The Cardinals Way (35 page)

For Tuivailala, it was nothing less than reaching the goal he'd set for himself—to earn that promotion.

“In June and July, I definitely think it was in the back of my head, where you want to end this year,” Tuivailala said in a July phone interview just after it happened. “I definitely wanted to be in Double-A. But in June and July, I tried not to think about the future. I kind of just take one day at time, like I told you. I wanted to make sure that when I did get the call, I was ready and I have all pitches and command where I wanted it to be.”

Finally, on a rain-swept Florida night, Tuivailala's future merged with his present.

“One of our games got canceled and it was raining hard. And then I finally got called into the office and we had Gary LaRocque there and all of our coaching staff and my manager, Dann Bilardello. He told me that there's good news and that I was getting called up to Double-A. It was kind of a weird feeling. I had the goose bumps at the same time. I was superpumped. And they all told me they believed in me and they told me it's the same game. Just go out there and compete. So I just shook all their hands and I was ready to go.”

Then Tuivailala got to make the call home.

“I think once [my mom] answered, she was at the store with my sister. And then I just said, ‘Guess what?' And she said, ‘What?' And I said, ‘I'm getting the call up to Double-A. I'm leaving tomorrow morning.' And then I could just—I could hear my sister in the background. I think she heard it through the phone and she's just screaming and they're all so excited for me. So then after I hung up the phone with them, I instantly got a call from my dad maybe a minute later. And he's all excited. So it was definitely a good day.”

The transition was also eased, said Tuivailala, by the continuity in the system. He'd known Shildt, his Double-A manager, for years.

“I definitely think it's an easier way,” Tuivailala said. “Spring training, they definitely mixed it up a lot. And that's what makes it a little bit easier for the transition. They tend to have a Triple-A coach, he'll help out lower guys, and the Double-A will swap every now and then. I definitely think that was a lot easier so that we got to know a lot of the staff members even through we're not at their level yet. I think that was a pretty good idea of theirs.”

I listened to Tuivailala's first game with Springfield on an Internet broadcast, coming back from an assignment in Fenway Park. The announcer struggled with Tuivailala's name. Then he marveled at the radar-gun readings. He'd once sat 95. Now he was frequently hitting 100, 101, 102, and sitting 99.

“After playing in front of attendance of maybe one hundred to two hundred, to, man, like three thousand to five thousand in the house,” Tuivailala recalled of his Double-A debut, “it was definitely different. But I was definitely juiced and pumped. When I got out there, I tried to breathe and just think of one pitch at a time. It's the same game I've been pitching in. And then when I got my first strikeout, I think that's what really got me going, and I felt confident up there.”

Tuivailala faced six Double-A batters in his debut. None of them reached base. Half of them struck out.

“I know that I'm throwing hard and everything. I made those typical pitches where I definitely feel like I threw a little bit harder. But after the game, I know a lot of the people—they tweeted me about the 102, and I'm not sure if the gun was a little bit juiced, but it was definitely good to get the attention of everyone after that.”

Tuivailala mentioned tilt again and pointed out that his teammate Nick Petree had also helped him to incorporate it into his delivery. Petree, who tops out in the eighties, couldn't be more different from Tuivailala as a pitcher. But that constant communication, in this case, allowed Tuivailala to discover what worked for him.

For Baker, another voice in Tuivailala's development, the joy was tempered, naturally, by frustration, the kind of natural tug between collaboration and competition that is the Cardinals' minor league system.

“I'm really happy for him,” Baker told me in September. “I was talking to Jenna about this last night, and I was, like, ‘I'm so happy for him.' He's borderline uncomfortable with how good he is. He's so humble. So that's awesome. But I think it's both. I think it's inspiring and demoralizing.”

The promotion still felt surreal for Tuivailala.

“At this level it's kind of crazy how fast this happened. Just going from spring training, back then I was just thinking, ‘Man, I don't want to go back to Peoria.' And then the next thing you know, I'm looking at myself now that I'm in Double-A. It's crazy how things happen.

“I told my parents and all my friends and everyone. They're all juicing me, telling me, okay, I'm going to be in the big leagues this year and I'll be there by around this month, you know? I just tell them I want to end strong and just keep playing hard and then I'll just—I'll see how things end up. But I definitely just want to end strong.”

It's fair to say he ended strong, and things got even crazier. His parents and friends were right. Tuivailala pitched through July and August for Springfield, notching a 2.57 ERA, a strikeout rate of 12.9 per 9 innings, and keeping his walks to just 3.9 per 9 innings. That got him a quick bump to Triple-A Memphis, where he struck out three of four Triple-A batters he faced, and then it was on to St. Louis.

“Sam hit all the benchmarks we set out for him,” LaRocque said of Tuivailala in a September 2014 interview. “Our conversation a year ago focused on what he could be if he accomplished certain things. So this was within the realm of what we had for him in terms of goals.”

In the realm, maybe. But was this the best-case scenario? “Absolutely.”

By January 2015, Tuivailala, who'd been trying to locate his command and an off-speed pitch less than a year earlier, found himself among the Cardinals big leaguers in the team's winter caravan, preparing to come to big league camp and win himself a bull-pen job. He'd pitch intermittently in St. Louis in 2015, while spending the bulk of his time with Triple-A Memphis. And he'd catapulted all the way onto the team's Top 10 prospects, according to
Baseball America
. Derrick Goold, in his write-up of Tuivailala, talked up his curveball:

“With the frame of a power forward, Tuivailala is the Cardinals' latest converted power pitcher after Jason Motte and Trevor Rosenthal. Fine command is all he lacks with the heat. In the Arizona Fall League, Tuivailala's curve advanced. He throws [it] hard and with a sharp drop.”
5

As for Rowan Wick, he doubled and tripled on July 21 in support of Daniel Poncedeleon in a game in Troy, New York, against the Tri-City ValleyCats, the New York–Penn League entry from Jeff Luhnow and Sig Mejdal's Astros. Wick's demeanor couldn't have changed more since that May day in Jupiter when he had to explain his decision to even keep playing the field, instead of leveraging that arm and giving pitching a try.

“I'd like to say we saw something different, but we didn't,” Marmol told me in the dugout before that July 21 game in Troy. “I know when we were getting on the plane, leaving Jupiter [back in June], he came over, put his arm around me, and said, ‘Don't worry, I'll hit at night.' Because he had a really tough extended.… The biggest thing we've seen with him is, he's gotten a taste of success, and it's brought him more confidence. There's a presence to him.”

Wick talked about his goal of making the NY-P All-Star team, and I laughed, telling him I thought he was pretty safe, seeing as how he'd put up a 1.290 OPS, and nobody else in the circuit had cracked 1.000.

But Wick was right, and I was wrong. There'd be no New York–Penn League All-Star Game. The next day, he was off to Peoria, and full-season A-ball.

“You know, when we work with these players every single day, we constantly in our minds hope for their ceilings and hope that they reach their ceilings,” LaRocque said of Wick. “And as players come through the system and do that, we're thankful that they're getting it, and he's clearly put himself in a position to be watched.

“But back in May three of our staff members came to me and said that Rowan had talked to them about stepping on the mound, meaning a bull-pen type of thing. And when it got to me, I said, ‘Turco, please sit with Rowan and find out what he's really thinking.' You know, the best way to communicate is, let's be transparent. Let's talk to the player.

“And it's just the way we do business. And Steve sat with him and said, ‘Hey, listen. Is this something you're really thinking about?' He said, ‘Oh, no. I said I want to hit.' And from that moment forward, there was never any other discussions from Rowan or anybody about him potentially even looking ahead into being on the mound. I mean, we're talking about eighteen- to twenty-three-year-old young men. And we're trying to help them through the grind of this. And he, Rowan, put the focus on ‘I'm going to hit.' And the rest, in the last two months since that time in late May, it's been pretty well documented.”

Wick struggled when he reached Peoria. His K-rate spiked, to nearly 40 percent of his plate appearances. His power remained, but the .220/.299/.433 line meant he'd probably need to go back and master Peoria before moving ahead. Wick headed to Instructional League this fall down in Jupiter, where George Kissell once ruled and where Steve Turco now presides.

The Cardinals didn't get a breakout from Rowan Wick in State College, whatever happens next, because they were certain he could hit. This wasn't scouting. This was listening. And so, too, was the two-way conversation that followed, when Rowan Wick decided to transition to the mound. Turco had him with the Gulf Coast League Cardinals by August 2015, Wick starting that process of climbing the ladder once again, in a new way.

Poncedeleon, too, got stronger as the year went along. In his first six starts, his ERA was 3.63, with a 20/9 K/BB rate in 17⅓ innings.

He revealed himself to be confident, but coachable.

“It's been fun,” Poncedeleon told me before his July 21 start. “I'd say you get to see a lot of new places. I've been listening, picking the minds of the coaches, and they tell you things that I'm still kind of learning today, after twenty years of baseball. I've been around for a while. These guys always have something new to tell you. How to approach and stuff. So that's good.”

In his last six starts, his ERA was 1.67, with a 32/5 K/BB rate in 27 innings. Then he threw six shutout innings on September 9. State College captured the league title. By August 2015, Poncedeleon had conquered Peoria, and posted a 1.17 ERA over his first six appearances with high-A Palm Beach.

Nick Thompson homered in that game. He'd struggled early on, and when I saw him on July 21, his season line was .236/.308/.358. He wasn't interested in waiting to seek out the coaches—the would-be premed student instead found Smoky Ortiz and got to work on remaking his swing.

“Smoky and I have been working a little bit in the cage,” Thompson said that night, as we stood in front of the visitors' clubhouse in Troy. “I'm just trying to get a little more balance, a little more flex in my hips, and trying to get just a little lower so I can reach that lower pitch, the lower outside pitch, a little better than I had been in the past. So it's been working pretty well so far. But he said I was standing up a little too much, that he wants me to flex my hips a little more. So we'll see how that goes today.”

Between Ortiz, and a reading regimen that featured C. S. Lewis and J. D. Salinger throughout August, something clicked.

“I think that was definitely the start of everything,” Thompson told me in September, a week after he, Poncedeleon, and Marmol celebrated that New York–Penn League title. “And I think if I looked at my splits, I think in the month of June I hit like .170, and then the months of July and August I hit over .300. And that was about the time that we kind of changed it up a little bit. It was at the end of June. And so I think after that, having a little success at the plate, and I think that made everything else a lot easier. Just the adjustment, and I feel like my body was more used to playing six to seven games a week. And I had acclimated to the applicable competition. I feel like, yeah, that was definitely the start of things. I think the success brought on by that was definitely a big help and a big motivator.

“In August, Ollie talked to us all and he said, ‘Hey, nobody's coming up. Nobody's going down. This is what we got and this is what we're going to win with.' And then we did. We put it together.”

From the moment Thompson and I talked in late July through the end of the season, his line was .339/.469/.470. He was a big reason why the Spikes won. And Thompson believes that winning, even at that level, matters.

“I think that it's definitely significant. That's kind of something that they preach. The championship team. The championship club. And I know [DeJohn], he always talked about ‘We're not breeding you guys to just become major league players. We're breeding you guys to be major league players on a championship-level team. And we expect our players to play through September and our major league players to play in October. So that's what we breed you guys for and that's what I want to see out of you guys.' But it's definitely an awesome experience winning the championship my first year out. It's just a wonderful experience.”

Down in the Appalachian League, Chris Rivera got off to a roaring start. His OPS in Johnson City in July was a blistering .860. But it dropped to .574 in July and .535 in August. He's still young—he didn't turn twenty until March 2015. And so the Cardinals moved him to catcher, where the cerebral Rivera not only excelled, throwing out 42 percent of would-be basestealers through August 2015, but posted an OPS of .778. Maybe he's the next Kissell and Turco, but maybe he's the next Yadier Molina, too.