Brian Walton
December 25, 2004
Year Two – Part One
Birdhouse Exclusive Interview with Jeff Luhnow
with Brian Walton
Jeff Luhnow, Cardinals Vice President of Baseball Development and I spent a full hour discussing the 2004-2005 off-season to date plus plans the rest of the way, the new Venezuelan developmental league, top prospects, player valuation tools, the Advisory Board and more.
This is the first installment of that series.
How do you feel the off-season has gone so far for the team? There have been some lows, such as the loss of Edgar Renteria and highs, like the trade for Mark Mulder.
I think everybody is pretty optimistic and excited about where we’re going next year. I think that the team on the field, the offense is going to be strong as it was last year, even with the loss of Renteria. It still remains to be seen how we fill those middle infield positions, but Pujols, Rolen and our outfield are still there. So, we’re pretty excited about the offense again. I don’t think scoring runs is going to be a problem.
Really, with the addition of Mulder to the rotation and the fact that we were able to keep Morris and Carpenter will be back and healthy. That gives you three starters at the top of the rotation who could legitimately be considered #1 starters - under different circumstances. So, that is pretty exciting. Plus, you have Suppan and Marquis, who both pitched a lot of innings last year at the back end of the rotation. And you still have some insurance in Ankiel and some other guys in the minors who may step up.
So, all in all, with the exception of rounding out the middle infield, which hopefully will be done in the next couple of weeks, I think people are excited about it. It’s always a frustrating loss when you lose a player like Renteria, a player of that caliber who has been with the club a long time and who was with us all the way last year and contributed greatly to the team’s success.
It has to be doubly disappointing since you thought the deal was done, right?
Yes, but you never know if we had signed Renteria, if would we have been able to do anything on the starting pitching front. So, there’s always those tradeoffs in the off-season. When you’re competing against Boston, who has a much higher payroll than we do, we both recognize Edgar’s talent. We both probably look at it much the same way; his leadership and his defense and his offensive abilities. When you’re comparing an $88 million payroll to $130 million or whatever they are going to end up being, they can afford to pay a little bit more that we can for certain players.
So, they can afford to eat a mistake every now and then while the Cardinals can’t?
Exactly. What we are trying to do is win the division every year and get to the World Series and win a championship. We really can’t afford to make any mistakes. And when you start talking about contracts of four years and three years, those are the type of contracts that can become mistakes over time. So, we really have a small margin of error relative to some other teams.
As you mention risk, let’s talk about Mulder’s health. He had injuries in 2003 and a precipitous drop off in results in the second half of 2004. How did the team deal with this before the trade was made?
Personally, I don’t know anything about Mulder’s health. I know he pitched a full season last year. And, I know that our trainers and doctors talked with Oakland’s trainers and doctors and we did a lot of due diligence to make sure. I think our side believes that he is 100% healthy. So, that’s pretty exciting to know that we are getting a pitcher like that who is healthy. As far as the second half of last year, every pitcher goes through ups and downs. And, sometimes, they’re just unexplainable. Really, the way we look at players is to look at their whole history and to look at their track record of performance and not just the last month or two. Now, obviously, you have to look at that as part of the equation, but when you look at Mulder’s last four years, he really is a phenomenal pitcher.
Early in the off-season, Tony La Russa and Dave Duncan were quoted as wanting two power starters. Is that something we might still see; more action on the pitching front?
Well, one of the things that I’ve learned in the last two years is that nothing is over until it’s over. And the off-season doesn’t end after the Winter Meetings. It goes on. For example, last year we were without a second baseman really until Spring Training was almost over. So, I don’t think anyone is going to stop working on ways to improve the team. But, it would have to be a deal that would make sense to our team.
Meaning, salary friendly?
Exactly. We have certain limits in terms of payroll and don’t have the flexibility to go out and sign a big free agent at this point without freeing up money from somewhere else. I think those are constraints that every general manager deals with. Certainly, we do. One thing I’ve learned around here is that the work never stops. We’re constantly talking to other teams and constantly trying to find other ways to improve the team. You never know what the opening day lineup will look like relative to today. I think we all feel pretty good about what we have right now and when you put in a couple of middle infielders, then we’re set. And, I think everybody would feel comfortable going to opening day with the group we have in place right now. But, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to looking at ways to improve.
What is the sense of urgency to make the final moves to complete the team?
There’s a lot being worked on in that area. Having said that, I don’t think we feel the pressure to get everything done before the New Year. Last year, we had a couple of question marks and we sorted those out during Spring Training.
Some market factors could turn in the Cardinals favor by then…
Exactly. Exactly.
Note: The Eckstein signing was announced within six hours after this conversation.
What are your thoughts about your first year with the team?
First of all, it has been an incredibly exciting year for me. To come into this organization and be involved last off-season and see the team come together, go to Spring Training and basically be here throughout this championship season and watch the team go to the World Series and share all that was exciting. So far, I am one-for-one in World Series, which is a record I hope will continue this year. I’d like to take it all the way this year, obviously. But, it was a great season last year. A lot of people obviously contributed to that.
Year Two – Part Two
This is the second installment of my series with Jeff Luhnow, Cardinals Vice President of Baseball Development. The focus here is Jeff’s role, the Cardinals’ re-entry into Latin America, the use of analytic tools for projecting player performance, plus the amateur and Rule 5 drafts.
How has your role evolved over the last year since we first spoke?
My role is a lot better defined today than it was a year ago. But, it’s generally in the same areas you and I discussed. The first area is in providing all the information, analytical support and recommendations that have to do with player valuation. More focused on the major league, but also the minor leagues and amateur levels. We’ve spent the last year evaluating and building our own tools to assess player performance and compare players to one another and actually put a dollar value on a player’s projected performance. We feel very good about where we are right now. Obviously, I can’t talk in detail about it because we do consider it proprietary knowledge, but we do have player valuation tools in place that we are very confident in. They are being used in the decision-making process, along with a number of other variables, of course. That is an area where we feel we’ve made a lot of progress in over the last year. And, there’s always more to come. That is area #1 and one of the key reasons I was originally hired and brought into the organization, into the front office.
And the second?
The second area is the international program. As you know, a year ago, when you and I sat down and talked, the Cardinals didn’t really have anything going on internationally. We had shut down our operations in Venezuela a few years before and shut down our operations in the Dominican about a year and a half ago. So, we didn’t have a pipeline of players coming in from Latin America or from anywhere else in the world, for that matter. Now, that has changed.
I’ve worked with some people here and we’ve got our program back up and running. We’re probably a couple of weeks away from announcing what we are going to be doing next summer, but we definitely have a Latin American program in place today. And, we’ve signed a number of players over the past six months that we think have the potential to make the major leagues; a lot of young players from various countries in Latin America. So, we’re back in that game and we feel very good about how we’re doing it.
The last time I talked with you, I think I was involved in doing a comprehensive study of how every other team was approaching their international operations, both in terms of how many resources they were dedicating to it, how many dollars, what kind of people, but also their strategy in the country as how they were finding players, what kind of signing bonuses they would give and all of that stuff. So, we did all of that. We studied it. We worked out the model we wanted to pursue and we started pursuing it.
It’s one of the things that people don’t realize that in addition to the payroll at the major league level, which is pretty big for a mid-market team, we are investing dollars in the international program, amateur scouting and other areas. That all adds up to a pretty big number. The owners, in my opinion, are very generous in allocation of dollars in all of those areas. It’s really a balance that you need. You need to spend money on your current team, but you also need to spend money on the future. We are doing that now and feel pretty good about it.
Can you give me an example?
We had a team of young prospects playing in Venezuela this winter. They were playing in a league called the Parallela, which is a minor league for the Venezuelan winter league. (www.ligaparalela.com) We had our own team down there called the St. Louis Cardinals. Some of the players on that team were players that we had at Johnson City last season, like Sandy Diaz and Tony Granadillo, who was taken from us in the Rule 5 draft. Most of the players on that team are new to the Cardinals. Players we signed since June. The team did well, considering the average age on the team was probably 17 years old and the league has a lot of players with A-ball and sometimes Double-A experience. Sometimes players from Venezuela come back there during the off-season and aren’t quite ready to contribute to the big club, but play with the minor league affiliate. It’s a highly competitive league. We play, I think, 62 games. And we felt like we made a lot of progress this year.
In fact, we had one player, Jose Martinez, who was one of the league leaders in batting average and led off in the All-Star Game. He was one of our players that made the All-Star Game. We just signed him a few months ago. He’s a middle infielder who has unbelievable fielding ability. Also, he was the best hitter on our team this year. (Martinez, 17, may play shortstop at Johnson City next season.)
So, those are the sort of players that we want to invest in; players that have a chance to make it to the big leagues, especially at those key positions, catcher and middle infield, and obviously, pitchers. We have a lot of pitchers down there that we are very excited about. We signed two 16-year-old Colombian right-hand pitchers, who are major league prospects. It’s going to be a few years before we really get to know them in the States, because at that age, they are going to need some time playing competitively in Latin America before they come over.
So, some of these players will play next summer in the to-be announced league in Latin America, while others will come to the States?
Exactly.
What is being done with these youngsters to help them with the off-the-field challenges they will face transitioning from home to playing in the U.S.?
It’s a great question. The kids we’ve signed down there have graduated from high school for the most part. We put in a program for them which is pretty comprehensive. They live in a house together. They train basically baseball from morning until afternoon. Then, they have an English program. They were going to an English instructor. We also had many of our coaching staff living there in the house with the players this winter. So, they were able to spend a lot of time with the players and talk about what it is like when you go to the States.
We’re going to put an education program into our new facility, which we’ll probably be talking about in a couple of weeks, which will encompass more than just English. It will also have components that will address what it is like to live in the United States; what these young kids who have never been abroad need to know and prepare them more generally for life, whether it is computer skills or how to get along with people, understanding social norms and all that sort of stuff. We’re right now developing a full-blown educational program for these young men so that when they come to the United States, they’re better prepared not only for the baseball side of life, but the rest of it.
We recognize that most of these players at the end of the day are not going to make it to the big leagues. And somewhere along the way, they are going to need to end the playing portion of their baseball days and move on to something else. A lot of them may stay involved in baseball one way or another. But, at least, we’d like to feel good about our contribution toward helping them become better prepared in life, regardless of whatever career path they choose.
I don’t want to preclude your announcement, but you are talking about a very significant investment here, aren’t you?
Yes, it is. The way I think about it, in corporate America, it’s the R&D pipeline. If you’re a pharmaceuticals firm or an engineering firm, you’ve always got to invest in the future. That is what we are doing through this program.
The third part, getting back to your original question about where I am spending my time and how I am fitting in here is with the scouting group and organization here in the United States, working very closely with the leadership group here in the front office and with the individual scouts in the different areas in trying to figure out what the best model is for the Cardinals to scout at the amateur level, high school and college. So, we’ve made a lot of progress there.
We feel pretty good about our approach and we have some wonderful scouts. We’re pretty excited as we’re going to have some extra picks this year, as you know. So, this is going to be an important year, especially considering we gave up one of our top prospects and two other young players in the recent trade. So, it is more important than ever to really focus on building up the farm system. You do that through your international program and through your amateur scouting in the nited States. So, I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on that area, as well.
We feel pretty good that both of those areas are getting appropriate investment from the ownership group; that we have the right strategy in place and the right people in place that we hope to find future professional baseball players for the Cardinals from whether it is a high school in San Diego or a tryout camp in the Dominican Republic.
You mentioned the building of analytic tools to measure and project performance. How do you deal with that when looking at amateur players and in the minor leagues, where conditions are much more uneven?
With the minor leagues, you can use many of the same methods. Actually, the same with amateurs at the college level, you can use many of the same methods as you use for the major leagues. Some of the context adjustment tools that you and I have talked about before, whether it is adjusting for ballpark or league or quality of competition, etc; you can use those same methods. And, a lot of clubs do, to evaluate or restate a player’s statistics in a more neutral environment. We do that for college, for Division I. We’re starting to crack the code for Division II and junior college and some of the other levels. It’s done at the minor league level as well.
Having said that, you have to turn a player’s Double-A stats into an equivalent, what you would expect at the major league level to put everybody on a level playing field. Those conversions are tricky, to be sure. They become much more tricky when you go below Double-A. I think at Double-A and Triple-A, we’re very comfortable with our methods for converting those stats and projecting major league performance. Once you get to Single-A and especially down to rookie ball, those leagues, even though they are competitive and you want to win, the pendulum swings more to the development side of things. A player may be down there working on plate patience or how to hit a breaking ball or control if he is a pitcher. So, you never know the real picture of what is going on. Because those environments are more developmental than Double-A or Triple-A, you may be misled. It becomes more of a challenge. Our rule of thumb basically is that we look at the stats below Double-A, but the stats we consider important at the minor league level are the ones as the Double-A and Triple-A level. Those are the ones that we feel are more predictive of major league performance. That is one of the challenges of the lower minor leagues.
Now on the amateur side of things, when you’re talking about juniors and seniors at a Division I school, you do have a fair amount of data to look at. We did use that as part of our calculus this year in our amateur draft and it was helpful to say the least. It was one component of what we looked at, for sure, but it was an important component and it was helpful.
The same really can’t be said for high school players. High school players have a lot less reliable performance information that you can rely on. So, in that situation, we do need to rely much more on the scouts’ evaluation of tools.
Is it fair to say that lack of analytics was a factor in the Cardinals amateur draft strategy shifting from high school to college players this past June?
No. And that was not an intentional shift. We had several high school players on our list of players we wanted to draft in the early rounds. But, the way the draft goes, you have to be reactive to which players are taken ahead of you. Several of the players we had on our list were taken ahead of us. It turned out that it is sort of a domino effect, where we ended up taking a lot more college players. But, if you looked at our board, which is obviously proprietary information, you would have seen quite a number of high school players up there at all rounds. But, that is just the way it works out. You can’t predict who is going to go when. You have to be prepared to react to that. Even when we got to the second round, players were in that zone where we ended up taking (Mike) Ferris. There was a feeling since we had taken a pitcher in the first round (Chris Lambert), that we really needed a position player, a proven commodity, in one of the upper rounds. To fill our system with those kinds of players. That is why Ferris ended up looking very attractive to us at that point.
What is the feeling about this years’ Rule 5 draft, both in terms of players gained and lost?
We had extraordinary success last year with Hector Luna. In fact, last year was a bit unusual for Rule 5 in that a lot of the players selected stuck with the team. That typically does not happen. Typically, the players come back and you make a little from that. We definitely had players that we were looking to take this year but didn’t take them either because they were selected… I wasn’t there for the actual draft, so I don’t know exactly what the reasons were, but we had players… We were prepared to take some players.
At the major league level?
Yes, at the major league level. But, we decided not to. I believe because they were taken by other clubs. And, we did take some at the lower levels, as you know.
The players we lost; that is sort of the risk you take by not putting players on your 40-man roster. There were several names bandied about of the players we might have lost; Nelson and Johnson, who we did lose, and some others. It’s always a shame to lose a player with Tyler Johnson’s upside. It remains to be seen if it is a permanent loss or not.
I was personally disappointed that we lost Granadillo, but there was not much more we could have done to protect him. He was protected at the Triple-A level and I think Boston just did a good job in scouting him. Probably watched him hit a monster home run for our team in Venezuela about a week before the draft. Our field down there, the fence is really far back and these are young kids, so you rarely see a home run. And he not only hit a ball over the fence, but it also went over the trees behind it. It was probably the biggest shot I had seen all year. I am sure they looked at him a little more than that. He’s a great kid and I wish him the best. It is really a shame to lose him as he would have been one of our top Latin prospects in the years to come.
Year Two – Part Three
This is the third installment of my series with Jeff Luhnow, Cardinals Vice President of Baseball Development. The focus here is on winter ball and the Advisory Board.
Where else have your travels taken you this off-season?
One of the most fun things I’ve done since the season ended is that I went to scout school. Major League Baseball puts on a scout school – one in Arizona and they put on one in the Domincan Republic. I went to the one in the Dominican Republic. It’s a wonderful program. The one in the Dominican is compressed into ten days. It’s normally a 14-day program.
It was long days. We got up very early in the morning. We had classroom instruction, then we went out to the field and watched a game. Then, we would come back and do our reports and continue working until about 10:00 at night. It really is a fabulous program. The instructors are very experienced. I’ve been in a lot of training programs in my life and this is definitely very well run and I got a lot out of it. There were about 30 students, most of whom were fairly experienced scouts in Latin America. But, there were a couple of Americans there. The program was fully bi-lingual, everything was said in English and Spanish, which for me was helpful because I listened to everything twice. Repetition always helps.
They have a program in Arizona, as well, that they run during the fall league. That is a two-week program, while the one in the Dominican is more like ten days. That was really a fabulous program for me, personally. I have spent a lot of time with our scouts over the past year, but it was good to go to this training and really develop my own skills as a scout and figure out what I thought about a player’s tools and have my own opinion and see the professors react to that and so forth. That was great.
When you were in the Dominican, did you look in on Hector Luna?
No. We were mostly scouting the instructional league, which are the younger players. There is an instructional league down there in November. We spent a lot of time watching the Rockies and the Reds and the Red Sox and those teams. But, they were mostly their 17 to 20-year-old players. Luna was playing in the winter league. I didn’t see him, but I did go see Licey play a game and saw two very good shortstops, (Jose) Reyes from the Mets and Hanley Ramirez from the Red Sox. They played against one another in the game I went to. That was a lot of fun, but that was not a part of scouting school. I did that as my own extracurricular activity.
Have you been to Puerto Rico this winter?
No, I haven’t, but I have been staying in constant touch with our scout there. We had Rick Ankiel and Yadier (Molina) playing there. And I think they both have had wonderful experiences. But, I haven’t had a chance to go over there.
Any comments on whether Ankiel is working on portions of his repertoire or whether he is going all out just as if he was facing major leaguers? His results, while generally good, have been spotty.
Most of what I have heard, since I haven’t spoken with him or his trainer or anyone else about him, but I know that he has had quite a bit of success over there. And, I am sure he has been working on things. After all, that is the point of winter ball. The winter ball clubs like to win, for sure, but it is also a good opportunity for American players who have a chance to do it to go over there and continue to get work, especially since Rick didn’t pitch a full season last year. I am sure he is working on things, but it certainly looks to me like looking at his strikeout to walk ratio and so forth, that he did have quite a bit of success.
And the league is very competitive. It is very interesting how those winter leagues change, though. In November, it is really the younger players. The major leaguers show up around now for the playoffs and the glory part. So, the league gets much, much tougher.
Who has stood out?
We had a young player in the Cardinals organization, a shortstop at Johnson City last year. His name is Juan Lucena. He was playing on our team, the minor league team, down in Venezuela. After only one at-bat, he basically got promoted to the big club, the Tigres de Aragua. He was the starting shortstop there basically all the way up to a couple of weeks ago. He is batting well over .300 and I think he is in contention for, if not a shoo-in to win Rookie of the Year down there and has just been a phenomenal contributor to that club. And that is a club that has Miguel Cabrera and other notable MLB stars and who are now heading for the post-season. So, we’re really excited about Lucena. Not only did he win the Appalachian League batting title and was one of the top hitters in the Cardinals organization last year, but he continued it this winter at a very high level. He was playing until a couple of weeks ago regularly against some very tough competition. Hanging in there. Fielding well and hitting well. That is an exciting winter ball story for the Cardinals.
Any other comments of note on players this winter?
Yes. I ran into (Skip) Schumaker when I was in Venezuela. He also plays for Aragua and had a great season. He then went back to the States to get married. I was just down there last week and I checked in at the front desk and they asked me “How is Schumaker doing?” He is a big fan favorite down there. They really loved him and he had a good experience.
His numbers were great and the fact is, he’ll talk about it next year. I am in favor of more of our players going down there and playing and continuing to develop their skills. I hope Schumaker’s positive experience will rub off on some of the other guys.
Let me shift gears now. A year ago, you were at the very early stages of forming your Advisory Board. Is that something that you were using in a transition basis to help get started with your tools and methods or it is part of your on-going mode of operation?
It’s really part of how we operate. We really operate using a combination of the Advisory Board, some consultants that we have tapped into and the people we have here front office. Some combination of those. Several members of the Advisory Board have been very active, mostly through email communication, but in discussions this entire off-season. Everything from six-year free agents to the Rule 5 draft to major league free agents to recommending trades and all that stiff.
It was a valuable experience. But it comes at a cost of the time it took to set something up like that. And, to work on an Advisory Board like this, you have to dedicate time to it. But, from our standpoint, the return on that time was well worth it. You have some very smart, very analytical baseball people spending a lot of time trying to advise us on how to make our team better. That is very valuable in and of itself.
We did bring everybody here last summer for a three or four day working session in person. That gave us an opportunity to talk about different ways to evaluate players and we were so able to give them some insight on some of the tools we were developing. With a group of very smart, analytical baseball people, the most important part has been the back and forth with email or phone-based dialogue about different players and how we see them and the pros and cons of possible signings, and so forth. That has been a good experience.
Did you select one of the evaluation methodologies from the Advisory Board members, meld them together or come up with your own?
When I spoke to you last year, I was doing a survey of all the different tools out there and trying to evaluate the effectiveness of them, trying to understand how they were built and all that. We’ve developed our own system, which is sort of a combination of a bunch of things. It is a comprehensive system that values the entire game of the player.
A component of a position player’s evaluation will be their defense; not only their range, but their ability to turn double plays and their arm. All that sort of stuff. In fact, to the point where we have been able to isolate the impact an outfielder’s arm has on the ability of the opponent to take the extra base. When you talk about a player who has a great reputation, back a few years ago (Raul) Mondesi and even Larry Walker, those players had such a great reputation for arm strength that players would very rarely take the extra base against them. We can isolate that and extract and figure out how much value that adds to a player.
When you talk about position players, whether outfield, infield or catcher, a big component and an area where we feel we are fairly well along probably compared to other teams, though I don’t know exactly what other teams are doing, is in mixing the defensive contribution with the contribution at the plate. And, the contribution at the plate includes everything. Eye at the plate, ability to take walks, ability to run the bases, ability to steal, ability to hit for power, all of that stuff. So, really what you do is try and figure out all the components of a player’s game that add value and add runs and add wins. Sum it all together and come up with a measure of that player’s contribution.
The trick is that you can actually look back and see how much a player added. And then, of course, you have to context-adjust it for ballpark, quality of competition and all of those things. But, the real trick is figuring that out going forward. That’s always been the magic.
Driving via the rear-view mirror isn’t always that effective…
Exactly. You learn a lot from past performance, for sure. But, there’s a lot to think about when you try to project future performance. And again, when you’re evaluating a prediction method, you can’t look at one or two players in isolation. You really have to look at all the players. In Ron Shandler’s new book, Baseball Forecaster 2005, he spends a lot of time in the introduction talking about how you evaluate different methods of forecasting.
In fact, I have my copy right here and was reading it before we spoke today.
A lot of those thoughts are right on. You can pick apart any forecasting method by selecting one or two players and saying “well, it didn’t work for these guys”. That always can happen. But, really the way to look at it is to look at all the players as a whole and try to figure out how you did. And I do think that Ron’s point in there about a lot of forecasters are nervous about making bold predictions, so they stick to a safe zone. I think that is an important and interesting point, as well. Obviously, we’re less worried about that because we don’t share our predictions, so internally, we have a methodology that is consistent across all players, where age and other things have an influence.
You don’t publish it in a book every year and charge people money to read it…
Exactly, though, we critique ourselves, for sure. And, we’ve already looked back at least season and looked at our predictions to see how well we did. We’re making improvements as a result of that. But, we don’t have to withstand the public scrutiny like the publishers of these books do. We can taka few more bold risks if we truly believe a player is going to improve or decline at a more aggressive rate than some of the publishers would be able to forecast.
So, it sounds like your external relationships with Shandler and Lichtman and others have been successful. Do you plan to continue that?
Yes, absolutely. No doubt about it.
What impact will Mark Johnson leaving the Cardinals have on your work? He was an important part of your efforts, wasn’t he?
Sure. The main reason we hired Mark was to help us build the database with all the data and to set something up that we could use as a tool going forward. He accomplished that and we feel really good about where that stands. Going forward, it is more about how to use the database. So, those are the sorts of skills that we have in house and are going to continue to invest in.
The data is organized. We get it from a very reliable, credible source, where we have historical data going back pretty far. It is clean. One of the big challenges in managing databases, as you can imagine, is just getting the naming convention right. Those were the sorts of skills that Mark was very good at. He has a lot of experience with databases and websites and so forth. He helped us clean all that up.
For example, you might have a particular player’s name in a Lahman database (www.baseball1.com), but that player doesn’t include the middle name and in the major league database it does and in the STATS, Inc. database, it includes his nickname. So, you might have one player that shows up as three different players across three different databases.
That mismatch can really kill you…
It absolutely kills you. It happens for so many players. It happens at the college level, as well. So, those are a lot of the things that Mark helped us work through here in building this database, something that is a very useful tool in our player evaluation at all levels. We feel really good about Mark’s contribution in the time he was here. We have a set of skills and will continue to build on those skills that we will need going forward. It is more about interpreting the data and analyzing what it all means.
Are you going to hire a replacement?
Yes.
Note: Cardinals fans wanting to learn more about Advisory Board members’ methodologies can reference these websites.
Year Two – Part Four
This is the fourth and final installment of my series with Jeff Luhnow, Cardinals Vice President of Baseball Development. The focus here is on how and why the Cardinals make the decisions they do and a request for more understanding from the fans.
What part of your job do you think that fans will understand the least and appreciate the least?
As you know, I have always enjoyed reading the chatter from the fans. I listen to talk radio religiously in the car. In fact, I’m signing up for satellite radio, because I cannot get enough of it. I want to be able to listen to it at home as well. And, I religiously surf all the websites.
I appreciate the fans’ passion a lot. And, I appreciate the educated fans’ out there and the Cardinals, I believe, have among the most educated fans in baseball. I think there are other teams with good fans, but ours are not only good fans, but they have a balanced, objective and informed perspective. All of that is wonderful.
The challenge is that it is easy for a fan to criticize that they see the front office doing or not doing. What is missing is the complete perspective of the tradeoffs that are being made internally. Every single one of these decisions is discussed, evaluated, analyzed and they’re not arrived at very easily. Us giving up three very good baseball players to get a #1 starter was not something that was a slam dunk.
At this point, like last year’s Drew deal, the Mulder trade looks like a good baseball trade that helped both teams. But, time will tell…
Exactly. The weeks leading up to that trade, I was listening to criticisms of the front office; the fact that we lost Renteria, that we lost Matheny, hadn’t signed Clement, hadn’t signed Pavano; we’re sort of sitting on our hands. Maybe had been involved in the Martinez effort, but not enough.
I understand it completely and I know it is going to continue. But, it is a little frustrating, being on the inside and knowing how hard people are working and knowing how many hours Walt puts in on the phone and in person trying to get things done. Then, reading criticisms that are really not warranted.
Now, what can we do about that? Not a lot, because you can’t invite everybody in to see what is going on. But, I do think if your average fan got a snapshot of how hard people do work and how much people do care and how much discussion, both pros and cons, goes into every move, they would realize that the front office is doing everything it can to improve this team.
There are economic constraints. It is not the owners putting a number down and saying “that’s it, guys, because we need to make money, and that’s all we’re going to give you.” That’s not the way it works. By and large, this club spends a lot more money relative to its total revenue than most clubs. I think we have very generous owners; owners who give the front office a lot of running room, but are also interested and involved when they can be and when they feel they can add value.
So, it is like running any business. There are always tradeoffs. And we’re in the public eye so much and the public doesn’t see 90% of the equation that goes into the result, that it is sometimes difficult to read a lot of the criticisms. I understand them, and I used to do it, myself. I do think that maybe the fans should give the front office and ownership more of the benefit of the doubt, because I know these people personally. I know how hard they work and how much they care.
I can guarantee you our ownership does not stop spending because they want to line their own pockets. That couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, these guys live and breathe this stuff. I don’t think they are in it to make money. I think they are in it to win championships. Our owners were so excited last year when we got to the World Series. You could see that was the reward they want, which is the same reward that the fans want.
But, at the end of the day, they have to make the tradeoff decisions about resource allocation and everything else. You could argue that they should go from $88 to $91 million or something like that. But, what does that mean? Taking that $3 (million) out of the R&D? Taking that money out of the Latin program or the amateur draft?
Would fans really make that decision if it was up to them? Because it affects our long-term competitiveness. So, a lot of these tradeoffs or decisions are made appropriately, but you can’t show all of that information to the typical fan.
It’s also a point in time discussion. If I looked at the last two weeks alone, I could be critical. But, I agree that we have to look at this over the long haul. Jumping into the water to sign the first free agent at whatever the price would help answer questions quickly, but it might also be the wrong business decision. You’re basically looking for more belief in the management of the team.
Right. I, for one, came here with no prior history, no biases. I am not an owner. I am not related to anybody in the front office. I am truly an outsider who came in as a fan, really primarily, but also as a business person.
I’d be the first to raise my hand and say something is screwed up, but it’s not. We have a very capable group of people here, all working very hard. These people don’t take vacations. They work long hours. Yes, Walt may be in Hawaii now, but I can guarantee you he is spending 80% of his time on the phone in working deals and talking…
During the winter meetings in Anaheim, I can’t tell you how many nights, we were up at 2am. We were not having pizza and wine. We were up talking about whether or not we should up the offer to so-and-so or whether we should get in on this deal or so forth.
I will say we had two new people at the winter meetings this year. Hal McRae was there and Jim Riggleman was there. It was an absolute pleasure and delight for me to spend time with these two exceptional baseball men. They were involved in everything that we did. It was just amazing to have their perspective. Jim has spent a lot of time in the National League with the Dodgers, Padres and Cubs, so he had a lot of insight into the players we were discussing in the National League. It was great to have Hal there, who has spent a lot of time in the American League. Jim is our minor league coordinator and Hal is our hitting coach. Obviously, they are both great baseball men. I learned so much just being locked up in a room until 2am with those guys. I couldn’t be more excited about those two men becoming a part of our organization.
And, Tony was there all the time, as well. He loves this stuff. He loves being involved. He loves hearing different points of view and talking about players. Tony is analytically-oriented, so he does like to hear the opinions of those who talk about the numbers and the performance and all that, which tends to be me.
We have a great dialogue and we usually end up in the right place because all the points of view are typically represented there, from the coaches’ point of view to the economic point of view to the performance point of view. Every single player we discussed makeup and clubhouse chemistry and what type of person they are.
And I do think one of the legacies of the Jocketty era is that he has put together teams where he does his due diligence on players’ makeup and their ability to play as a part of the team and what type of people they are. He will take a risk occasionally on a player who has a bad reputation.
Like Luis Martinez?
Julian Tavarez had a spotty reputation and fit in perfectly here and contributed quite a bit to the clubhouse chemistry. And Luis Martinez, too. He was a valuable addition to the Larry Walker trade at the end of the day for us. Despite what happened there last winter, he ended up being a good guy from all the reports we heard from the clubhouse in Tennessee.
The character issue resurfaced this past week when the name Julio Lugo came up…
Incidents like that, you obviously look at them and try to understand them. But, what is more important from our front office’s perspective is to talk to people who really know these players as human beings. You get a much better read as to who they are by talking to players who have played with them, coaches who have coached them than you do reading reports in the papers about them. You read an article that somebody was sued for something or had an incident but you learn a lot more by talking with someone who interacted with that person throughout their career.
You know, we try to be objective here, looking at decisions from all angles. But, as always, feel free to set us straight if we misrepresent the facts.
I think it is good. I have always thought your website has a good balance. You have to try to keep everybody honest. In my opinion, you need to have dialog, both pros and cons, on every deal, before, during and after they happen. That’s the only way you learn and the only way you get all the facts on the table and all the opinions on the table. I have no problem with that at all. I think you guys do a very professional and responsible job of talking Cardinals baseball.
It has been a pleasure to talk with you and I especially appreciate how generous you were with your time. Any final thoughts?
We had a very successful year last year and are poised to have another amazing season this year. It’s going to be a lot of fun this season, the last in Busch Stadium. This year, if we get there again, which I hope and expect we will, our bats won’t go cold and we’ll bring that championship here for the last year of Busch Stadium. That is the goal. We’re working as hard as we can to make that happen. It is going to be a fun season in St. Louis. That’s for sure.
