The St. Louis Cardinals might already have made their most impactful move of the winter and it won’t cost them what a league-average middle reliever would have. Their most sweeping personnel changes might not involve a single player.
When the team announced a series of contract extensions for everyone in senior management last month, including a new three-year deal for manager Mike Shildt, it also outlined a series of promotions within the baseball-development group, the analytics wing of baseball operations.
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Six members of the baseball development team received promotions and, since then, the club has been backfilling replacements for their previous jobs.
In October 2018, when Marc Carig wrote this excellent story on New York Yankees executive Brian Cashman and the construction of his club’s massive analytics department, the Cardinals had a middle-of-the-pack analytics presence. By the end of this winter, the Cardinals will have doubled its size from 13 months ago, with 12 full-time employees split into two sub-departments.
One fork of the department, run by newly promoted systems director Patrick Casanta, will mine all the data from the technology the team purchased in the recent season while analysts led by Kevin Seats, a Ph.D.-trained geologist, will turn that data into models that the coaches — from rookie ball to the major leagues — can use to help players get better. The group also will provide models the Cardinals’ front office can use to help guide personnel decisions.
Jeremy Cohen will oversee the entire baseball development operation, with Matt Bayer, Javier Duran and Tyler Hadzinsky also getting new titles and responsibilities.
The total cost of the changes might not equal a raise for an arbitration-eligible player, probably less than $1 million all told, but its impact could be several times as great as a low-level player acquisition. The work, in fact, is perfect for an offseason in which the team already has signaled its lack of payroll flexibility.
“We are invested in having the technology available all throughout our organization and having people who can assist players in leveraging that technology to maximize their performance,” general manager Michael Girsch said.
Next season, the team hopes its efforts to collect, analyze and disseminate all the information it has been gathering will start to have a direct impact on its ability to win baseball games.
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The team viewed 2019 as phase one of a series of new initiatives that included Blast motion sensors, high-speed video and K-vests for hitters and Rapsodo pitch-tracking technology for pitchers and hitters. Now, it is moving boldly forward with the approach, having already hired minor-league hitting coordinator Russ Steinhorn, a close colleague of hitting coach Jeff Albert from their Houston Astros days, to continue to push the technology on young hitters throughout the system. Old-school hitting coaches have in some cases been replaced with those open to the new approach.
“We somewhat did a pilot last year with a lot of stuff,” Girsch said. “We feel comfortable moving forward with that approach.”
Some of the movement is being motivated by a desire to catch up with other organizations. The Los Angeles Dodgers, for example, are now using the old visiting clubhouse at Dodger Stadium to house their massive analytics department and they’re still searching for room to house new hires.
Some of it, too, is simply bowing to the sheer quantity of information. When the Cardinals launched their baseball development department in 2008, they built models off what Girsch called “back-of-the-baseball-card,” statistics. Now, each of the new technology systems generates gigabytes worth of data that has to be gathered and interpreted in various ways.
“I would describe this as a modernization,” Girsch said.
Since all 30 teams now are using many of the same technologies, the brave new frontier seems to be in how teams interpret the data they’re getting. Last season, the Cardinals dealt with occasional tension between some on-field staff and the analytics group, another prompt to improve their data-handling abilities.
The Cardinals reached the National League Championship Series before their relatively anemic offense caught up to them and they were swept in four games. The club is hopeful that a winter spent pushing analytics and technology will pay off in terms of better hitting in 2020.
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“All we’re trying to do is quantify and be specific about what players are doing with their swing and what they’re trying to do with their swing,” Girsch said. “Rather than say, ‘Stay inside the ball,’ with the player not necessarily knowing what that means or how to fix it, we say, ‘Here’s how your hip rotation is,’ or ‘bat path’ or ‘time to contact,’ whatever the case may be. Then, we can adjust it by doing drills, track it and say, ‘Is this moving the direction we want it to?’”
While fans continue to wait for the Cardinals to make the kinds of moves that stoke the hot-stove, they already have overhauled their infrastructure with relatively little fanfare. If the direction wasn’t clear before, it is now. Get in line with technology or kindly step out of the way.
(Photo of Adam Wainwright: Will Newton / Getty Images)
