JUPITER, Fla. • When Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak stood up for his opening remarks two springs ago in a clubhouse filled with the roster he assembled, the future he’s now counting on sat just a few stools away.
New teammates and soon to be friends, Stephen Piscotty, in his first spring training with the major-league Cardinals, had a seat close to Randal Grichuk, who was in his first spring as a Cardinal. Grichuk wore No. 88, Piscotty No. 91. Their numbers were high, reusable, and, like some of the players who wore them through the years, wholly forgettable. The number Mozeliak spoke about was not. Grichuk still remembered it two years later.
“Twenty-one,” Mozeliak recited.
In a room seeded with Hall of Famers and World Series champions, a National League championship series MVP and more than a dozen players who had just won the 2013 NL pennant, this stat stayed with Grichuk. Twenty-one. That was the number of players who had made their major-league debuts with the Cardinals in 2012 and 2013. The Cardinals had relied on the rookie infusion, the most in the majors, to reach the postseason each year and add to a decorated franchise’s most successful era. Grichuk knew the true value of Mozeliak’s 21.
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It equaled opportunity.
“It’s not about the big name. It’s not about what you’ve done in the majors,” the starting center fielder said. “It’s about what they see in you. It’s about how hard you work. It’s what makes this organization. They bring you here for a reason. You’ll get your chance. They trust their guys, and they’re going to let us go out and show whether we can do it or cannot.”
As the Cardinals open their 125th season in the National League and pursue their fourth consecutive National League Central Division title, they are betting big on the in-house talent.
LOOKING INWARD
The inability to land either major free agent they courted — Cy Young Award winner David Price or outfielder Jason Heyward — left the Cardinals with spare payroll, few long-term commitments and one high-priced addition, starter Mike Leake. It was an offseason that even Mozeliak conceded “challenged us in trying to find ways to build a club.” So, they went with a roster built mostly from within.
That stance added a chill to a winter that saw 2015’s best Cardinals pitcher, John Lackey, and best all-around player, Heyward, migrate to the rival Chicago Cubs. During a decade-long reign over the Central, the Cardinals never faced a clear and present danger to their rule quite like these Cubs. The Cardinals are Rome on the wane, threatened by the hip renaissance up north. They reject the idea they’re a fading dynasty.
“I don’t think our plan is to fade,” Chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. said. “That is not in our mindset.”
Check out youth, the Cardinals suggest. By both choice and circumstance, they are siding with internal options for significant roles, perhaps as many as they ever have in a year they intend to contend. To reignite a wayward offense, they’re banking on the emergence of Piscotty (25), Grichuk (24) and Kolten Wong (25). To solidify a rotation, they need budding consistency from Michael Wacha and Carlos Martinez, both 24. To close it, Trevor Rosenthal. He’s 25. The days of counting debuts are done. It’s time for the young players to deliver.
On his way to joining the North Side, Heyward added inference to injury. He noted the Cardinals’ “aging core.” Adam Wainwright (34), Yadier Molina (33) and Matt Holliday (36) are the only trio in franchise history to be a part of five consecutive playoff teams, though it’s true all three missed significant time in 2015 with injury and two have seen recent declines in production. Despite his time in the clubhouse, Heyward missed the promise behind the pillars.
The Cardinals’ rotation will have the youngest average age in the division, at 27.8. The Cubs are the oldest, at 31.8. The Pirates, who host the Cardinals on Sunday at PNC Park for Major League Baseball’s first game of the 2016 season, will have the same average age as the Cardinals for their starting position players, around 28.9. The Cubs’ eight average 27.3.
When it comes to their probable lineup, their rotation and their closer, the Cubs, so celebrated for their youth, will have seven players age 26 or younger.
The Cardinals, that graying group, also will have seven.
“Our first line of defense is to move from within,” Mozeliak said this past week while standing on a back field at Roger Dean Stadium. “We take a lot of pride in the fact that we try to find the answer here first and then look for solutions outside. To the players, the message is quite simple: work hard and you’ll have a chance in St. Louis. We want this to be our model.”
For, Mozeliak it goes beyond being The Process.
It’s personal.
In the young players and the opportunity offered, he sees himself.
CHANGING A CULTURE
Fresh out of college and running a summer baseball program in his hometown of Boulder, Colo., Mozeliak got his first big-league break because he was lefthanded.
The expansion Colorado Rockies needed a lefty to throw batting practice, and while Mozeliak described his days feeding fastballs as “random and short,” they were also essential. Within a year he was lunching with Don Zimmer, listening to Don Baylor chew on scouting reports and absorbing every morsel about Major League Baseball that he could.
Mozeliak never had difficulty making a decision or sharing his view. But he learned as a network of baseball mentors developed around him — from uniforms like Zimmer to suits like Walt Jocketty to scouts like Mike Jorgensen — that listening could be his ladder.
He got ahead by first not saying much.
“I was very strategic in not having an opinion,” Mozeliak explained. “Which was totally against my normal way of thinking. I listened. And I listened. Ultimately, Walt ended up trusting me and including me in that inner sanctum. I wasn’t outspoken. I wasn’t running the meetings. I wasn’t taking charge. But I was paying attention. I was lucky Walt gave me that opportunity.”
Jocketty, as general manager, brought Mozeliak to the Cardinals. The protégé’s first chore was modernizing how the scouting department stored information. The son of an IBMer who thus knew his way around a computer, Mozeliak brought the Cardinals out of the file cabinets and into a database. His rise accelerated. Mozeliak became assistant scouting director in 1998, scouting director by 1999 and director of baseball operations in 2001. In 2003, Jocketty deputized Mozeliak as his assistant general manager and mused to the Post-Dispatch that “one day I’ll be able to work for him.” When Jocketty was fired after the 2007 season, Mozeliak was named his successor, on Halloween.
The 12th GM in club history, Mozeliak had to mend a fractured front office that included an analytics department that felt ostracized and minor leagues that had been pillaged.
To do that, he listened. And listened. To everyone.
“I spent time interviewing different minor-league players through the years, and the biggest takeaways I have from that experience was, No. 1, they want to know where they stand,” Mozeliak said. “Am I going up? Am I going down? Neutral? So, feedback. No. 2, when they first put on that Cardinals’ minor-league uniform, that’s one goal. But guess what? There’s another one. They want to play in St. Louis. Now, we want that carrot to be there for them.”
As Mozeliak enacted DeWitt’s blueprint for a self-sustaining farm system and a more data-driven decision machine, that carrot took root. And not just for players.
Mozeliak described the organization’s goal as a table. The four legs are international scouting, amateur scouting, analytics-baseball development, and player development. Supported by all four is the table itself, Mike Matheny’s major-league club. If one leg is short, weak or untended, the table wobbles. To keep the legs strong, all need the same amount of attention. Part of that attention was inclusion. The walls that had previously existed between disciplines had to come down. The fact that one building in Jupiter seemed to house two worlds during spring training — the majors and the minors — had to cease.
Mark DeJohn, a 29-year fixture with the organization and now its field coordinator, said there has “never been better harmony in everything we’re doing.” He referred to it as a “culture change that started at the top.”
A message that echoes at every level is simple: opportunity awaits.
“The Cardinals seem to have a core principle that they never deviate from in their development,” an NL scout said. “They are consistent. They clearly have a plan and stick to it.”
That plan extends beyond player development to the other legs of the table. In the nearly nine years with Mozeliak as GM, the Cardinals have enhanced and advanced their use of analytics to a point that they feel confident and comfortable sticking to their evaluations of players. That was certainly true this winter. The Cardinals have seen a three-year decline in offensive production. They went 17 years without scoring less than 700 runs before doing it the past two years. They have slipped to the NL’s lower half in slugging and home runs. This past summer, they said they’d accept an increase in strikeouts for a power jolt. The Cardinals struck out a franchise-record 1,267 times but hit the fourth-fewest homers in the NL. To overcome withering offense the Cardinals relied on what analytics would call an outlier — absurdly excellent pitching and a peerless run-prevention style that yielded 100 wins.
Unable to re-sign Heyward, an enigmatic offensive player, the Cardinals traded for Jedd Gyorko, a complementary infielder with offensive potential. They veered away from free agents such as Chris Davis, Yoenis Cespedes and Justin Upton. DeWitt explained how “adding a player there might not give you much more than an incremental advantage, and the price you pay for that would not be worth that incremental advantage, if any.”
“How John does it and how we do it is somewhat similar in how this past winter we only did that one big thing,” Minnesota general manager Terry Ryan said. “It doesn’t bode for a nice winter, no, because (the media) and people who are adamant about free agents and high-priced free agents and I guess the star-studded types – they want those people. We all do. I get that. It’s fun. But who is going to argue with the St. Louis Cardinals if they didn’t do that? Not me.”
Unwilling to spend just to spend, the Cardinals stayed with what they had.
They bet on the system they built. They bet on themselves.
There is the risk that the players aren’t ready, that the Cardinals have overvalued their prospects because when it comes to optimism, possession is nine-tenths of the law. That is a risk Mozeliak is willing to take because “age shouldn’t hold you back when you feel there is a bright future for someone.” He speaks from experience. He can point to himself.
He can name the 21.
“When you see guys like (Jon) Jay and (Allen) Craig and they’re not only coming up but also winning a World Series and they’re on the field for that, you believe,” Piscotty said. “If they can trust a player in the World Series, they can trust them during the regular season. He had backing for that claim. You believe it. You see it.”
‘SAVE THAT SPOT FOR ME’
Along a back hallway at the Cardinals’ spring training complex, a wall is decorated with framed photos of 22 players. Each photo has a name and the year of that player’s big-league arrival, from “Yadier Molina (2004)” to “Matt Carpenter (2011),” “Adam Wainwright (2005)” to “Stephen Piscotty (2015).” They are arranged in chronological order with one exception; the late Oscar Taveras is set aside.
The brainchild of farm director Gary LaRocque, the photos are of players who came from the Cardinals’ minor-league system and the year they debuted. All of the current minor-leaguers pass those pictures at least once a day during spring training.
Some stop to read the names.
Some point to an open space.
“Save that spot for me,” DeJohn overheard a prospect shout. “I’m up next.”
“It tells the story,” Mozeliak said. “Loud and clear.”
The Cardinals had 14 homegrown players appear in the postseason last year, down from recent highs of 18 in 2012 and 2013. On any given day this year, six of the eight starting position players could be from the farm. By this time next year, shortstop Aledmys Diaz and fireballer Alex Reyes will probably have their photos on the wall.
This is the structure DeWitt and Mozeliak built. This is the year they need it most. Mozeliak found out via a report on Twitter that Price had chosen Boston’s richer offer. A week or so later, Heyward’s agent called personally to let Mozeliak know the Cardinals had finished second to the charismatic Cubs. Mozeliak moved on.
The opportunity he wanted was the opportunity he had to give.
“This is the confidence we have in our group,” Mozeliak said. “You can’t have lip service or you’ll lose internal credibility. If it works, then super. If not, then we will react. Right now, it’s time we find out if we are right on some of these young players.”
Derrick Goold
Derrick Goold is the lead Cardinals beat writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and past president of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.
