Poor timing on my dad's part. During a season where the Cardinals are sitting at the bottom of the National League, he decides to buy a book written 7 years ago about smart and well-run the Cardinals are.
Megdal starts with a few chapters on the team's drafting and player development system up to the early 2000s, started by Branch Rickey (the guy who signed Jackei Robinson to play for the Dodgers, and carried forward by a man named George Kissell and his various understudies for the next several decades. From there, Megdal moves into Bill DeWitt Jr., the owner of the team, bringing in Jeff Lunhow to improve those systems by incorporating newer statistical measures.
There is the expected pushback from the old-school types who don't trust guys who make decisions based on numbers in spreadsheet, though Lunhow and John Mozeliak and any number of other people Megdal interviewed take pains to point out how the numbers were used in conjunction with the eyes-on scouting. The idea being to have the most data possible, to make the best assessment of whether a given player will turn into a major leaguer, and what the team should do to help it happen.
The thing is, I follow the Cardinals, so a lot of this is old hat to me. I've known since the late 2000s there was a conflict in the front office that lead to GM Walt Jocketty's being let go. I've known the Cardinals at one point seemed to have an assembly line, just churning out useful players and pitchers while fans of over teams wondered where the fuck these guys came from. I knew there was an eventual talent drain, as those guys started getting offered higher-level, higher paying jobs for other teams. The biographies of the people the Cardinals hired in that time are new to me, but how much do I really care about that?
It's like that movie Air with Affleck and Damon. Why do we care about some guys that figured out how to use the most popular basketball player in the world to market shoes? I watch sports for what the players do, not guys in offices with suits and ties, discussing how to get the best return on investment with their pool of draft money.
It is funny to read Megdal have to account for the 2015 scandal of the Cards' then-director of scouting, Chris Correa, getting busted by the FBI for hacking into the Houston Astros' (where Lunhow was GM) databases. Which was apparently really easy, because Lunhow used the same passwords he used when he worked for the Cardinals. *sad trombone* So Megdal has to try and square the circle that the Cardinals had a guy do that, which he does by Correa being a lone actor. Which, to the extent I remember the results of the FBI investigation, accurate.
It still leaves Megdal, having spent 250+ pages talking about how the Cardinals had done such a good job incorporating all this different information and creating this steady pipeline of players, having to wonder if the Cardinals are going to be able to continue to be a premiere franchise going forward. As they've won exactly one playoff series since the book was published, and are in the midst of a season where the current winning percentage would be the worst for a Cardinals team since 1919, signs point to "No."
Granted, I can't tell if this season is bad luck or there are serious flaws in the team-building philosophies. All of their relief pitchers deciding to suck simultaneously is probably luck, unless it's a flaw in their pitching strategy or game calling (their new catcher had some well-known issues with that before he arrived, but the team apparently thought they could fix them.) Not being willing to splurge on front-line, free agent starting pitching (and also apparently unable to develop such pitchers) hadn't kept them from at least making the playoffs recently. But it tends to leave a team dependent on their defense to help their pitchers and the Cardinals are also drafting a lot of guys based on their hitting, few of whom are any good at playing defense. But some of the defensive miscues have been from guys - Nolan Arenado, Tommy Edman - who are normally very good at defense. Bad luck, or failure of organizational philosophy? Probably a little from Column A, a little from Column B.
The fact I diverged into discussing the current team conveys that I was not invested in this book. But in the interest of ending on a somewhat higher note, it's funny to see Lunhow discussing the hacking scandal, knowing the Astros would get busted for cheating by using technology to stealing pitching signs in a few years, and Lunhow would get fired as a sacrificial lamb.
'If the tradition-bound members of the Cardinals' front office thought Jeff Lunhow had an atypical background, the brain trust he ultimately formed didn't change anybody's mind. The McKinsey executive hired a guy from MASA and Lockheed Martin, a guy from Brown and Lehman Brothers, and a cartoonist.'
No comments:
Post a Comment