The Cardinals Way (32 page)

“That's what you do,” Arango cooed, as the hitter connected, the ball sailing over the wall in right-center field.

“That's a swing,” echoed Gonzalez.

Players grouped in the outfield for fly balls, getting called in groups of about a half dozen to take their turn at BP. The pitchers warmed up along the first-base line, where a pair of mounds served as the bullpen during the season in the Florida State League, and the final stage on this day.

“This is where the final conversations take place,” Kantrovitz said to me as we watched the batting practice. “We take final temps on how they feel, and we determine whether inquiries into signability prices are worth having.”

The shortstop with the Jeter arm hit three over the wall. He ultimately got drafted late and didn't sign. Signability—so many kids lost chances to be professional baseball players in 2014 because of poor advice within an NCAA system designed to deny them basic info, and to force teams to guess.

Dash Winningham, a burly, left-handed high school kid from up in Ocala, Florida, knocked a few home runs into the right-field corner. Kantrovitz and Gonzalez pay particular attention—this was another Gonzalez gut feel.

“Can he go opposite field?” Kantrovitz asks.

Fortunately, the Cardinals have a coach who specializes in instructing young hitters right there. Steve Turco puts a hand on Winningham's shoulder when he steps out of the box.

“You ever go oppo?” Turco asks him. “You want to be able to use the whole field. You can do it—you've got a lot of bat speed.”

Winningham returned to the cage and hit everything to left center, as instructed. The Cardinals gathered two pieces of information from a quick exchange: he's coachable, and it wouldn't take long for him to be a more polished hitter than he is now.

By contrast, the kid with “Lenny Dykstra” in him, per Gonzalez, took some weak cuts in the box. Kantrovitz made a note of it.

Another lefty swinger entered the cage. The scouts perked up. He headed to college, though you could see why Charlie Gonzalez thought so highly of him. And I recognized his mom from the scouting report.

Up the first-base line, Arango was arranging the pitchers, instructing those who needed to show the Cardinals specific parts of their arsenal what to be ready to throw. Kantrovitz watched. Boyles took radar-gun readings, grabbing them from one pitcher, then the other, two throwing at a time. Davis recorded video to feed into the mechanics algorithm. Turco calmly talked them through the pen session—“Okay, third-place hitter up, what do you do?”

Then it's Gomber's turn. They know the fastball, they know the changeup. They want to see the curveball.

“I haven't thrown it in a while,” Gomber cautions the group. Then in it comes, looping over the plate in textbook fashion at 75 miles per hour. Grunts of appreciation all around me. Another, just as good, 74. That's the stuff. Good curveballs are like shooting stars when you witness them up close.

I asked Gomber a few weeks later, after he'd been drafted by the Cardinals in the fourth round, if he knew what was at stake when he uncorked that pitch.

“Yeah. It was a good one,” Gomber said, standing on the field in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, about to make his professional debut with the State College Spikes. “Actually, when I left, some people asked me how it went. I told them they were the best curveballs I've thrown in my life. So—that was a plus. Those were some really good curveballs I threw that day.” Gomber smiled. “A great time to do it. Good timing.”

After Gomber, Gonzalez had brought over a pitcher he hadn't discussed the day before, but had been pushing Kantrovitz on since March, I learned later.

“This is Daniel Poncedeleon,” Gonzalez said. “He's gonna throw for us.”

Everything about the presentation was designed to get the maximum attention for a guy Gonzalez wanted to flag. “This is my favorite pitcher in the state of Florida,” Gonzalez told me while Poncedeleon warmed up. A few hitters were kept around so he could pitch, off the mound, to live hitting.

Poncedeleon hit 93 with the fastball, impressed with the cutter. He hadn't pitched since the end of the college season, one he'd had at NAIA Embry-Riddle after a near deal with the Cubs following the 2013 draft led the NCAA to rule him ineligible. This typical NCAA nonsense meant fewer eyeballs on Poncedeleon as a senior sign.

“The best part about this? We're gonna get him for five thousand fucking dollars,” Gonzalez said. “For the best pitcher in the state of Florida.”

Gonzalez had a value of $1.75 million on Poncedeleon. A $1.75 million value for a $5,000 signing bonus: this is the mother lode, given the rules that govern the 2014 MLB draft.

When Poncedeleon finished, the combine winding down, Kantrovitz discussed his travel plans. He'd be getting on a plane that afternoon and going through this exact process at several other regional sites, then back to St. Louis for nonstop draft prep.

“What's the last time you saw your family, Dan?” Gonzalez inquired.

The question caught Kantrovitz off guard, and for a moment the baseball man thought of his wife, of his two girls back home. He shook it off—he couldn't afford to lose focus for a moment. Not right now.

“It's been tough,” Kantrovitz said. “But this is also the most fun time of the year. It's crunch time.”

June 5, St. Louis, Missouri

John Mozeliak sat at his desk, approximately four hours before the start of the 2014 MLB draft. An agent on the phone wanted to get Mozeliak to commit to paying $3 million to his client if he fell to twenty-seven.

“Yes, I'm saying that sounds good if it happens,” Mozeliak said. “That sounds real good to me.”

The agent brought up another player, and Mozeliak expressed some interest in him as well. Immediately, the agent steered the conversation to what it would cost for the pair as a package. The Cardinals had picks twenty-seven and thirty-four, but Mozeliak, who pounces on things cerebrally—sentences uttered as surely as opportunities—saw one here.

“We'd want some guidance from you about when we could expect each guy to go, so we know who we'd need to take first,” Mozeliak said.

You might think he was ironing out his final draft scenario. He wasn't. Not even close. This was one of fifty calls he estimated he'd already had today. He expected that number to rise precipitously over the coming hours.

Draft day means your strategy is dependent on twenty-nine other teams, hundreds of high school and college players, and a budget that is unforgiving if you believe one player might cost one amount, only to discover, after picking him, he costs significantly more.

On the shelf were Cardinals player contracts going back a decade,
Bill James Handbook
s, along with
The Fielding Bible
and
Baseball Prospectus, 2014
. So, too, was a bottle of champagne from that World Series on-field celebration back in 2011. Mozeliak had a few more calls to make, so we reconvened later that afternoon in Bill DeWitt's office, DeWitt and Mozeliak calm as their seventh draft as owner/general manager approached.

“I've been to the draft every year since I've been involved with the club,” DeWitt said, when I asked what his night would be like. “And it depends on the year, and as time has gone on, it's changed somewhat. It's more strategic. I get a rundown after they're all said and done with their scouting. I mean, along the way I'll hear about certain players. But there's nothing more to do at this point except wait and see.

“There have been times over the years when Mo is your primary point person on the agent to particulate in the top picks. Where there's a call to make on should we do this/should we do that, and we talk about that. More financially oriented.”

I said it seemed as if there were fewer decisions to make on the financial side, given the caps, and Mozeliak said there were “different decisions.”

“Before the pool system was in place, there was a system of slotting that if you wanted to go over a slot, you were required to check in with the [MLB Labor Relations Department],” DeWitt said. “And LRD would either talk to the commissioner or request that you talk to the commissioner. They couldn't tell you what to pay a player. But they would try to give you information about what the market was and their opinion of the player's value. So there was never a requirement to get permission, just a request that you get their opinion.”

Permission no, but as Mozeliak put it, “speed bumps. Cautionary advice.”

Realistically, though, the days ahead were going to be Dan Kantrovitz's show.

“But Bill and I, our roles have typically been more strategic, more financial, and more of a sounding board,” Mozeliak said. “A lot of times it's very fluid and a lot of things are happening. And so, we're not that close to the players. We really don't know A is better than B, or B is better than C. We just know that they're highly thought of by our group. But, yes, we can be much more rational in thinking about the dollars and cents and, if we do X, will it allow us to do something else down the road and help think through that. That's what we do.”

DeWitt echoed this: “Yeah, I mean, in the end the scouting director's the one who's managing the whole process all though the year, and when it comes time to draft, he's the one that we're looking to put the board together, make the decision on who the team should take. Unless there's something beyond just a pure player that [serves as] a reason to talk about it.”

Having a system that, as Mozeliak put it, both “allows us to know how to value a player now … and knowing what we want to pay for” gives him a chance to focus on process instead, the way he was while talking to that agent on the phone earlier in the day. I mentioned that he had looked at his computer and come away with a skeptical expression.

“Actually I was trying to reverse engineer because he mentioned another team,” Mozeliak said. “And he was telling me that they were willing to pay X for that player, and I was just trying to see if they could really afford it. And the answer is no. So, I don't think it was true.”

This is how the rest of Mozeliak's draft day would go.

“My day today has been I met with you twice,” Mozeliak said. “I met with Dan probably four times. I need to go back and talk to him shortly in his office. And I've talked to a lot of agents today and just trying to get an understanding of what may happen.”

Then again, without any picks until number twenty-seven, Mozeliak was limited in how prepared he could be. Given the recent run of success by the Cardinals, he had gotten used to a late first-round pick.

“I've resolved myself in this particular draft to not overconcern myself with what may happen,” Mozeliak said.

“Just let it unfold,” DeWitt said.

“We have four picks tonight, though, so there's a pretty good chance you and I are in that room all night,” Mozeliak said to DeWitt.

“I think in a way I would approach tonight, if I were in your shoes, one is, just understand it's very fluid,” Mozeliak said to me. “But it's a slow fluidity tonight. And so, like, your takeaway might be very little. Tomorrow, pace picks up and you can watch the board interaction change a little bit quicker. And then our system will benefit from that. And tonight, Bill sitting in there, me sitting in there. That's just the nature of the beast. Because we have a seven-and-a-half-million [dollar] pool and we'll spend four of it tonight.”

The largest conference room in the Busch Stadium offices had been prepared for the draft. Multiple televisions played, one with the MLB Network broadcast of the draft, another with the Cardinals game in Kansas City against the Royals. Red, white, and blue bunting had been placed on walls around the room wherever there weren't individual draft magnets, each representing a player who'd been scouted on the field, talked to off it, analyzed statistically, mechanically, and medically.

With all the scouts, front office members such as Gary LaRocque and Matt Slater, a table in the far corner for DeWitt, Mozeliak, Kantrovitz, Michael Girsch, and Chris Correa, forty people were in the draft room.

And there was no getting away from all the magnets, separated into these categories: 245 college pitchers, 185 college position players, 51 junior college pitchers, 22 junior college position players, 118 high school pitchers, 150 high school position players, those with signability issues, those with medical issues. Separate from these, within easy reach of Kantrovitz's seat, was a kind of “next up” grouping: RHP, LHP, C, SS, CF, 2B, 3B, and simply BAT.

I asked a pacing Joe Almaraz what was going through his mind, his year of nonstop travel and evaluation leading up to this.

“You can't think right now,” he said. “The game's about to start. Just want to put some runs on the board.”

Everyone's in jacket and ties—I feel underdressed in a polo. Mozeliak's wearing his bow tie, Kantrovitz has on a black suit, gray-checked tie. Even Charlie Gonzalez has a sports jacket and tie, though over jeans.

Before it's even started, Dan patrols the carpet back and forth directly in front of his board, wearing a path as the first magnetic strips, with full info on players, come off the board as they are picked. At pick seventeen, Kantrovitz and Mozeliak confer with Almaraz, and Mozeliak disappears from the room to make some calls about potential outcomes just ten picks away. Now Mozeliak is mirroring Kantrovitz's movements, in and out of the draft room. At pick twenty, Mozeliak counts the picks left, then leaves again, while Kantrovitz doesn't even sit down, tapping a rolled-up sheet of paper against his right hip as he walks.

By pick twenty-four, the strategy is set. Mozeliak sits down next to DeWitt. The Cardinals are about to draft someone they'll spend $1,843,000 on. But Mozeliak taps DeWitt on the shoulder, gestures at the television. The two men are transfixed instead by an Oscar Taveras at bat. A few days earlier, in his Cardinals debut, Taveras launched a long home run into the right-field seats at Busch Stadium. The crowd reacted disproportionately to a run that put the Cardinals ahead 1–0 in the fourth. Everybody there believed they were seeing the beginning of history, like watching Musial's first home run, or Pujols's. Taveras received a curtain call from the Busch crowd. I ask Gary LaRocque how he will place these about-to-be-drafted guys in the player-development ladder. He breaks it down simply: