Cardinals make progress in modernizing their pitching approach. Here’s why it matters
The overwhelming majority of pitchers who have taken big leaps for the St. Louis Cardinals have one overarching commonality: in some form or fashion, they’ve either designed a new pitch or made significant tweaks to one previously in their arsenal.
That sort of development can come through trial and error and conversations with teammates, but it also can come through an intentionally driven organizational process. The Cardinals know they still lag behind their competition in terms of infrastructure, but the pitching department under Dusty Blake is making real strides in finally modernizing an important part of the apparatus.
“In my seat, taking a step back, removing the wins, losses, just looking at progress organizationally, that is a high point,” manager Oli Marmol said last week. “It’s sustainable, and a process I feel like we can replicate moving forward beyond this level.”
Integrating the big league processes into the minor league apparatus is the challenge the Cardinals have to overcome.
Blake has a weekly set video meeting with the minor league coaches in which they go over progress of individual pitchers and review video and data sets. Some of that data is not collected in as controlled an environment as desired, or with the maximum number of parameters, simply because the Cardinals have not yet fully built up the facilities and lower levels which allow them to catch up to their competition.
Those additions will require more – more technology, more staffing, more vertical integration that should start from the day a player signs. A long-desired and long-delayed pitching lab being built at the team’s complex in Jupiter, Florida should be a boon in that department, but permitting headaches and multi-year delays in the construction timetable have pushed the project back as well as scaled it down.
It’s not that they don’t know what they’re missing, but rather that those on the baseball operations side are doing their best to make do with what they have available.
Take, for instance, righty Michael McGreevy, who started the season on the far outside of the available arms who would be considered for big league starts and is scheduled to end it taking two turns in the rotation. On top of generally being a pitch-to-contact pitcher in an increasingly swing-and-miss reliant world, McGreevy struggled against lefties, leaving him vulnerable as a starter to opponents with stacked lineups.
In examining how McGreevy’s pitches already moved, the team was able to work with him to design a cutter. Working at the start of last offseason, McGreevy entered spring still without full comfort with that pitch, but now relies on it heavily.
“It’s been huge to lefties, and just seeing the growth is super encouraging,” McGreevy said. “The first month and a half [of the season] was more like, really, development. Obviously you want to compete and stuff, but it was more like, hey, we’ve got to trust this process with the cutter and what we’re trying to accomplish. Once we were able to kind of catch our stride, it was just back to my normal self.”
That description McGreevy gave – getting back to his normal self, albeit with a new weapon – is precisely the aim throughout this process. Marmol ran through a litany of examples: Ryan Fernandez building a repeatable delivery to sharpen his slider, Kyle Leahy altering the vertical break on his slider by four inches, Matthew Liberatore honing his slider to tunnel off his fastball and reserving his curveball as a result, John King taking velocity off his slider and finding sharper bite, Andre Pallante building a sinker which turned him into a big league starter.
These aren’t improvements that come exclusively from the team, but they come at its direction. Players must be bought in and committed to the process, but that goal is easier to achieve when the process is modern and digestible. Players also have friends throughout the game, and they know which organizations are on top of things and which are not.
The Cardinals, over the last 10 years, have not been. They now find themselves in a position to drastically improve that reputation.
Asked if the way to reach the roots of the organization with those improvements is improved facilities and access to technology, Marmol half interrupted the question and replied, “all of it. No doubt about it. Yes.” The success seen at the major league level has happened in large part because Blake and his staff have around the clock access to the best possible tools. Now it’s incumbent on the organization to provide the same access in Peoria and Palm Beach as exists in St. Louis.
Assistant general manager Gary LaRocque’s retirement opens up the farm director position for modernization that has long lagged, so long as a new hire is accompanied by support from ownership. The large metal shed standing amongst practice fields in Florida was a start, but it was arguably behind industry standards the day it was built.
Investment in the big league facilities have seen immediate returns and allowed for big jumps which didn’t occur earlier in the pipeline. If the Cardinals are able to shorten that curve, they’ll benefit from the pitches it turns out.
