The Cardinals Way (14 page)

Added Strom in a January 2014 e-mail, “With my philosophy in mind I then sat back and listened to this engineer show me a whole new way to look at how we throw, how the body moves and so much more. In essence it created a thirst for additional information.… The rest is history as they say. One thing for sure … as I write this, I am still finding out new [things]. I have always realized … ‘I don't know what I don't know.'”

The resulting shift in philosophy created several problems for Strom. One was that he suddenly found himself teaching differently from the way that had gotten him hired by the Expos and other teams in the first place. It was also different from what his fellow coaches were teaching.

Ultimately, it cost him his job. The Nationals (after the Expos moved to Washington) let Strom go on the last day of spring training, 2006. He thought he would catch on elsewhere, but it didn't happen. He spent the summer at home with his wife, Carrie, in Tucson, Arizona.

“When I'm home, for the last seventeen years, I take care of my [family],” Strom said. “I have my ninety-seven-year-old mother-in-law living with us, I have a seventy-two-year-old sister-in-law that lives with us. I have three bulldogs. That's my family. So I'm taking care of a lot of people in that regard.”

Eventually, Strom decided to take his new ideas directly to teams. The Cardinals needed someone who was thinking along the lines of Witte to implement the ideas Strom had come to through Nyman's work. So when Strom gave his presentation to Luhnow, Mejdal, and Kantrovitz, he'd found precisely the organization where his new way of looking at things was an asset for hiring him, rather than a liability. When I asked him whether he'd have been hired by the Cardinals if not for the Nyman epiphany, he said, “No, I don't think so.

“And so eventually they hired me that year. They brought me down to the instructional league. Just kind of talked to a few people. And I had dinner with Bill and Jeff and showed them what I thought I could do, in terms of injury prevention and increasing velocity and developing pitchers. And they apparently liked what I had to offer, and then they offered me a job as a mechanics coach on the pitching side.”

This represented a further incursion of the Luhnow changes into what had been a tradition-bound Cardinals operation. Exactly how poorly that was received finally revealed itself to Strom in the person of Mark DeJohn, who you might remember as George Kissell's self-described adopted son.

“Well, I remember coming in as an outsider,” Strom recalled. “And I remember Mark DeJohn, who I became very close with—I remember one day in St. Lucie where the Mets were training. We were in instructional league. It was spring training or something and I'm working with the guy, and Mark is kind of watching me from the side. He called me over the side. He makes this comment. He says, ‘You know what? You're a pretty good guy!' He says, ‘You're not the asshole that everybody tells me you are.' And so I looked at him and I said, ‘I really don't know how to take that.' And he said, ‘Yeah. You're a hell of a guy, man. You're fun. You're funny. You like the same music I do. Why doesn't everybody think this about [you]?' I didn't know what they thought of me. But obviously I was not thought of very highly.

“But I think what happened is, the message was different than what people had heard before. And maybe they didn't like the message. Maybe they didn't like the fact that they may have to rethink what they taught. Which I had to do, too. [Coaches like] Tom House. There was an array of people that as you pick and choose from the fruit that you want to use and create your own idea of what the delivery should be like, the training should be like. That kind of thing. [Coaches like] Eric Cressey. And I'm still doing that today. I mean, I'm changing now. I'll be different tomorrow than I am today, as new information comes forward.”

For Strom, working under Dyar Miller and alongside Tim Leveque, the principles are easily explained. In essence, a career of educating young pitchers allowed Strom to maximize the delivery of what became a new set of guidelines.

“I did nothing to offend anybody,” Strom said. “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. Creating an athletic pitcher. Stop doing long-distance running and do sprints instead because of the energy system in pitching, which is one and a half seconds to throw the ball, you wait twelve seconds, you do it again. You do it fifteen times. You do it nine times a game. Total outburst: six minutes, five seconds. Well then, why go out and run an hour when it's not in the same energy system? You're better off doing explosive-type stuff. Okay?

“Things like that. Long toss to develop arm health. Elevated fastballs, which we're doing now. Strength-training-for-the-arm-type stuff that's a little bit different. Learning how to decelerate correctly. Things like that. And are we on top of things? We still have a ways to go. But the beauty of working with Jeff and working with the group that I have now that I'm fortunate to work with is that they'll listen.

“And the one thing about Jeff, don't be subjective. Be objective. Show them, show me the numbers. Show me the money, so to speak. And with that he'll look at, review it, and give you a chance if he believes in it. So I'm fully appreciative of that, instead of those people blowing you off.

“Because had it not been for Jeff, I think I'd have been gone after the first year. You know, there were people kind of looking at me sideways. What's this guy doing? I had long-toss going. I had the velocity enhancement. I had people being more athletic in their deliveries. And as I told everybody, I like the sinkers as much as anybody, but a pretty good pitcher one day told me—my favorite pitcher, Sandy Koufax—he told me, “The people that throw sinkers are those that cannot throw fastballs.”

Meanwhile, as the Cardinals altered their pitching instruction and program, they took another step toward integrating analytics into their drafting—“a big step,” according to Mejdal. “I think that as time went on, it was more systematic, but even to this day, there is, in general, two methodologies, and while we combine them into a single number, you can still see the remnants of each methodology. Right up to performance base, that takes some of the scouting attributes, and the other methodology, [which] is completely scouting. And so, the Jed Lowries of the world, for instance, score much higher on the first method than the second. And although we had an overall way of combining them, there was still an anchoring to the conventional method. And it was a gradual de-anchoring to the current method and re-anchoring to the method that combined all the information that took place over the years.”

Eleven players from Luhnow's 2006 draft reached the major leagues through the 2014 season, with Tommy Pham the latest one for the Cardinals. But the clearest indication of the huge results the marriage of analytics and scouting could produce might have been the selection of Allen Craig in the eighth round.

“So, thinking back to being a fly on the wall in the draft room when we drafted Allen Craig and that process, I think it was when we were just maybe getting started with analytics integrating into amateur scouting,” Kantrovitz said back in our first interview in August 2013. “I remember Sig, who at the time had done some really good work on the analytics side, had identified Allen as one of those guys that, as relative to his peers, had done really well. And then I remember our area scout at the time—once Sig mentioned him, I think our area scout was, like, ‘Yeah. You're right. That's the guy—he can turn around a fastball as well as anybody and hit 'em over the parking garage.'

“And so it was an interesting situation where you saw the marriage of what the stats were saying with what the scouts were saying, too. And then there's a lot of players that fit that profile.… So that's like a perfect storm, you know? It's like everything worked and more. And we also probably got a little lucky.”

Though Craig struggled in 2014, getting traded to the Boston Red Sox, he's already been a clear win from that draft, with more than 8 career WAR through 2014, and a career OPS+ of 115. It didn't happen because of just analytics, or just scouting, but both, engineered in a process of Luhnow's creation.

One of the myths perpetrated through a misreading of
Moneyball
was that scouts are somehow unneeded in a system where analytics are used. The idea is a riff on the old idea that technology can come in and replace people, like that Woody Allen joke: “I called my parents: My father was fired. He was technologically unemployed. My father had worked for the same firm for twelve years. They fired him. They replaced him with a tiny gadget, this big, that does everything my father does, only it does it much better. The depressing thing is, my mother ran out and bought one.”
3

In fact, as DeWitt pointed out to me when we spoke in September 2014, Mejdal ran the historical numbers on scouting recommendations, and on an
analytics-only
approach, to see which produced better numbers. The scouts won.

Naturally, Luhnow had no intention of relying on just stats, any more than he'd have relied on scouts alone, absent any measurement of their annual performance.

A pair of changes helped to create friction in the short term, but ultimately married scouting to the Cardinals' new strategy in a comprehensive way.

The comprehensive scouting reviews, administered every fall, compared the value assigned to scouting recommendations to the players' actual performance. So things such as being the guy who recommended a particular player, the type of evaluation a scout could lean on in the past, gave way to every value judgment's mattering. Thanks to a Sig Mejdal innovation, a “shadow draft” he began in St. Louis in 2009 and continued in Houston, even players scouts loved but the Cardinals didn't draft could be used to evaluate that scout.

“It is a small attempt at illustrating to the scouts when they are consistently too optimistic or not,” Mejdal told me in a January 2015 e-mail. “The scouts actually come away from each draft with a collection of players that they would have drafted if they were the scouting director. The player was at the top of their pref list, he was available, and the scout wanted to take him. At that point, the scout has done all that he can. That he doesn't get him is just happenstance. So, those players are now assigned to the scout and they will be followed and compared to the expectancy of return for that draft pick. The scout doesn't have to say ‘I told you so,' and in time he might see that the guys that he has for each round really don't produce as much as the expectancy for that round.”

The system essentially rewards introverted scouts. But the real purpose is making sure scouting done by introverts, which is every bit as valuable as the scouting done by those who pound the table, gets incorporated into overall evaluations just as much.

For Luhnow, the deep review of scout performance dovetailed with what he'd done at every company he'd ever run.

“Human resources is a big part of my background,” Luhnow said. “I did a lot of consulting on human resource management with companies. I had started two companies from scratch. It's a big passion of mine so we did everything. Everything. All best practices when it comes to HR. We did evaluations. Did goal setting. Looking at actual output. Understanding that there's a variability in the output. And so I gathered a lot of information, and each scout had a review that was pretty thick. And from that we decided which scouts to let go, which ones to promote.

“That was institutionalized and there were reviews—a lot of these scouts had never really received a review in their entire career, and all of a sudden they were getting a pretty intense review on what they were doing and what the numbers were to back it up and all of that.”

The wisdom in this is pretty obvious. We wouldn't determine the effectiveness of a hitter or pitcher based on one epic game. Mark Whiten hit four homers in a game. Bud Smith pitched a no-hitter. Albert Pujols never hit four home runs in a game, and Pedro Martínez never pitched a no-hitter.

The long-term health of a team's farm system isn't necessarily determined by the once-in-a-generation player whom everyone else missed, though that obviously helps. Instead, it's building depth, winning at the margins, and adding more talent every single year. That happens by employing scouts who are slightly better at a difficult game—the ones who can identify a sixth-round talent who can be had in the eighth round, a senior sign who can add value without costing the team a significant signing bonus.

But to really understand how and why scouts were so important in the Luhnow rebuild of the team's draft process, one change stands out: they were asked to dramatically expand their lists.

“Jeff wanted a really big list,” Turco, then a Florida-area scout, recalled. “I used to have fifty or so.” And previous scouting directors, Turco said, wanted that list even smaller.

“I don't care about everybody,” Turco recalled one saying. “I want to know who you like. I don't care about the other guys. Just make sure you have a good feel, and you're right about the guys that you do like. So I was gonna drop my list down from fifty, fifty-five to the forties, maybe thirties. Because, if you're telling me, just give me the guys that you really like—I mean, I don't like 'em all!

“Then Jeff comes along, and my list grew from the fifties to over a hundred. Because he wanted all those names.”

For Turco, that was confusing. “I told him, when you have all those names, how do you decipher? How do you really know?” Turco's skepticism was understandable. If the Cardinals were continuing to simply weigh the relative arguments of scouts, an overabundance of potential players for the draft would only inhibit the process.