't seen it, which you have, his arm might end up being his carry tool.”

Wick, a Canadian native, had to figure it out without his family nearby, or even in the same country. “My parents were down here for spring training, and I haven't seen my sister since, like, February,” he said.

But at this point, with short-season assignments coming, Wick had a simple task: he needed to hunt strikes, as Turco put it. It was up to Turco and Wick to figure out if he could do that. When I asked Wick if he thought he'd made any progress, his response was telling:

“I don't know.” He went off to lunch.

Meanwhile, Corey Baker was not in Palm Beach, where he'd started the season. The Cardinals promoted him to Double-A, a place he'd struggled in limited opportunity in 2013. Baker arrived in the professional ranks with a delivery that needed refinement, and primarily a fastball and changeup—the changeup, he believes, is what got him drafted at all. He remembers an early conference between Ace Adams and the pitchers:

“He spoke that to the group. He spoke to moving off the rubber. Momentum. Getting some tilt. Getting that angle on the ball in your body. So that was definitely mentioned. And I'm sure he definitely worked with guys, and I'm sure when Brent Strom at the time, my pitching coordinator, came around, he worked with guys at it. For me, personally, I don't think that's something that was a big issue for me. I think it was more the momentum and working on that front side.”

And shades of Mike Witte, Adams brought his pitchers in to see old video of Greg Maddux, of Mariano Rivera, of Justin Verlander.

“And obviously not that we have to repeat that, because everyone's different, but just what's in their delivery that you think is necessary and they think could help everyone. I remember Maddux, and I had a side view of him and how far his body is away from the rubber when he lets go of the ball. And that's going to create a huge advantage for you.”