The Cardinals Way (38 page)

They've done it without Luhnow and Mejdal since 2011. A cursory look at the team's top ten prospects as of January 2015 reveals that of the ten, only two—outfielder Charlie Tilson and pitcher Sam Tuivailala—had been acquired before Luhnow left for Houston. The other eight came during the Dan Kantrovitz era of drafting, five of them through that draft (Marco Gonzales, Stephen Piscotty, Rob Kaminsky, Jack Flaherty, Tim Cooney), two via amateur international signings (Alex Reyes, Magneuris Sierra) and one via trade (Randal Grichuk).

Accordingly, Correa assured me that if there was one thing he and his staff weren't worried about, it was the Houston Astros.

“Nothing is the same as it was three or four years ago when Jeff left or Sig left,” Correa said in January 2015. “I mean, it's all an updated and new—and we hope it's all better. I mean, I'm sure they're making improvements, too, to the point that they want to be, you know, better than all the other teams. But I really don't think it's all that productive for me to be worrying about what other teams are doing.”

So. About that. In June 2015, Michael S. Schmidt of
The New York Times
revealed that “Front-office personnel for the St. Louis Cardinals, one of the most successful teams in baseball over the past two decades, are under investigation by the F.B.I. and Justice Department prosecutors, accused of hacking into an internal network of the Houston Astros to steal closely guarded information about players.”
3

Correa had said this to me in January 2015: “I've had a lot of people ask me and frankly I was a little afraid you were going to ask me, 'cause I'm a little tired of this. How are we going to survive now that Sig and Jeff left for Houston? How are we going to survive now that Dan's left? We have a great group of people here. We have a great group of people here, and frankly I'm not even interested in recreating whatever success we've had from past years because I think we can do better.”

In July 2015, the Cardinals dismissed Correa after a team-imposed leave of absence. Further comments on it were neither forthcoming nor legally permissable: the investigation was ongoing. Suddenly, the intellectual throughline from that three-man group, Jeff, Sig, and Dan, had a significant rupture. And exactly how fully the Cardinals needed to rebuild it, or even start it anew, remained a great unknown to even the Cardinals themselves as this book went to press. Correa was to be the replacement for Kantrovitz, the hometown front office star who left for Oakland back in November 2014.

Here's how Dan's departure went down. The Los Angeles Dodgers, another customer for analytics, lured Andrew Friedman away from the Tampa Bay Rays.

Friedman needed a GM, and hired Farhan Zaidi, previously the assistant GM in Oakland.

That meant Billy Beane needed an assistant GM, something Mozeliak realized at the GM meetings out in Phoenix in November.

“And so I was walking back, late afternoon, with Billy and David [Forst] and I kind of joked, ‘Are you guys going to come after Dan now?'” Mozeliak recalled. “And Billy candidly said that, yeah, he's someone that he's thinking about, but hasn't made any decisions yet.”

But the fit was obvious. Kantrovitz had excelled as scouting director, but he'd also been Oakland's head of international. Mozeliak had him involved in other areas, too, making him a generalist as well as a specialist.

“The transition was so quick, but it was not without emotion,” Kantrovitz told me in January 2015. “St. Louis will always be my home and where I grew up. But the truth is Oakland feels more like my baseball home. I had just completed a three-year extension with Bill and Mo and was not planning to leave. But when Billy calls, it's tough to say no.”

The man at the other end of the table back in June at the regional scouting meetings moved on as well. Charlie Gonzalez, who'd never imagined a career in baseball, was hired by Jeff Luhnow as a special assistant. Suddenly, his trips weren't just around Florida—his dress shirt hanging in the back window of his car to keep it unwrinkled—but in planes flying all over Latin America.

Back in September 2014, Luhnow said, “There are people that really don't like Charlie Gonzalez.”

Oz Ocampo, Luhnow's director of international, responded, “I love Charlie!”

Luhnow nodded, indicating that he did as well, saying, “I think that he's an acquired taste. For sure. Because he can be a little overbearing. I'll put it this way: if he weren't able to produce the number of big leaguers that he's been able to produce, he would have been fired a long time ago. Because he's a high-maintenance guy. He is the definition of high maintenance.”

Two months later, Luhnow brought the definition of high maintenance to the Astros.

“He and I didn't really keep in touch very much after I left,” Luhnow told me in January 2015. “Would see him at a game here or there. But after we lost two of our senior scouts—Marc Russo to run Atlanta's international, and David Post went to become a special assistant in San Diego—we felt we needed some heft in our scouting department and wanted to maybe find someone who was ready to be a national cross-checker.

“I thought through all the scouts that I've known throughout my career. And Charlie clearly has the passion for it, the track record. So we requested permission. It was not an easy conversation because several Cardinals have come over, as you know. They were reluctant to lose him. But we were able to interview him and bring him over here, and he really is playing a pretty important role for us.”

Luhnow is right—there's certainly annoyance in some corners back in St. Louis about the number of Cardinals he's taken to Houston. Gonzalez is merely the latest. Ace Adams, too, joined the Astros, working under Brent Strom, another Cardinals coach turned Astros coach. Mike Elias, Houston's scouting director, Ocampo also worked for Luhnow in St. Louis.

“All the people who came over to Houston from St. Louis are people that I'd hired originally in St. Louis,” Luhnow pointed out in August 2015. “Mike Elias and Brent Strom and so on. And not all of them were so welcome the whole time they were in St. Louis, either. To a certain extent, I felt like—not that I was abandoning them by leaving, but a lot of the promises I'd made to them about what we'd be doing over there—now I was leaving them to fend for themselves.

“For example, in the case of Brent Strom, I really felt as if he should be a major league pitching coach. And I didn't feel like that was going to happen in St. Louis. And I had hired him originally, and he had gone through a lot of resistance, some of the things he teaches and how he teaches. I did feel somewhat responsible, and probably appreciated his value more than others do because I'm the one who originally hired him. And the same thing applies to Sig, and Mike Elias. The Cardinals could have made Mike Elias scouting director instead of Dan and I wouldn't have had a shot at him. But they didn't, and so I felt partially responsible for his career, appreciate his value, and I brought him over.”

But what Charlie Gonzalez in specific also represents, both in St. Louis and now in Houston, is the greatest possible rebuke to the idea that there isn't room for a significant human element within a data-driven organization.

The Cardinals have every scout in their draft room. But ultimately, the ideal is that the scouting reports are incorporated into STOUT, not overriding it. A scout pounding the table, to use the old baseball cliché for a scout advocating forcefully for his player, is nothing more than double-counting what the scout is saying. If Charlie Gonzalez or any other Cardinals scout submitted a report high on a player, that information was already part of the team's complete evaluation of a player, just like his statistical history, his mechanics, his medical history.

And saying that Charlie Gonzalez would pound the table for his players doesn't even begin to describe it. Charlie Gonzalez's existence is pounding the table for whatever he believes in. Plenty of people, even in St. Louis, where he'd seen success, didn't like it.

Perhaps the Luhnow-Gonzalez reunion makes sense: a pair of baseball men going about things differently from those who came before them, missing the typical baseball pedigree and path.

Baseball traditionalists might still object to the Astros, even with Gonzalez. But it became impossible to claim the Astros were somehow immune to human subjectivity. Luhnow faced this issue, actually, with his analytics team—making some draft picks that the scouts loved, but his emerging system didn't, to help keep the peace. Even Kantrovitz would do this from time to time—an accommodation for his scouts, who were spending an obscene amount of time on the road, traveling great distances to procure, ultimately, the tiny sliver of information that would give the Cardinals an edge when that draft started.

“You sometimes allow things into your decision making that when we're actually talking about the fundamental principles of the draft, you'd be steadfast on them,” Mozeliak said in January 2015. “This is how we make decisions. But we saw some leakage [of subjectivity] in how we were picking players the last couple of years. And I would imagine even with someone like Correa, who's probably a little more disciplined to the process, you're going to see a little there, too. And that's just human nature. There's that human element that I don't think any system could ignore unless you don't have them in the room.”

Then came Correa's firing. And suddenly, Mozeliak needed to rethink a fundamental challenge to how the Cardinals would move forward in a position that made most of the final calls as gatekeeper for the players entering the Cardinals' development system. The hiring of Correa, as Mozeliak acknowledged, was a huge bet on analytics over pure scouting, since Correa had no such experience. Would his replacement have a similar résumé? Could Mozeliak continue to empower the analytics department, when the greatest public embarrassment the Cardinals had faced, perhaps ever, originated out of that very department?

“No it has not but finding the right person may be difficult,” Mozeliak told me when asked if his willingness to empower the analytics team had changed following the scandal in August 2015. “Finding someone with a more balanced background may make the transition easier when trying to move forward.

For Mozeliak, it is time to build a coalition once again. FDR's broke apart, let's not forget. The South left the Democrats behind eventually. Civil Rights tore the party apart. By 1948, four major candidates for president included three who were once FDR Democrats: Harry Truman, Henry Wallace, and Strom Thurmond. Truman won, however. Mozeliak has excelled at this kind of team-building for his entire career. Now he needs to do it again, at a time few expected it. Mozeliak said he wouldn't consider changing that basic setup, with scouts and analysts together in the draft room on draft night—it helps with quick answers to signability questions, and more significantly, it is vital for morale, which was clear back in June when Almaraz pointed it out. Don't underestimate the loss of Chris Correa when evaluating how the Cardinals have operated over the past few seasons. So much of Correa's background, from analytics to psychology, have been key drivers in how the Cardinals operate. And now, with many of those who trained Correa and Correa himself gone, how the Cardinals move forward becomes more complicated than simply promoting the next person in line.

“It's our job to continue building our baseball operations department,” DeWitt told me in August 2015. “It has been diluted to a degree but you can be sure that it will be replenished and as robust as ever.”

Added Mozeliak: “Loss of quality employees is always a concern and like all companies we face challenges with retention. Creating a rewarding working environment [so] that individuals can grow within is our goal.”

So what happened? It's something the key figures in this drama that's played out over the past dozen years, leading to some of the greatest success of any baseball organization in baseball history, profess to still be in the dark about.

Luhnow remembers the shock he experienced as he gradually discovered that not only was someone with his former employer responsible for the hacking, but within the very group that he'd founded, like Frankenstein's Monster turning on its creator (though Frankenstein's Monster never had nearly this much success in the draft).

“It's a fair point,” Luhnow said in August 2015. “It's the last thing I expected. When I found out that someone had illegally accessed our information, I didn't know what I thought it was, but the last thing I expected was it would be a Major League Baseball team, especially one I had worked with. It was shocking and disappointing.”

And yet, it is important to distinguish this schism from the one Luhnow faced early in his Cardinals' tenure. The people who served as his biggest impediments upon his arrival simply wouldn't have thought to hack a database. Many of them wouldn't be caught dead in front of a computer. So something else, something beyond divergent worldviews, drove this hacking.

“I think there may be some resentment/jealousy/some other unhealthy stuff that led to this happening,” Luhnow said. “I don't think it had anything to do with a philosophical approach on how to make good decisions. I think they're all on the same page about that—get good information, and make decisions based off of that.”

Mozeliak said he was in spring training in Jupiter in February 2015 when he was informed of the investigation and all that came with it: “Needless to say, I was shocked and had many questions.”

For DeWitt, the moment had to be especially painful. It was his relationship with Luhnow that drove so much of what's resulted in the past dozen years for the St. Louis Cardinals. The two men hold each other in the highest esteem, even after all that's transpired.

“My first thought was total disbelief,” DeWitt recalled in August 2015. “I thought that the alleged activity, if true, goes against everything I believe in. I have always tried to surround myself with smart people who do things the right way. I had and still have a great relationship with Jeff. I know that he knows I would never allow this type of activity.”