The Cardinals Way (13 page)

One person who didn't need to be convinced to listen to new ideas: George Kissell, who'd been with the Cardinals since Branch Rickey, who'd hired Travis Hoke, the Jeff Luhnow of 1914.

“George Kissell, the first time I met him, was at the winter meetings, that same Drew winter meetings where he was being presented with a lifetime achievement award,” Luhnow said. “And as I sat at the table—met him, his wife was there—and I heard stories about him, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is, like, a Hall of Famer sitting right in front of me. This guy's amazing.' The next time I met him was at spring training that year. He didn't know who I was. I was kind of intimidated by him because of hearing all these great things about him. He came up to me and starting asking me questions and I thought, ‘This is the oddest thing in the world. This is the guy that knows everything and I don't know anything, and he's asking me questions.'

“He asked me about my background. He was asking what I saw today on the field. He wanted to know what I thought. And I started to ask him questions and he said, ‘I learn something new every day. It doesn't matter who it's from. It doesn't have to be someone that's gotten more experience who knows more. I learn something every day.' And I thought, ‘That's amazing that this guy is such an important part of this organization and that's the attitude that he has.'”

Let's not sugarcoat it—Cardinals tradition was, at times, used like a bat against Luhnow's ideas. But not by Kissell. And not by those who tapped into what has made the Cardinals most successful, when they've succeeded, for nearly a hundred years.

“I think from Rickey to Kissell to [DeWitt] Senior to Junior, there's some thread through those guys that really allows for innovation in a game that isn't necessarily known to innovate,” Luhnow said.

Precisely how necessary it was to have an owner urging longtime baseball men to listen couldn't be any clearer than in the hiring of Mike Witte. Witte and DeWitt had attended the same high school, and Witte was a classmate of Drew Baur's, an original investor when DeWitt purchased the team.

When Witte came to the Cardinals, his baseball résumé was as follows: (1) he'd collaborated with Tug McGraw, the relief pitcher for the Mets and the Phillies, on McGraw's
Scroogie
comic, and (2) he owned a lot of videocassettes of old pitchers. Now, of course, he's a consultant to a number of major league teams. But it took the Cardinals to give his ideas a chance.

“It started with Mike Witte, a cartoon illustrator from Princeton,” Kantrovitz remembered. “I remember when I picked him up from the airport for his first meeting with our staff down in Jupiter, and he literally packed close to a thousand VHS tapes of old-time pitchers that he had studied. He was kind of like a brilliant mad scientist.

“Bill turned us on to him. What started out as a favor [by meeting with him] became the genesis for our focus on classic mechanics.”

While Witte put together some of the intellectual underpinnings for what would ultimately lead to wholesale changes in how the Cardinals trained their pitchers, Mejdal was hard at work determining how to configure the team's process for evaluating players in the draft. Now armed with data on both college and high school pitchers, Mejdal had approximately two months to put those together from his first day on the job in April 2005 to the June 2005 draft.

“I was the only one doing this and so there was going to be models for everything, but I reported to Jeff because Jeff was responsible for the draft and he was the biggest customer of this [work]. It wasn't the others. So with the drafts, whatever, eight or ten weeks away after my first day, that's were my energies went.

“I was the one creating the models. But Jeff was aware of the steps throughout. And so was Dan. But at that time I was the analyst doing the modeling, the database work.”

That doesn't mean Mejdal was certain his methods would work. After all, even the best processes don't always yield expected results. In a room full of skeptics, after the debacle of 2004, Mejdal and the rest of the group worried about what that might mean for the analytics team.

“I remember it well,” Mejdal said of his apprehension that spring. “Like—the analysis we had done, that I had done, in those two months were showing that you can increase the output of the draft in a very significant way. I think I'm as insecure as anybody when it comes to standing up in a room filled with expertise with a contradictory position when you have not analyzed every imaginable interaction and their attributes. And, frankly, in those two months, we had good reason to believe that we could have wonderful results. But there was still a giant insecurity because there simply hadn't been enough time to throw rocks from every angle at the model.”

Ultimately, 2005 saw the Cardinals incorporate analytics into their decision making—but it was a far cry from where the team ultimately arrived, which was making analytics the primary decision driver, with scouting a key component of those overall values on each amateur player. Still, the forward progress is clear, with the 2005 Cardinals draft yielding eight major league players, twice as many as the 2004 draft, and guys such as Colby Rasmus in the first round and Jaime García in the twenty-second round enjoying sustained major league success.

“The difference between '04 and '05 was twofold,” Mozeliak said. “One is, obviously we had more confidence in our analytical strategy for the draft. But we also ramped up that department with personnel and went to a more traditional structure.”

The draft could have been even better, though. The Cardinals could have taken Jed Lowrie.

“The model loved Jed Lowrie,” Mejdal recalled, “who was this undersized—he was playing second base—undersized second baseman at Stanford who was not—he was well liked by the scouts but not nearly as much as with the model. And I had made my arguments that Jed Lowrie was a better pick with our thirtieth pick than Tyler Greene. And I remember having this sort of sick feeling, like, what if we actually take him because of my work and he fails? So this would be a wonderful anecdote for people that talk to and point to how we [in analytics] have little to add. Because, I was insecure with an undersized player from such an elite school and just [lacked] the confidence that he was as good a bet as the more athletic Tyler Greene.”

Greene reached the major leagues, but collected only 746 plate appearances over five seasons while accumulating a career WAR of -0.6 through 2014. Lowrie, meanwhile, reached the major leagues in 2008 and has been a solid starter at shortstop throughout his career, with only injuries holding him back. With 8.4 career WAR already through 2014, Lowrie signed a three-year, $22 million contract with the Astros prior to the 2015 season.

So though it may seem as if the Cardinals remade themselves quickly—to go from no analytics team in the fall of 2003 to essentially a full analytics operation in every level of team operations in less than a decade is remarkably quick for any company, let alone one in the tradition-bound game of baseball, let alone in a hypertraditional structure within baseball such as the St. Louis Cardinals—to Mejdal it still felt slow.

“Jeff was very smart and he brought this in very gradually,” Mejdal said. “To me it was frustratingly gradually, but perhaps looking back on it, it was the optimal way of implementing this change. So, no, we didn't pick Jed Lowrie, and, no, we didn't do much in '05 with the model.”

Encapsulating the challenge of Luhnow's job is that what Mejdal saw as a slow, subtle difference felt jarring in the more traditional corners of the Cardinals' front office.

“Sig was in the room. Sig was vocal and I was trying to adjust as much as I felt comfortable adjusting given the audience,” Luhnow said. “And what happens is you end up with players in this order. And then this scout will vehemently argue that this guy needs to move up, and this guy's scout believes he's probably too high because he's more of a performance guy than a scout guy so he's not going to argue. So then you've got to sit there and the room is kind of expecting you to move that guy up and you have to determine what [to do]—pick your battles, right? And a lot of it comes out of how you massage the conversation in the room and how much time you give each player and all of that. One thing you don't want to do—and this happened the year before—was have the scouts leave the room. And then when they come back in, the order's changed and they didn't have anything to do with it. That did not go over well.

“You have to make everybody feel like their input is valued, but you have to avoid double counting and that's what happens. Because that player's already up there because the scout loves him. So if you allow that scout and his voice to push him up even higher, you're damaging your total output. No question about it.”

Put simply, scouts arguing passionately for their own guys wasn't just a different way of drafting from what Luhnow was recommending, and now implementing. It was an impediment to it, once that scouting enthusiasm had already been incorporated into a player's overall grade.

The resulting turmoil meant that John Mozeliak had two jobs. He was the assistant general manager, with a hand in virtually every area of Cardinals operations, very much the Walt Jocketty–trained executive. But Mozeliak was simultaneously among the most receptive members of the front office to the ideas of Luhnow, Mejdal, and Kantrovitz.

“It ate up a lot of time just because we were a fractured company,” Mozeliak said. “But I still had my day-to-day job, which was as assistant GM, which was paying attention to waivers. Obviously contract negotiations. Obviously all employee contracts went through my office at that time. Consulted with all the department heads on their annual planning and all that. So that part of the job was very consistent. Very normal.”

Meanwhile, the Cardinals moved to implement some of the ideas Mike Witte first brought to their attention. And while Kantrovitz and Luhnow “baseball-ized” the draft ideas that Mejdal came up with, as Kantrovitz put it, they had someone with a long history in the major leagues to do the same on the pitching-mechanics side, someone recommended by Witte. Fortunately for the Cardinals, he was ready to ditch the things he'd been teaching for decades, realizing that he'd been doing more harm than good. Brent Strom, you see, had a pitching-mechanics epiphany of his own.

I did nothing to offend anybody. It was just the message. They didn't like the message because what happened—being a traditional game, they didn't like the fact that there may be a different thought process about how to go about things.

—B
RENT
S
TROM

The first man to have Tommy John surgery, as you probably know, was Tommy John.

The second was Brent Strom. He calls himself “the Buzz Aldrin of Tommy John surgery.”

“I came to spring training in ['78 with the Padres], my arm was bothering me,” Strom told Evan Drellich of the
Houston Chronicle
in March 2014. “I tried to medicate it with the hot stuff that you put on your arm and cortisone shots. Actually, I was in Yuma, Arizona. I left about nine o'clock one night and met a doctor at midnight in San Diego to get a cortisone shot without the club knowing, came back, tried to [pitch]. I was hanging on by my fingernails and was released at the end of spring training.

“Trying to see what I can do to make this club, I get released the last day of spring training, I contact—somehow I get in touch with Dr. [Robert] Kerlan, who is alive at the time.… Jobe worked under Kerlan. So then I go out to LA and they look at it, they do the testing, they decide to try the Tommy John surgery again … it was within weeks they wanted to do the surgery. I was a free agent.

“They were looking for another candidate [for the surgery], I think. Obviously, I was at wit's end, desperation time, they performed the surgery. I remembered they tried to take [the tendon] out my left wrist, I still have the scar right here [but they needed to look elsewhere for a tendon]—so they took it out of my left leg. I came back and pitched at the Triple-A level and won [ten] games that next year with Houston.…

“It's probably a good thing it's called Tommy John surgery and not Brent Strom surgery. Tommy John wins 288 and I win 22. So it depends on which surgery you get, I guess.

“It's one of the reasons I'm so adamant about the mechanics, we have a better understanding now of why this happens. So we try and do things to help eliminate that. Now medical [advancements] allow Tommy John surgeries—I hate to use the word
routine
—but it's a lot easier to work on an elbow with this than it is a shoulder. Shoulders are more difficult.”

So for Strom, keeping pitchers healthy was personal. He remembered when his career ended. He remembered why, what it felt like. And he'd spent a career trying to keep guys from the same fate. He'd joined the Los Angeles Dodgers as Triple-A pitching coach the year after his playing career ended in 1982. And he'd spent most of the subsequent two decades as a pitching instructor at both the minor and major league levels—in Houston, he was the pitching coach for Terry Collins in 1996, and with Tony Muser's Royals in 2000–2001. And he was working as a minor league pitching instructor with the Montreal Expos in 2004, about to give a speech at a pitching clinic in Seattle.

A man named Paul Nyman spoke just ahead of him, and Strom realized he'd been going about his profession all wrong for twenty years.

“Probably the biggest influence that I've had is a gentleman named Paul Nyman, who's out of Connecticut,” Strom told me in a September 2014 interview, sitting in the visiting dugout at Citi Field. “And this is an engineer who, when I was doing a clinic one time and I had my eureka moment and he spoke ahead of me. I mean, it was like an eye-opener. To understand that momentum is important. That how the body moves through space and how you can re-create tension and a little tension at the right time. These kind of things. Because before that, I was a dude that would lift the leg, lean balance. Do all this stuff. I was one of the culprits. And I never intentionally hurt anybody, but I know I did.”