The Cardinals Way Page 9

  Kantrovitz, though, grew up playing baseball. He hoped his future would be on the field and went to Brown University, where he graduated with a degree in organizational behavior—a combination program of economics, engineering, and psychology—all while hitting .417/.490/.620 his senior year.

  But the ultimate ceiling of Kantrovitz’s on-field career also came at Brown.

  “I had in a practice, a rundown, a collision with another player,” Kantrovitz recalled. “It was a harmless type of thing. It wasn’t anything vicious. But my shoulder popped and that’s when I tore my labrum. And I had a surgery in college to try to get past it. Because I thought, maybe, I could have a future in baseball. It’s what I wanted to do and that was kind of a Band-Aid approach and got me on the field for my senior year. But I was kind of throwing sidearm.

  “I built some arm strength, but I couldn’t—I mean, there was something really wrong at that time. I was still getting interest from some of the teams, ’cause I could hit a little bit—but knowing in the back of my mind that [my career] was going to likely come to an end. I was like every other kid who studies economics advancement in college, you apply for those banking-consultant jobs. And so I did that at the same time and was hoping I got drafted. And fortunately I did.”

  The St. Louis Cardinals drafted Kantrovitz, taking him in the twenty-fifth round of the 2001 draft. I asked Kantrovitz if his own injury protocols as scouting director for the Cardinals from 2012 to 2014—put into place to maximize the number of healthy bodies in the draft class—would have prevented him from drafting himself.

  “Wow … tough question,” Kantrovitz wrote in a December 2014 e-mail. “Since we don’t spend much time reviewing medical records of senior signs [$1k bonus guys], if I [or the player] was playing all year long, we would have to assume he was healthy … so, yes. It would have been too improbable/painful for a player to have been able to play an entire season at SS with a torn labrum.”

  Kantrovitz ought to know—he’s the one who did it. Being drafted meant the future scouting director of the Cardinals had an internship in how the Cardinals develop players. Kantrovitz played as Kissell coached. He played with a catcher named Yadier Molina, a pitcher named Rick Ankiel, who walked 1.8 per nine and struck out 16.2 per nine, and got into a game at Johnson City—even collected a professional hit—before he and the Cardinals agreed that the only way he’d have a chance to make it through their system would be to repair the labrum with major surgery.

  But the surgery didn’t work. Kantrovitz remembered drills in the spring of 2002, along with the other young Cardinals shortstops. One after another, fielding grounders, firing them across the diamond, the bullets out of young arms with a future. And then his throws, well short, never too hot for the first baseman to handle.

  “And then they said, ‘Hey. You know the writing’s on the wall,’” Kantrovitz recalled. “You know, ‘This isn’t going to work out for you.’ And, I mean, I knew it, but I had to have somebody else force me out of it. I would have stayed there forever. But that’s kind of how the transition came about.”

  So Kantrovitz’s on-field career was over, though the experience allowed him to know intimately the vocabulary and thinking that went into the on-field playing and scouting—one of the two languages he’d need to speak as scouting director.

  Instead of coaching next, however, Kantrovitz’s path deviated from that of generations of Cardinals prospects who didn’t reach the major leagues. He didn’t head back to Johnson City. He was off to Wall Street.

  “I called the guys at Lehman Brothers, and the investment banking division said—he was offering me a job in college, so I asked if that was something that I could pursue again.… They said sure. So a couple months later, I just went to New York and was there for a couple years as an investment banker. I’m glad I did that job because I realized that’s something I absolutely never would want to do.”

  The job served two purposes for Kantrovitz. While he understood that spending hundred-hour weeks in investment banking wouldn’t suit him, he realized that he had the capacity for working that kind of schedule, provided it was in a job he truly loved.

  The extent to which the baseball front-office world differed a decade ago from today can be summed up in how Kantrovitz marketed himself, through cold calls and e-mails.

  “I was marketing the fact that I played baseball,” Kantrovitz said. “I didn’t think anyone would care that I learned every macro on Excel and that I crunched numbers.… But I guess that turned out to be something that people started to value at that time.”

  That process may seem fast in retrospect—Kantrovitz took less than a decade to essentially scale the profession within multiple front offices. But no greater evidence may exist of how different front offices were at the time than the year-plus Kantrovitz spent essentially unemployed, pursuing a baseball job. Any baseball job. Kantrovitz relocated to Seattle to work, for no pay, with Ron Antinoja, doing something called Tendu analysis, which is to say, determining from past performance what individual player tendencies would be going forward. While that didn’t immediately lead to a job in baseball—Kantrovitz and Antinoja met during spring training with several teams, including the Cardinals, in 2003, 2004, and a few teams bought their software—it did attract the attention of Bob Bowman, a senior executive with Major League Baseball.

  “Bob Bowman and MLBAM expressed a lot of interest in the technology and potentially purchasing it … or just trying to replicate it,” Kantrovitz said. (MLB would eventually team up with Antinoja in 2007.)1

  By the middle of 2004, Kantrovitz was e-mailing with Mariners manager Bob Melvin about strategy, but had little tangible to show for his decision eighteen months earlier to leave Lehman Brothers. He and his college sweetheart, Brenna, a lawyer, had gotten engaged weeks earlier and were busy trying to plan a life together. Then he got a call from John Mozeliak.

  “[He] said we do have this assistant job in the scouting department open and you’re going to get exposed to a lot of things, but maybe it’s not what you’re making as an investment banker,” Kantrovitz said. “I said, ‘Well, whatever it is, it’s more than I’m making now. I have nothing.’ I jumped at it immediately. Now it was a job in baseball, it was a job with the Cardinals.… I would have paid him to do it.”

  If it took a long time for baseball to notice Dan Kantrovitz, it didn’t take nearly as long for Jeff Luhnow to recognize that the new hire was perfect for his gang of baseball revolutionaries.

  “So at the time, that was when I interviewed with Jeff, Mo, and Walt,” Kantrovitz said. “And there was a lot of change going on in the office. A month in my time there, Jeff said, ‘I need you working for me.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ So from that point on for the next four years, I worked under Jeff pretty much directly. And didn’t really realize how lucky I was. Getting exposure and literally responsibility on everything from major league pitching mechanics to the stats. The international stuff. The scouting. It was not your typical assistant job, which [was due] to Jeff. That’s the kind of guy he is. He’ll give people a lot of runway. And he had a ton of responsibilities that I think he needed to delegate, but it was awesome to get that kind of exposure. And during that time, I was working with Sig.”

  That would be Sig Mejdal, who took the untrod path from NASA’s Fatigue Countermeasures Group, where he served as biomathematician, to the St. Louis Cardinals.

  Decades before Mejdal made the jump to a baseball front office, though, he was an OG sabermetrician. Maybe not Travis Hoke OG, Rickey’s hire to chart base and out efficiency back in 1914, but well ahead of his time.

  “So I grew up in San Jose, California,” Mejdal told me in an October 2014 interview. “I played six years of Little League baseball, but I was reading Bill James before he had a publisher. I was in the Society for American Baseball Research in grade school. So I was always fascinated with baseball numbers, and that didn’t go away as I got older. I think most every project that I had in high school or college
I would twist it to be baseball related.

  “I remember asking the teacher in third grade how to do fractions because I wanted to see how many home runs my Hank Aaron card would have over 162 games,” Mejdal said. “He’s hit five homers in twenty-three games. And I remember asking the teacher how to do this. And she asked why I was asking this, and when I told her, I remember her laughing. On the way to my master’s thesis, it was on valuing, instead of estate valuing—[it was] baseball players. So, it was throughout, really.”

  Mejdal graduated from UC Davis in 1989 and went to work for Lockheed Martin. But he’d volunteer for graveyard shifts so he could spend more time playing with baseball numbers. He’d try to retrofit the spacecraft modeling for baseball instead. On he went, to AltaVista, then to NASA. It wasn’t like Kantrovitz’s experience, a work life despised.

  “I enjoyed my work, but there was no confusing—it was work,” Mejdal said. “I enjoyed when I was done with work more than I was at work. But in baseball, now, that’s not the case.

  “When Moneyball came out, I started looking for a [baseball] job, but I did not have the foresight to imagine that a team would be interested in somebody who didn’t play baseball. I just had myself boxed in my mind as an outsider. I would always remain that.”

  It’s important to understand the differences between Kantrovitz and Mejdal because what follows comes directly from the personalities and goals of the two men and has everything to do with the roles they played in remaking the Cardinals. Kantrovitz, the crossover figure, fit in easily in any room, whether among scouts or analysts. His long-term goal was to earn a spot as a general manager or director of baseball operations for a major league team.

  Mejdal has no such designs on that kind of job. He’s extremely well liked by those who know him. But it’s apparent in any conversation with him that he’s operating at a different intellectual speed, and conversation with most others is the mental equivalent of coasting for him. Nothing in how he interacts with people is condescending—that’s just the reality of the world relative to Sig Mejdal.

  Put simply, a significant part of Kantrovitz’s brainpower is spent on the political/social capital required to survive and advance in the baseball world. It’s the skill set that’s served John Mozeliak so well. Mejdal, though, is a pure analyst. While I’d like to live in a world where, purely for the entertainment, I could watch Mejdal interact regularly with the media, it’s fair to say that Mejdal has no appetite for that.

  “All of the interactions with the press,” Mejdal said. “All the drama. Yeah. None of that interests me, nor do I think I would be exceptionally good at it. You’ve got to have a thick skin to be a GM and—I’m trying my best to have thick skin as an analyst and I need thicker skin. So I think I would lose my stomach lining if I were GM.”

  This should not be confused with Mejdal’s desire to get into baseball, nor did it limit the scope of those efforts.

  “I did the résumés. The cover letters. The follow-up with phone calls, and I started creating these unsolicited reports. Teaser reports, so if they hired me, [they’d see] how I could complement their existing processes. And I was as respectful as could be. I got virtually no returns. No interest.

  “But I kept at it. I ended up dedicating, like, one or two full days a week with doing this research. Sending these reports. Following up. I went to the winter meetings uninvited and stood in the lobby for three days waiting for somebody who looked important to walk from the elevator to the front door so I could give them this ridiculous brochure I made on why he needed to hire me. So, yeah, I did a ton of stuff.”

  For months, it seemed a waste of time. He did get that polite e-mail from Paul DePodesta. Rick Hahn, later to become general manager for the Chicago White Sox (and briefly a candidate for Cardinals GM in 2007),2 encouraged him at the winter meetings. David Forst of the Oakland Athletics did as well. So the outlines of the new thinking in baseball were faintly visible, though precisely how quickly and completely they’d come to remake the industry wasn’t apparent just yet.

  Once again, though, Mozeliak acted as a facilitator. One of Mejdal’s brochures landed on Mozeliak’s desk, and he passed it along to Luhnow.

  “I just got an e-mail from Jeff saying he was interested in it and wanted to talk to me,” Mejdal recalled. “And we talked and met in person in St. Louis. I met Walt and Mo and Jeff.… And then I met again in person with him in December of ’04 in the winter meetings in Anaheim. And then he hired me soon afterwards. My first day was opening day of 2005.

  “It was a wonderful feeling. I remember buying a one-way ticket to St. Louis and how bizarre that sounded as I was leaving my beloved California. And, yeah, it felt like I was starting this wonderful adventure.”

  As the 2005 season dawned for the Cardinals, Luhnow, Kantrovitz, and Mejdal set out to discover what they thought could be improved about the St. Louis Cardinals. Everything was on the table.

  “The group doing data analysis was Sig, Jeff, and I—it was a three-man shop,” Kantrovitz said. “And it’s funny because—Sig had this way of saying things in a perspective like nobody else. He would always start off his sentences with ‘Imagine…’ And I’m going to paraphrase him. And it was ‘Imagine…’ because people would ask, ‘Oh, you guys—you guys are doing really neat stuff.’ Well, he would say, ‘Imagine somebody who’s not really been doing anything.’ So I was just coming into the draft with a ranked spreadsheet, which, at that point, was a lot. And that’s not saying anything against the Cardinals. That’s just what most of baseball was in at that point.

  “And so whether it was international scouting, whether it was player development pitching mechanics, whether it was draft statistics, I mean, there were so many frontiers to work on. It was really exciting. I mean, it was amazing, frankly.”

  Change was coming to the St. Louis Cardinals. And if the work Luhnow did as a consultant wasn’t concerning enough to those in the status quo, once he had control over the draft and international operations, he couldn’t be ignored. DeWitt wasn’t about to let that happen, anyhow.

  Luhnow’s work didn’t stop there, though. Everything was fair game. Early in spring 2005, some longtime Cardinals—manager Tony La Russa and pitching coach Dave Duncan—found that out.

  “So I remember this meeting we had,” Kantrovitz said. “I remember it because I was really nervous because it was when Jeff told me to present to Tony, Dunc, and Walt our theory of pitching mechanics.

  “And so, that meeting, Bill stood up and gave the introduction to it, which he never does. At least rarely. And he said, ‘You know what?’ And this was, for me, the genesis of the whole movement. And he said, based on his time with the Reds—the team was doing well. They were winning World Series. But he saw that they were getting complacent.

  “And he wasn’t going to let that happen with us. And his introduction was basically saying, ‘Hey, Dunc, Tony. Don’t kill Dan and Jeff for proposing some of these things that seem wild and outlandish,’ because that’s what he wants.

  “He wanted that change, at least, to be discussed. And that’s really, for me, the genesis of it, was that first meeting that we [now] have all the time. It’s normal. But it was just questioning what we currently do. Bringing up new ways of doing things. And it was Bill’s vision. To say, I don’t want to see this happen, what he says happened with the Reds. He didn’t want the same thing to happen.

  “I think people maybe underestimated his baseball acumen in that sense. And that was driving everything we did. He brought in Jeff, and it gave us a lot of ability to do some pretty cool and creative things, even if they didn’t work.”

  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.