The Cardinals Way Page 11

  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.

  That wasn’t the process Sig Mejdal was building, though. Here’s how you know.

  “You know, my background is in research,” Mejdal said. “I’m a scientist, and so wherever the data comes from, if it has predictive ability, I’m attracted to it, and the reports that the scouts generate provide a tremendous amount of predictive ability. And so we traded processes such that we squeezed every ounce of predictive ability out of the scouts’ expertise. And in my opinion, in the first draft, 2005, that was my first experience at the draft, much of the scouts’ passion came from their confidence to speak during the draft. And so [there are] different personalities and different desires of the scouts. A different personality is a person who may be more quiet. Different desire is a person who really wants more players. [This] was playing a role in the draft. And neither of those things were related to the player’s underlying skills.”

  This was a concern echoed by Turco, by the way. But Mejdal’s solution was radically different:

  “And so we created processes that would combine all the scouts’
orders into a single overall list. And that was the goal of squeezing every last ounce of predictive abilities from the scouting reports, and not simply relying on the scout who happened to sit closer to the scouting director on draft day. We didn’t want to ignore the scout who’s perhaps a little less confident to speak up to contradict the area scout or the cross-checker.”

  But making sure the scouting recommendations aren’t skewed was only a part of the reason for such a long list. Ultimately, the rankings used by the Cardinals were a combination of what the scouts who saw a player thought, and what the analytics said a player could be based on regression analysis of that player’s high school, college, and/or summer league stats.

  Many times, the statistics would highlight a relatively obscure player—or maybe a player whom a scout in a given area didn’t ultimately like. But without a scouting report, the Cardinals would have half the needed data to plug into their system to determine the value of a player. They could always go back and get the stats for someone off the radar that one of their scouts liked. The reverse wasn’t the case, unless the lists were dramatically expanded.

  The personnel in scouting changed, too. Luhnow didn’t just use his evaluative tools to understand who was best; he didn’t hesitate to move people and find additional scouts who he thought could do better. Luhnow scouts did look somewhat different from the guys who’d been in the department before he arrived.

  “As we started to bring in new people, the profiles felt different than the guys who had been there, and I knew that in order to be successful I was going to need to not only retain but motivate and get a lot out of some of the veteran guys. Roger Smith. Mike Roberts. You know, Chuck Fick. Joe Rigoli. Marty Maier. So I put those guys in leadership positions. But as we started to backfill for the area scouts, we started to bring in a new breed of area scout. Which is, typically, someone that is younger, played the game. They all played the game. Had a passion for the game. But also have a appreciation-slash-understanding that things were changing, and they’re willing to do things new ways. Incorporate new ways of managing their jobs and managing information.”

  To find them, though, Luhnow followed a process that differed from the closed system that had dominated scouting hires for years. He used, believe it or not, a computer.

  “So this is a funny story, but first time I had an area scout opening, I posted the job on the Internet and Chuck Fick came in and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. You can’t find a scout on the Internet. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.’ I said, ‘Maybe not, but we just got 250 résumés and so we’re going to go through them all and we’re going to pick the best ten and we’re going to interview them and we’re going to see.’

  “And sure enough, the number of scouts that we found on the Internet, they now are not only with the Astros and the Cardinals, they’re in other organizations as well. So you can find a scout on the Internet. It’s just a way of telling people you have a job opening. In the past in baseball, and this is very common [in all industries], people hire based off of recommendations from people they know. I got an area scout job. ‘Oh, I got a guy. A perfect guy. He’s…’ You know, and that’s it. You interview him and you give him the job and that’s it. To me, that’s ludicrous. And so, we went out and we hired people that we had no connection with.

  “And sure enough, there’s a lot of people that were recommended still, and we put them in the process. If they end up being the best candidate, then they’re the best candidate. But they’re going to have to go through the process. So each candidate went through three or four rounds of screening, and in the final rounds they would be interviewed by four or five people.

  “And then we’d get together and we’d say, ‘Okay, here’s the criteria. Who’s the best guy?’ But there was no litmus test as far as can they run numbers, because we weren’t thinking that the area scouts were going to actually do any analysis. That’s not why we were hiring them. We got analysis guys at HQ. We wanted guys that could do the job of evaluating with their own eyes, but be aware that they were going to be measured in a certain way. That there’s certain ways to doing this job that appear to be best practices. They’re going to have to hustle. They’re still going to have to travel a ton of miles. And they’re going to have to appreciate that when they come to the draft, that their guy may not get drafted because there’s another guy that’s done a better job in his [playing] career that deserves that spot more.”

  Yet, despite this attempt to incorporate scouting data in a uniform way, one scout Luhnow hired in 2006, Charlie Gonzalez, would play a vital role in how the Cardinals drafted for years.

  “So, I felt like we were not covering Florida properly,” Luhnow recalled. “Our area scout lived in Tampa, and he was getting [beaten] in Miami. We needed someone in Miami who understood the Cuban thing. Run with the Cuban scouts. And so I told our area scout, Steve Turco, you’ve got to hire a part-time guy. So find a couple guys. It’s in the budget. Find a couple guys and go interview them.

  “And he goes through this whole process and finds a couple guys and we interviewed them and I remember Charlie—I interviewed him by phone, and Steve Turco told me that Charlie was fluent in Spanish, and so I interviewed him in Spanish. And I wish I had seen Charlie over there on the phone. I’m sure his face was red, and he was mumbling and stuttering. His Spanish wasn’t that good.

  “And so I got off the phone and I was, like, ‘Turc, I got to tell you. This guy’s kind of a liar.’ I said to Turc, ‘This guy’s a fraud. I can’t believe you want to hire this guy.’

  “And he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you, Jeff, I don’t think he’s a fraud. I think he’s actually a good dude and he was so nervous.’ Because Turco was there watching him do this interview.

  “I said, ‘Okay, Turc. It’s just a part-time job. That’s fine. I’ll let you hire him.’ And I think it was one of the best decisions we’ve ever made because he is relentless. There’s no question that he pitches his guys harder than anybody, and he also advocates for his guys once they get drafted.”

  I talked to lots of people about Charlie Gonzalez. The response I got, across the board, when I asked about Gonzalez’s background, was “Yeah, what is Charlie’s background?”

  “Well, I know some stuff about him,” Luhnow said. “I don’t know how much I can tell you for the book. All I can tell you is when I told him we needed to do a background investigation, he got really, really nervous.” (Gonzalez says his nervousness stemmed from a lack of professional playing background.)

  Charlie Gonzalez will be sixty-one years old in 2015. He’s a bear of a man, ruddy complexion over seemingly constant movement. You cannot watch him, out on a field directing a scouting combine, or in a boardroom discussing the minute details of every player entirely from memory, without understanding that Charlie Gonzalez was born to be a professional scout. Yet he didn’t start doing it until he was well into his forties.

  “Charlie’s incredible,” Luhnow said. “He really is incredible. He had a surfer body back in the day because he used to surf a lot.”

  “I’m not quite sure what Charlie’s educational background is, but I can tell you he is brilliant,” Kantrovitz told me in a July 2014 e-mail. “He can be Jewish, Latin, an intellectual, a car salesman … whatever is needed in any given situation to relate to a player and family. It’s one of those rare cases where I’m not sure if he could get a job outside of baseball, but he is elite at his job in baseball.”

  Charlie Gonzalez was born in Chicago in 1954. His first baseball game was in the stands at old Comiskey Park with his father, Brice, a public-school teacher.

  “Mine was the old White Sox,” Gonzalez told me in a December 2014 interview. “Minnie Minoso. Louie Aparicio. Nellie Fox. All those guys. I mean, I love the black Sox hat with the White Sox logo with the little red trim on it.

  “Used to hate the Twins and Norm Cash and Rocky Colavito and Harmon Killebrew because I was a die-hard fan. Later on, I really liked the Bull,
Greg Luzinski, and—what the hell was his name? Used to wear the big teardrop sunglasses. The big teardrop glasses. Dick Allen.”

  His second-favorite team, which he developed an interest in after moving to the Miami area as a child, was the St. Louis Cardinals.

  “We had some college friends of my dad’s that lived in St. Louis, and I remember in the summertime we would go,” Gonzalez said. “My parents divorced when I was about twelve, and I remember I went to a game at old Busch. But I really, really, really liked the Cardinals. Again, they were just on the heels of the White Sox, and the White Sox were my team.”

  Gonzalez played baseball, but he says his real passion as a teen was swimming.

  “I went to high school down here [in Florida],” Gonzalez said. “I swam competitively. I mean, you have no idea. Practice in the summer twice a day, you know? Six to eight in the morning. Sometimes three times a day. And then we would do long-distance swimming, work on endurance at night. I was at a very, very, very high level.

  “I swam with special coaches. A guy named Wally Spence. I swam basically with a—it boils down to and equates to today’s terminology or mind-set, it would be like travel ball.” (Spence, incidentally, was one of the Spence brothers, who were all inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1967.)4

  “Come ninth grade, I went to an all-boys Catholic school and I immediately made the swimming team as a freshman, and I was still very good, but you know what? My enthusiasm was dwindling because really my heart wasn’t in it. I was offered a scholarship to Catholic University. Basically, if I kept my times and everything stayed the same—but I was burnt out, you know? I went to a high school that was about thirty-five miles away. And I would take the bus out there. And after school I would have swimming practice and I would have to take the metro bus all the way back home where I lived.”