double-birds-blog

[double-birds-blog]

Why Can’t the Cardinals Attract Top Talent?

By Adam Felder

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the Cardinals head into the offseason with a premier super-elite talent as their number-one target. They put on a good show in chasing that talent. For a while, it looks like it might happen.

Then it doesn’t. Some other team nobody counted on ends up taking the player instead.

Max Scherzer to the Nationals. David Price to the Red Sox. Jason Heyward to the Cubs.

And now, Giancarlo Stanton to the Yankees, apparently.

The method by which the Cardinals fell short was different this time, though. In the case of the first three players, the Cardinals got outbid financially (and yes, the Cubs’ offer to Heyward with the opt-out was potentially more lucrative; nobody could’ve predicted he’d turn into a pumpkin upon arriving in Wrigley). That’s irritating enough given that the Cardinals are a team with deep pockets and also one whose relative ranking in payroll has sunk in recent seasons.

But Stanton? This is a new one. Allegedly the Cardinals were willing to take on more of his monster contract than other suitors, but Stanton took a look at St. Louis and decided “no thanks.” He did the same with San Francisco, so it’s not as if the Cardinals were uniquely scorned.

And we’ll never know why Stanton didn’t want to play in either city, but instead for the Yankees. Given his short list, “likelihood of winning sometime soon” was probably part of it. But we’ll never know what was going through his head other than a quite correct “I have a full no-trade and the Marlins want to move me; I have all the leverage here and I’d be a fool to give it up for anything short of an ideal landing spot.”

It does beg the question, however: why isn’t St. Louis an ideal landing spot?

If it were only Stanton this offseason, it wouldn’t really be a question. But Stanton spurning St. Louis for another city fits a recent pattern: premium talent doesn’t want to play for the Cardinals long-term.

That’s something fans of the team for the last two decades aren’t used to.

Ben Godar over at Viva El Birdos did a nice job outlining this, but for most of the Tony LaRussa era, premium talent would regularly ignore the bigger-market coastal teams and settle in the Gateway City for the long term—sometimes for lesser dollars, even.

Mark McGwire had his own NTC that he waived to come to St. Louis in his walk year, then promptly re-signed at below market value. Jim Edmonds didn’t have an NTC, but happily settled in St. Louis after a trade from the Angels. Scott Rolen got unfairly run out of Philadelphia and put down roots with the Cardinals. Matt Holliday left a bad situation in Oakland in 2009 and signed a long-term extension after a midseason trade.

All of these players are Hall of Fame caliber talents (okay, maybe not Holliday; the bar for left fielders is ludicrously high. Hall of Very Good, perhaps?) Godar pointed out that perhaps all of these players weren’t attracted to St. Louis so much as they were attracted to TLR. And even if you’re a Mike Matheny defender (surely you’re not reading this blog if you are, but maybe you got here by accident?), you can certainly admit that #22 is no #10.

I have a different suggestion: perhaps the players who don’t want to settle in St. Louis long term are making that decision because they’ve seen a pattern of how the Cardinals treat their players long term. It’s a pattern that stretches back into the TLR era—but not the Walt Jocketty era, which ended after the 2007 season. It’s a John Mozeliak legacy.

Edmonds? The Cardinals decided they didn’t want to play him into the sunset of his career, and in order to accommodate his desire to play, they shipped him off to San Diego. They got David Freese in the deal so it’s not as if it didn’t work out for the Cardinals, but that has nothing to do with how Edmonds was treated on his way out. Sure, the Cardinals can say they were honoring the player’s wishes by giving him a chance to play every day closer to home, but one can just as credibly point out that the Cardinals shouldn’t have signed Edmonds into his final seasons if they weren’t willing to use him.

Rolen? The Cardinals decided they didn’t want a Hall of Fame caliber talent at the hot corner for years to come and shipped him to Toronto for Troy Glaus. Glaus was actually really good for one season before his body gave out on him, but again that has nothing to do with Rolen’s treatment. (I admit I’m doing some hand-waving here; Rolen had clashed with TLR dating back at least to the 2006 season and it’s entirely possible the club decided it couldn’t keep both personalities wholly independent of Rolen’s aging curve.)

Holliday? The Cardinals decided before 2016 was over that he wouldn’t be coming back and left their star outfielder dangling. Sure, it led to perhaps the most beautiful moment of the 2016 season, when a crippled Holliday somehow one-handed a ball over the right field fence and circled the bases with tears streaming down his cheeks, but it doesn’t change the fact that the Cardinals put an aging player out to pasture rather than letting him finish his career on his terms. Holliday deserved better treatment.

In all of these cases, one can credibly argue that the Cardinals made the right decision from a talent-on-the-field standpoint: the aging curve in MLB is brutal, and by the time a player hits free agency the first time they’re usually past their prime. By the time they hit it a second time they’re a shadow of their former selves.

But one can also credibly argue that from a basic decency standpoint, the Cardinals failed. These players committed to St. Louis, in many cases at below market value. That commitment should have been matched by an equal commitment by the Cardinals to respect the player.

It’s not just those three, though. Take a look at Mike Leake, the “We Tried” consolation prize in the David Price sweepstakes. Leake got a full no-trade clause and a 5-year deal. The Cardinals got rid of him a year and a half into the deal. Again, probably the “right” move for the Cardinals in that it saved them a few million over the next couple seasons, but one that seems kind of gross. After all, the Marlins are regularly shamed for handing out NTCs like candy after their new stadium got built, only to turn around and flip players who made a commitment to Miami.

And then there’s Dexter Fowler, last offseason’s big free agent acquisition. He also got a full NTC. He’s also allegedly unhappy in St. Louis (despite his insistence to the contrary). The Cardinals are also allegedly considering moving him. Moving two NTCs in two seasons, both less than halfway into their deals is an extremely bad look and would almost certainly throw up giant caution flags for subsequent free agents.

Let’s not forget Heyward, who when signing with Chicago said something to the effect of believing the Cubs had a brighter and more stable future than the Cardinals. Demonstrably, he was right, but one also wonders if he just wasn’t willing to settle long-term with a team that’ll look at a player’s final few years with derision and scorn, looking to extract any remaining value it can via a trade.

That same sentiment was echoed by Tommy Pham last season when the Cardinals released Jhonny Peralta: a player who clearly didn’t have it anymore, but also one whose work ethic and professionalism were respected in the clubhouse.

In fairness to the Cardinals, they aren’t alone in this practice. The Boston Red Sox are rather infamous for planting stories in the media to run vilify long-term contracts and run players out of town. Anybody remember the fried chicken and beer “scandal” that dumped Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford? Or the more recent job done on Pablo Sandoval? Or the ongoing efforts to vilify David Price?

But that’s sort of the point: the Cardinals can’t compete with the Red Sox or the Yankees when it comes to media markets—they’re always going to be a lesser light. And even if they can compete in dollars thanks to their new cable contract (and as negative as I generally am about the Cardinals, it’s reassuring that ownership wasn’t going to let money become a stumbling block when it came to Stanton), that’s demonstrably not enough or we’d be celebrating Stanton’s arrival to St. Louis rather than thinking “well I guess maybe Christian Yelich would be pretty good if we look at the WAR vs. salary surplus tables.”

The Cardinals need leadership that’s willing to commit to players over the long term—even as that long-term means absorbing some bad years. Players looking to sign long-term deals presumably factor the organization’s loyalty into their calculus. And for the last ten years the Cardinals largely haven’t demonstrated that loyalty—they’ll cut bait the minute it looks like there’s better value elsewhere.

That’s not something that’s on Mike Matheny, who for all his disqualifying traits is at least loyal to his veterans: see Adam Wainwright’s 2017 season most recently. It’s a problem with the whole organization—an obsession with extracting all possible value from a player before prematurely tossing their used-up husk on the scrap pile.

It’s a practice that’s worked pretty well from a wins and losses standpoint over the last decade, and one that might be the direction MLB is heading thanks to a greater understanding of SABR-driven actuarial tables. Regardless, if that’s the case, the Cardinals are in a ton of trouble in the long term. And we should get used to players being as mercenary as possible and turning their backs on the Gateway City in the process.

Stanton wasn’t the first. He won’t be the last, either.

[double-birds-blog]

Did Mike Matheny Cost Trevor Rosenthal $40 Million?

By Adam Felder

If you’re a Cardinals fan, there are very few reasons to like Mike Matheny. The team has gotten steadily worse on his watch, and despite him now being in his sixth season, he’s seemingly learned precious little about any of the managerial aspects of the game that fans have access to. He might well be the “Leader of Men” in the clubhouse (though given his handling of several players, that’s debatable as well), but in the dugout he’s a complete imbecile.

But we’re treading old ground here. Matheny makes a great punching bag with his constantly inventing new forms of tactical idiocy. Hell, back when I was freelancing, his ineptitude gave me fodder for a column or three every week. The man made me money.

And “making money” seems to be the one thing I admired about Matheny. No, not that he’s good at making money—he’s a schmuck at that, too—but rather that he wanted his players to get paid.

Matheny has said on more than one occasion that he’s aware that saves are the metric by which relievers are evaluated, fairly or unfairly. However meaningless it may be when it comes to constructing a winning team, it’s admirable that Matheny wants to help his players get paid in arbitration and free agency.

Alas, Matheny’s an idiot, and even his best intentions are bungled by his idiocy. In this case, the money lost in Matheny’s real estate bungling has nothing on what he’s presumably cost Trevor Rosenthal.

* * *

Not to belabor the point (though if you want me to, click here), but free agency is the promised land that only a tiny fraction of professional ballplayers ever get to see. For those lucky few who manage to navigate the ridiculous hoops that make up the MLB labor agreement, free agency is a chance to reach the payday they should’ve had for years prior.

Trevor Rosenthal, who’s about to enter his final year of team control, was incredibly close to that payday. Instead, he is having Tommy John surgery. He’s certainly done for the balance of 2017, and in all likelihood finished for the entirety of 2018 as well.

Prior to the injury, he would’ve made about $8.2 million (using the 40/60/80 guideline for the three arbitration years) in 2018, though it’s debatable if that would’ve been in a Cardinals uniform. At the very least, he would’ve been attractive in a trade—some team would’ve happily paid him that salary for a single year as they chased a championship, and then also collected a draft pick when Rosenthal reached free agency as a very good closer.

And make no mistake: as frustrating as Rosey has been to watch at times, he’s a very good closer. Since joining the Cardinals in 2012, Rosenthal has accrued the twelfth-highest WAR among relief pitchers—behind eleven names that are also highly-paid closers:

I think we can all agree that Rosey doesn’t belong in the conversation for the top 5 guys on this list. Jansen, Chapman, and Kimbrel are all otherworldly talents who put up videogame numbers. Andrew Miller doesn’t close—his managers have been smart enough to just deploy him in the highest-leverage situations possible. His four-year, $36 million deal seems a bargain—the result of his both not accruing saves as a reliever, and perhaps his being a frankly terrible starting pitcher at the beginning of his career. One could forgive some GMs for thinking that Miller’s strong stats out of the bullpen before free agency were just a byproduct of small sample size, and that the larger body of uninspiring starting pitcher innings were a better descriptor of Miller’s future results.

Then there’s Betances, who only recently inherited the closer’s role in New York, taking over for the deposed Chapman. He’s similar to Rosenthal in that he walks too many and strikes out a ton, but he’s also much harder to hit. More importantly, Betances hasn’t reached free agency so we can’t really evaluate him.

But David Robertson? You could make a case that Rosenthal had similar numbers before Robertson reached free agency, and he signed a four-year, $46 million deal with the White Sox.

Mark Melancon? Rosenthal stacks up relatively well against him (a higher K/9, though a worse ERA and much worse WHIP thanks to Melancon’s superb control). Melancon just got a four-year, $62 million deal from the Giants.

You might’ve noticed I skipped a couple names on the list: Greg Holland and Wade Davis. I skipped them because the two of them are instructive when it comes to what happens to dominant relievers as they get hurt approaching free agency.

Greg Holland was, without question, an elite relief pitcher for the Royals. He put up a 2.42 ERA and a 12.1 K/9 for the Royals from 2010–2015, notching 145 saves in the process.

And then he got hurt. Holland was part of the elite big three for the Royals in their 2014 World Series run, but was nowhere to be found in the 2015 postseason when the Royals actually won the Series. He missed the entirety of 2016—in much the same way Rosenthal is going to miss the last little bit of this season and likely the entirety of next season—and ended up getting a flyer from the Colorado Rockies: one year at $6 million, with a $15 million player option for 2018. The Rockies were clearly cognizant of the going rate for an elite closer when it came to that option year—$15 million is too low if Holland recaptured his previous form. Indeed, he has, making the All-Star team and leading the league in saves. Holland is lucky—his injury apparently only delayed his payday, rather than negated it.

Then there’s Wade Davis, part of the Wil Myers-James Shields trade that the Royals inexplicably won, as it turns out. Davis signed a team-friendly deal with the Rays back when he was a starting pitcher, exchanging some of his highest earnings potential years for the certainty of drawing a large paycheck should he get hurt (or get bad) before reaching free agency. The Royals moved him from the rotation to the pen in 2014, and suddenly had a dominant reliever. Davis, in turn, came up lame in 2016, hitting the DL with the velocity loss and “forearm tightness” that all too often is a precursor to Tommy John surgery. He ended up traded for Jorge Soler, a toolsy player who hasn’t panned out thus far, and one with a much lesser value than most closers of his caliber fetch (see the package the Nats gave up for Melancon last season, or what the Cubs paid for Chapman).

Point being: a reliever, however good, who has the whiff of injury, is going to make a lot less money when he hits free agency. And Rosenthal, whose numbers put him comfortably in the at least four-year, $60 million range if healthy, instead is looking at best at a Holland-esque package that totals closer to $20 million.

Now, twenty million dollars is still a shitload of money, and it’s not like Rosenthal is going to be in the poor house anytime soon. But it’s also $40 million less than what he’d have gotten had he stayed healthy, and that’s just at the low end. Sure, the going rate for a Rosenthal-tier closer might be $60 million over four years, but that’s during the 2016 offseason. Who’s to say what the rate will be during the 2018 offseason, or if a particularly desperate team wouldn’t overpay him?

* * *

There should be no question that Rosenthal’s injury will cost him at least $40 million dollars. Now the question becomes: who is to blame for that injury?

Maybe nobody is to blame. If there’s one conclusion I can draw from pitchers that get Tommy John, it’s that there’s really no consistent set of behaviors that invariably leads to—or avoids—ligament replacement surgery. Certainly, overuse is a factor—it’s why there’s such a rash of the surgery at the youth level: the human elbow just isn’t made to handle the kind strain pitching puts on it. But a pitcher has to pitch in order to make his living, and the line between “use” and “overuse” is fuzzy and difficult to define. Just ask the Nats, who iced Stephen Strasburg before their hilarious demise at the hands of Pete Kozma in 2012. Maybe Rosenthal goes under the knife no matter what his usage pattern was.

But let’s be honest about this: Matheny’s usage of Rosenthal didn’t help, and he was overused to the point that his agent tried to intervene. The Cardinals allegedly were internally concerned about Rosenthal’s overuse, though the concern wasn’t really borne out in subsequent seasons. Rosenthal was among the league leaders in both appearances and innings in 2015, and only recently fell off the leaderboard in 2017—makes sense, given that he’s now missed a week of service time.

And it’s not as if Matheny doesn’t have a history of burning out relievers to the point of injury and ineffectiveness. You could cobble together a damned good bullpen out of guys that Matheny has overused:

Jason Motte, 2012: 1st in saves and 20th among relievers in innings pitched (not to mention another 8 postseason innings). Needed Tommy John by the following season and has never come close to recapturing his dominant form.

Edward Mujica, 2013: an all-star who reached September with a superb 1.73 ERA over a whopping 57.1 innings, he was completely burned out by the season’s final month. His September ERA was 11.05, and he should’ve been left off the postseason roster entirely. He ended up getting a two-year, $9.5 million deal from the Red Sox and has been entirely ineffective since. His MLB career is almost certainly over given that he couldn’t cut it with the 2017 Tigers.

Pat Neshek, 2014: an all-star who reached late August with a superb 0.81 ERA over a whopping 55.1 innings, he was completely burned out by the season’s final month. His ERA the rest of the season was 6.75, and he gave up the game-tying home run to Michael Morse in the “let’s use Michael Wacha in extra innings on the road; who cares if he hasn’t pitched in a month” elimination game against the Giants.

Kevin Siegrist, 2015: he led all of MLB in appearances, but looked completely gassed by the postseason. Gave up a series of bombs to the Cubs (most notably the one by Kyle Schwarber which may not have landed yet) in the NLDS. His velocity—and as a result, his effectiveness—was notably down that October, and never recovered. It’s continued to dip in 2016, and further dipped in 2017. He’s spent time on and off the disabled list ever since.

Seung-Hwan Oh, 2016: an all-star who made the eighth-most appearances and seventh-most innings among relievers, despite the fact he’d come nowhere close to those totals since his rookie season in Korea. Charitably, he’s been mediocre in 2017, with an awful 1.3 HR/9, and a pedestrian K/9 of 8.7.

Seth Maness, 2013–2015: Despite being called up a ways into the 2013 season, Maness ranks eighth overall in appearances from 2013–2015, just one slot ahead of our man Rosenthal. Maness was never a power pitcher—his whole shtick was absurdly-good control, but even a finesse pitcher needs to have some measure of velocity. By 2016, Maness didn’t. His low-90s heater dipped into the upper 80s, and while the elbow surgery he needed wasn’t precisely Tommy John and is apparently medically interesting, he still hasn’t recovered. He allowed a whopping 14.9 H/9 during a brief tenure with the Royals this season, and has spent most of his time in AAA.

Stack those six guys up with Trevor Rosenthal, and if they’re all healthy and effective, you have the best bullpen in baseball by a long shot. Again: entirely possible some or all of these guys would’ve run into trouble even with more conservative usage. We don’t know. But Matheny certainly has a track record of burning his best pitchers out.

And now we add Trevor Rosenthal to the scrap heap. We’ll never know for sure if his overuse contributed to his injury, but we know that his overuse was intentional on Matheny’s part—he was trying to help. And we also know that Rosenthal’s injury has cost him at least forty million bucks.

It makes Matheny’s real estate bungling look positively pedestrian in comparison.

[double-birds-blog]

The Cascade of Failures Involving #RallyCat Is the Most 2017 Cardinals Thing Possible

By Adam Felder

Wednesday night, something magical happened for the Cardinals. Down 5-4 late-ish to the Royals, the club was about to squander a golden scoring opportunity when Yadier Molina strode to the plate with the bases loaded.

Yadier Molina shouldn’t be batting fifth. Or Dexter Fowler fourth. But hey, as Mike Matheny errors go, at least Fowler and Molina should both be playing, so him screwing up the order in which they batted is a comparatively minuscule error.

But against Peter Moylan, who eats righties for breakfast (just ask Paul DeJong, who flailed helplessly and struck out on three pitches a couple minutes prior), a below-average hitter like Yadi wasn’t terribly likely to be a hero. He took a pitch, getting ahead 1-0.

And then the magic happened.

An adorable kitten ran out onto the field. Neither the TV broadcast nor the radio broadcast correctly identified it at first, but I can hardly blame Mike Shannon or Al Hrabosky for not making out what it was at first. But eventually: pretty obvious it was a cat. It trotted past Lorenzo Cain in center field, who wanted nothing to do with it, settling around the warning track in center.

A member of the grounds crew, Lucas Hackmann, ran out onto the field to corral the cat. His technique was…well…not so bright, as anyone who’s worked with animals can attest. Cats can scratch and bite and it hurts. Kittens in unfamiliar surroundings while chased by some random dude…they’re gonna scratch and bite too.

None of this seemed to dissuade Hackmann, who dutifully scooped up the animal and began trotting toward the seats. He got a couple scratches and bites for his troubles, ultimately settling on grabbing the cat by the scruff of its neck and holding it as far from the rest of his body as possible. It worked, as he made it off the field and into…well, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Back to the magic.

Moylan, whether unnerved by the delay, or just because baseball is random and sometimes weird things happen, left a pitch center cut for Molina. And Molina, while not a great hitter, seems to be entering the Old Man Strength phase of his career, as he roped it for a grand slam that was obviously gone off the bat. Cardinals up 8-5, everyone’s happy, Yadi takes a curtain call.

Thanks, Rally Cat!

Solid bullpen work mopped up the victory, putting the Cardinals inexplicably 1.5 (and now 1) games back of 1st despite being a thoroughly disappointing team all season.

And while Zach Duke, Seung-Hwan Oh, and Trevor Rosenthal were salting away the magical comeback, the Cardinals had already fucked up the larger moment off the field.

They lost the cat. Not because he got away from the employee, but because of an extended cavalcade of stupidity where any single person could have prevented it, but failed.

The only thing that would make this more 2017 Cardinals is if the club explained it couldn’t retain the cat because doing so would forfeit a draft pick.

Let’s run this down, shall we? Apologies in advance for linking to the advertising garbage pile that is STLToday.com, but the reporting here is necessary.

The Cardinals employee, Hackmann, who scooped up the cat? He’s fine, by the way, thank goodness. He’s also kind of foolish for thinking he could just approach a random scared animal with no equipment, or a box, or a towel, or anything at all, and not get torn up a bit. But his next step after getting the cat off the field was not to quarantine the cat, or get it somewhere safe, or ask someone what to do.

He instead took it outside to the Musial statue outside the ballpark, and let it go so that he could go seek medical treatment. Which is pretty damned stupid, but I can’t blame the guy too much. He had no idea what to do, the club (by its own admission a day later) had no procedure for stray animals on the field–despite the fact “cat on the field” happens a few times each season across MLB, including an event involving the Cardinals only a year ago. So “ouch, my hand freaking hurts; let’s just let the cat go back to hanging out at the ballpark since nobody told me what to do, I need to go get this looked at” seems an understandable, if negligent action.

So now we’ve got a stray cat that lived in Busch Stadium back to being a stray cat that lived in Busch Stadium (pretty sure it wouldn’t be at all difficult for a kitten by the Musial statue to get back to wherever it hung out previously). Which is a missed opportunity to find a home for a cat that had people lining up on social media to adopt it, and that’s pretty bad. But this is the 2017 Cardinals, so of course it has to get stupider, with more missed opportunities.

A local fan, Korie Harris, ostensibly wanting to care for the cat—but given her actions more interested in being a Famous Cat Lady—went looking for Rally Kitten. Harris went outside, found the cat, scooped it up, and allegedly planned to adopt it. Cool!

Wait, no; she’s a fucking idiot. Here is what you do when you plan on adopting a stray cat: you put the cat in a carrier, or a box, or something. You put it in your car. You go home. You schedule an appointment with the vet as soon as you’re able.

Here is what she did: she grabbed the cat. She…posed for pictures with random people around the ballpark, apparently enjoying her newfound fame. She lied to ballpark security that this was her cat that’d gotten away. (Why club security didn’t do anything about the idiot who brought her cat to the ballpark remains a mystery; another systems failure in a series of cascading failures.)

Then, I guess when she got tired of mugging for the camera, she tried (allegedly) to get the cat home. Except the cat ran off.

Billy Madison knew what to do when an animal you care about runs off, and he was an idiot–it’s the whole premise of the movie. Thus, this lady is dumber than Billy Madison. She says she looked for it for hours, but she also says she then went to a local bar to tell the tale of the one that got away.

I recognize that this is one of the dumbest and least important things to get all “a ha!!!” about, but let’s think about this. The cat incident happened around 9 p.m. local time. She clearly spent some time mugging for the camera and otherwise being a dumbass, so let’s say the cat gets away from her around 10 p.m. If she looked for it “for hours,” she’s getting to her local bar around midnight, and telling tales for a couple hours until closing time. I mean, I guess it’s possible, and far be it from me to impugn someone’s right to hang out at a bar on a Wednesday night until the wee hours of the following morning, but which is more likely: she’s a late-night bar patron, or she’s just a goddamned idiot who made up a story so she wouldn’t look quite so bad while getting the fame she so clearly desired?

So now we have a cat that has actually seen its station in life get worse, since now it’s a stray cat in some strange-ass neighborhood it doesn’t know. Way to go, lady. And you definitely made yourself look really smart and dedicated by posing for photos of you…throwing dry cat food in bushes the following morning as if the cat’s a Pokémon and gonna magically appear because of your dank kibble lures.

Failure by the club to properly plan for an infrequent (but certainly plausible) event, failure by an employee to think ahead while understandably concerned for his own well-being, failure by that employee’s superiors for not recognizing the moment and making sure their new viral star was looked after, failure by club security for not realizing an idiot fan’s lie, and failure of an idiot fan to not be an idiot. Well done, everyone.

But wait! There’s more! The Post-Dispatch, never one to fail to sugar-coat one of the organization’s screwups, applied the same level of scrutiny to the idiot fan. The article I linked above should be headlined “Local idiot endangers animal in attention grab; is a loser.” It’s not.

And then, lastly, there’s the club and how it handled the cat. During the broadcast, it started to be obvious nobody knew where the cat was, but that didn’t stop Dan McLaughlin from reporting the Humane Society had picked it up (this is almost certainly not McLaughlin’s fault; presumably someone told him the Humane Society picked it up). There were dramatic shots of an empty cat carrier during the broadcast. Surely it’d ferry our star off to its forever home, the implication goes! Meanwhile, kitty is either staring at Stan or being carried around by a buffoon. Or hiding in the bushes from the aforementioned buffoon.

Which brings us to Thursday morning, when the Cardinals issued their press release on the status of Rally Cat. Plainly stating they had no idea what happened to the cat, that Harris lied to them, that they’ll come up with a stray animal procedure in the future to prevent further screw-ups, and then closing with a pun that’d make Piers Anthony cringe.

It was a shitty press release. No apology. No admission of culpability. No “Hey, we’re an organization where Tony LaRussa had huge sway for over a decade; maybe we could make a donation to his charity, or we could encourage fans to adopt their own rally cat/dog/rabbit at their local shelter.” Just “This lying fan; we’ll make a process, hope someone finds the cat lol, oh and also go Cardinals baseball!”

A tone-deaf and indifferent response from a tone-deaf and indifferent organization. The only thing that’d make it better is the club capitalizing on Rally Cat merchandise even while its indifference had endangered the life of the eponymous animal.

Oh wait, they already did that.

The St. Louis Cardinals aren’t evil or malevolent. They’re just really damned stupid, constantly. The organization is just a big dumb giant striding about and making things worse without noticing or caring about its community. In the grand scheme of things, one kitten is about the smallest and least consequential victim, but it’s not as if the club hasn’t been indifferent about human flooding victims, or victims of drunk driving despite two players dying of it, and a high profile manager getting popped for DUI during his tenure.

This stupid team, and its stupid fans that enable this stupid behavior.

…I hope they win tonight.

[double-birds-blog]

On Continuing to Root for the Cardinals

By Adam Felder

Earlier this season, SBNation ran a contest asking baseball fans to write why they rooted for their team. I don’t know who actually won. I read some really good submissions from Cardinals fans on Viva El Birdos, though, so I’m hoping one of them got something neat out of the contest.

I didn’t submit anything. I couldn’t really come up with a compelling hook that made my Cardinals fandom special. Despite most evidence to the contrary, I really try to keep my mouth shut and my fingers off the keyboard if I think I don’t have something interesting to say, so I sat this one out.

That’s not to say I didn’t at least start writing something to see if it’d go somewhere. The closest I came to a compelling narrative was my love of the Cardinals community, meaning all the various people I’ve interacted with and in some cases befriended due to nothing more than a shared love of the birds on bat. It’s some six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon level of detail not worth getting into here, but I’m relatively certain I’m not where I am today career-wise if not for my engagement with a bunch of really awesome people in the St. Louis Cardinals baseball community.

My love of this baseball community is having to do an awful lot of heavy lifting of late, because I’m genuinely not sure if the organization itself—that is, St. Louis Cardinals, LLC—is worth rooting for. Frankly, I’m disgusted with the organization and that has far less to do with the quality of the on-field talent than it does the off-the-field shame this organization provides.

Which leaves me with a question I never thought I’d have to ask: do I believe it’s defensible for me to be a Cardinals fan in 2017?

Let me pause here real quick to make clear that the emphasis in the above question is the “for me.” Fandom is a personal choice, and so long as you’re not beating the hell out of some poor bastard for daring to wear the jersey of another team, I’m not gonna begrudge your rooting for your team of choice.

That said: for my own part, I don’t agree with the “keep politics out of sports” sentiment that so many fans hold. I don’t know how one can look at all the various municipal budget-destroying stadium deals, the NFL/US Military symbiotic sponsor relationship, the appointment of team owners to ambassadorships, President George W. Bush’s explicit mention of and intervention on performance-enhancing drugs in MLB, MLB’s antitrust exemption, etc., and conclude that sports are apolitical. Sports are big business, and big business is political. It just is, and you’d have to be willfully blind to not see it.

That said, I suspect the “keep politics out of sports” sentiment is less a function of not seeing the relationship and more one of recognizing it, but just wanting to enjoy a ballgame and not be inundated with all the awful shit that permeates the news in 2017. I get that. It is exhausting to look at all of this and try and stay engaged and informed. Thus, I’m not going to think less of anyone who just wants to watch a Cardinals game and not deal with the news cycle—though given the performance of the 2017 squad, I’m not sure how relaxing that approach would be anyway.

Point being, the question I’m asking is a personal one, and not one I expect anyone else to apply to him or herself. The awesome people I talk to in the Cardinals community will continue to be awesome should they continue to support the team in light of its indefensible actions. Viva El Birdos itself, which has a fairly strict “no politics” rule, is managed and edited by some of the smartest and most insightful writers baseball has to offer.

All that said, am I okay with rooting for this organization?

I don’t see how I can get myself to “yes” here. The Cardinals’ shameful and tone-deaf failure to credential an Outsports editor to cover Christian Day at Busch Stadium is only the latest in a series of failures that demonstrate the organization is uncaring at best and malevolent at worst.

On the off chance someone’s reading this who doesn’t know the backstory: the Cardinals invited 2011 postseason hero Lance Berkman to speak at the event. Berkman has some pretty reprehensible views on LGBTQ rights, and has used his celebrity to push specific anti-LGBTQ legislation.

If the Cardinals wanted the day (which has existed in some form for decades; I distinctly remember it growing up in St. Louis) to be a celebration of faith, they could have turned to any number of Christian players on the active and former roster. Adam Wainwright, for example, has been a featured speaker at this event in the past, and if he harbors beliefs that stray into the controversial/political realm, he’s smart enough to keep them to himself. There are any number of Cardinal players past and present who are generally awesome people of faith. And then there’s Berkman.

For the “but free speech” crowd: Carlos Martínez’s salacious social media likes were also him expressing himself, and the club came down on that. That the Cardinals invited Berkman was a failure of research. That the Cardinals didn’t rescind the invite after his views were obvious to all was a far worse mistake.

Still, that mistake could have been interpreted charitably as the Cardinals recognizing they’d stepped on a landmine but thinking they’d make the situation worse by intervening. Indifference and cowardice aren’t exactly virtues, but they’re a lot better than endorsing discrimination.

By failing to credential Outsports, the Cardinals made clear this wasn’t indifference. It was actively endorsing discrimination. It also proved the organization to be staffed by tone deaf morons. Had the Cardinals credentialed the editor, here’s what happens: he goes to the game. He writes his story. Life goes on. It’s a lot like what actually happened minus the tagline of “Cardinals explicitly refuse to credential Outsports.com” that got all the attention. It’s discriminatory, but also just really damned tactically stupid.

The club’s excuse that “blogs and websites” don’t get credentials is utterly laughable. It’s 2017, and if you hadn’t noticed, print journalism has been in its death throes for years. (Truth be told, so is a lot of digital journalism; all these organizations laying off writers in favor of a video-only strategy that will blow up in their faces isn’t a good sign at all.)

Further, it’s not as if Outsports is some tiny little operation nobody has heard of. From the metrics publicly available, the site gets somewhere in the neighborhood of half a million people to it each month. For context, stltoday.com, the website for St. Louis’ local paper, is somewhere in the two million range. I don’t know what subset of that two million is purely for the paper’s sports coverage, or more to the point, the paper’s baseball coverage.

Point being, Outsports.com has a large enough digital presence that “we don’t credential blogs and websites” is a moronic policy. Arguably, it’s not a policy at all and just an attempt to create a media-friendly excuse for “we don’t want your kind here.” After all, it’s 2017–the lines between print and digital don’t really exist anymore, and the Cardinals have no problem credentialing folks like Craig Calcaterra and Jeff Passan, whose NBCSports and Yahoo Sports platforms are purely digital.

I don’t know Chris Tunno, the person who rejected the credentials request. But from what I can see of him on Twitter, he’s, uh…not the person that a club that wasn’t negligent would want as their mouthpiece.

I don’t want to make this about Tunno, though. I don’t know the dude and one person shouldn’t have the ability to ruin my fandom. And, indeed, there are any number of other aspects about this organization that are awful.

As near as I can tell, the organization did essentially nothing in response to Tyler Dunnington’s minor league teammates openly discussing the best way to kill gay ballplayers. Sure, there was a lot of talk about this being “taken very seriously,” but unless the club managed to run a stealth investigation and not talk to a local media that seemed entirely disinterested, it was performative outrage. Nothing happened. I don’t expect billion-dollar organizations to champion civil rights, but I expect them to at least give a damn and take action when employees and members or a discriminated-against group are actively facing death threats.

And then there’s the failure of the club to leverage its power to aid flood victims this past spring. Chase did a much longer discussion of the issue here, but the short version: the St. Louis Blues and even the River City Rascals used their ability to reach fan communities to help with flood relief. The Cardinals, with a much larger ability to help, did not. The Cardinals are a St. Louis institution; it’s shameful that the club didn’t intervene to be worthy of that title, instead choosing to be another aloof business.

I’m treading on already-covered ground when I bring up the club’s failure to disavow (or say anything) about the moronic “Darren Wilson/David Freese” racists outside Busch in 2014, and that there’s clearly a way to not be an asshole when it comes to this sort of thing.

Point being, for a “civic institution,” the Cardinals’ indifference-at-best, endorsement-at-worst approach to business is a shameful one. It’s hard to root for an organization that clearly cares so little about its fans. It’s a lesson we have to keep learning over and over again: the #brands are not our #friends. If “corporations are people,” they’re the most indifferent and aloof of all people, concerned only with making money rather than the well-being of the community in which they make that money.

Even on the field, the club seems content to cash in on mediocrity, with no clear plan in place for improving. Mike Matheny, the man who was hired with no managerial experience and who manages as such despite being in the job for six years, has a three-year contract extension. John Mozeliak and the newly-promoted Mike Girsch preside over a thoroughly mediocre team that…did literally nothing at the trade deadline, the paralysis all-but-ensuring another year like the current. Seriously: how the hell could the club do nothing?

There’s not much to root for here. I don’t like the management and operation, and the on-field product is pretty terrible too. To reward it with my time and attention doesn’t seem defensible.

And yet I’d give up quite a bit were I to quit the Cardinals. This is, present grotesqueness aside, the same organization that had team President Mark Lamping send teenage Adam a bunch of parking passes in downtown St. Louis so I could afford to attend the season tickets I’d saved all summer for (but was too stupid to realize that parking cost money too).

By wins and losses, it’s a better team than the late-90s McGwire-and-Lankford-and-scrubs team that I watched with my brother when we weren’t even on speaking terms and really only had Cardinals baseball left to mediate.

Hell, there are even a couple still-in-decline-but-I’ll-always-be-a-fan holdovers from the miracle 2011 squad. I can only hope that I have the same fond memories of Tommy Pham and Carlos Martínez in ten years as I do of Yadi and Waino.

But the biggest thing I’d miss, and the thing that will still keep me coming back? It’s the same community. I’m not sure how to interact with Cardinals Twitter and the writers and bloggers I’ve befriended if I’m not at least following the Cardinals. We don’t always talk about baseball, but that’s the common thread through which all other conversations start.

These are invaluable relationships. Several of those bloggers helped apply enough pressure on the Cardinals that the team hosted its first ever LGBT day this season, prying action out of the indifferent monolith. Perhaps if I’m lucky and skillful enough, my continued presence in this community will help steer the organization in a less-crappy direction, both on-field and off.

I can’t just walk away despite all the reasons the club’s given me. But, if there’s anyone out there reading this in the organization…my god, do better.

[double-birds-blog]

Things Are On Track to Get Even Worse

By Chase Woodruff

As the 2016 season got underway, the Cardinals were feeling disrespected. Yes, they’d suffered a portentous NLDS loss to the Cubs the previous October, and then stumbled through a disappointing offseason, but from the top of the organization on down, they were adamant that they wouldn’t be relinquishing their NL Central crown without a fight. “I like the moves that we’ve made,” said Mike Matheny. “There are some players here who have done some pretty special stuff.” Asked about the “aging core” narrative that had sprung up over the winter, Yadier Molina didn’t give an inch: “We’re just getting started. We’ve got more experience. We stay in shape. We know the game better. We’ve got the advantage.” The divisional race “[is] going to come down to the end,” predicted Matt Carpenter. “I don’t think our plan is to fade,” said Bill DeWitt. “That is not in our mindset.”

The Cardinals, of course, finished 2016 with 14 fewer wins than the year before, losing the Central to the Cubs by 17½ games and missing the playoffs for the first time since 2010. Things have gotten even worse in 2017, with the club sitting at or below .500 for most of the season thanks to a sputtering offense, an unreliable bullpen, and an absurd, off-brand fundamentals crisis. Just a year and a half after vowing that the Cards hadn’t lost any ground to the Cubs, and a few months after assuring fans they’d improved in the offseason, John Mozeliak is now publicly fretting about the team’s “attitude and culture” and conceding it may be time for a bit of a rebuild. “Watching a game like yesterday,” he told Jenifer Langosch last week, “it’s tough to justify going out and solely playing for this year.”

In the 18-month period over which the party line shifted from “We’re competing for the division” to “We may punt on this season,” it’s been difficult to detect any corresponding shift in how the organization actually goes about its business. Opening-day payroll dropped to 14th-highest in the league, its lowest rank since 1999, and a high-profile pursuit of Luis Robert ended with the club getting outbid by the White Sox. Jaime García, Matt Adams, and Marco Gonzales have been shipped off in a series of minor trades. A couple players got DFA’d and a coach was “reassigned,” but that came after a three-year extension for Mike Matheny and just before two big promotions for Mozeliak and Mike Girsch. For a team whose own self-assessments have fallen so far so quickly, and who have spent the season talking about “accountability” and bruiting “shakeups,” the Cardinals have sure seemed intent on sticking to business as usual.

That could change over the next few days, and fans have every reason to hope that it will. The greased skids of the trade deadline may represent one of the best opportunities the Cardinals will have for a while to alter the franchise’s present course—and it’s getting harder and harder to see how that course isn’t one of continued entropy and decline.

It’s true that in a proximate sense, the Cardinals have suffered from some bad luck in 2017; according to BaseRuns, they deserve a record five wins better than their current 50-51 mark. But luck is layered, and underlying the club’s solid run differential are an unusual number of performances that, for a variety of reasons, are probably not sustainable. Tommy Pham has almost singlehandedly redeemed the season, but no one’s penciling him in for 600 PAs at a 144 wRC+ clip next year. The same goes for a bounceback season from Michael Wacha and what has looked for long stretches like a career year for Mike Leake (not to mention the overall health of the rotation, generally). A year after Aledmys Díaz’s rookie campaign, plenty of caution regarding Paul DeJong is in order. Jedd Gyorko is probably not the team’s second-best hitter.

Sure, any one or more of these performances could be sustained into next year, and there are other players it’s fair to expect will improve. But Lance Lynn will be gone and Adam Wainwright’s halting decline will continue, with post-Tommy John rookie Alex Reyes expected to pick up the slack. Matt Carpenter and Dexter Fowler will both turn thirty-two. Yadier Molina will be starting six times a week and forcing himself into the five hole by looking at his manager funny.

As always, there are no certainties, and in the long run the club will eventually begin to reap the benefits of its well-stocked farm system. But without major improvements to the 25-man, the Cardinals are going to be counting on an awful lot of things breaking their way to end up as a better team next year, and the median outcome is probably one that’s slightly worse.

Between now and next April, the trade market is the only way major improvements to the roster are going to happen; DeWitt is already pleading poverty, and there aren’t many worthwhile upgrades in this winter’s free-agent class, anyway. The Cardinals don’t need to be deadline buyers in the classic sense, but at some point, if they want to be a better club next year and beyond, they’re going to need to add major-league talent to the roster in a blockbuster or two. At the very least, trading Lynn for a prospect who could be flipped later on seems like a good idea—but in the chaotic environment of the trade deadline, there are surely plenty of opportunities that won’t necessarily exist in December, and Mozeliak and company shouldn’t pass on any of them lightly.

It’s time for the Cardinals to take some risks, to make some bold moves, to chart any other course but the cautious, complacent hedging that got them to where they are now. Otherwise all the talk of shakeups and accountability will have been hollow, and fans can look forward to a near future just as middling and miserable as the present—and beyond that, who knows? A well-regarded farm system isn’t a guarantee of anything, and anyone expecting any big additions from the 2018 free-agent class is, to put it mildly, kidding themselves. Eighteen months ago, neither the Cardinals nor most of their fans expected things to get this bad. The last thing they should think now is that things can’t get worse.

[double-birds-blog]

Shut Up About Carlos Martínez’s Temperament

By Chase Woodruff

Six weeks ago, Carlos Martínez took the mound at Yankee Stadium and just didn’t have it. In the first inning, thanks in large part to a sinker that was going all over the place, he threw 36 pitches, walking four and allowing a run on a wild pitch. Then he dug in and battled, overcoming his lack of command to put up four scoreless innings while walking a total of eight batters and striking out eleven. He worked around a costly Jose Martínez error at first base in the third and escaped a bases-loaded jam to end the fifth. The offense gave him no run support at all, managing just two hits through the first six innings, and then Mike Matheny inexplicably sent him back out for the bottom of the sixth on 106 pitches; gassed, he recorded only one out and allowed two more runs before Matheny finally gave him the hook.

It was an exasperating, heroic, absurd solo performance from one of the team’s best players, who seemed to put a struggling ballclub on his back and carry it as far as he possibly could. Broadcasters have a whole set of trusty clichés to describe an outing like this. You’re not always going to have your best stuff, they’ll say. It’s about grinding it out, and knowing how to adapt, and doing your best to give the team a chance to win. That’s what separates good pitchers from great ones.

But those aren’t the clichés that the Fox Sports Midwest broadcast team reached for that day. “Sometimes you watch Martínez,” said longtime play-by-play announcer Dan McLaughlin, “and he’s very animated on the mound. You’re not seeing that at all here today.”

“It’s an interesting point,” said his partner, Tim McCarver. “When he’s animated, he’s more effective. He’s happier. That’s his…feeling.”

At 25 years old, Carlos Martínez is the ace of the Cardinals’ staff. Since he became a permanent member of the starting rotation at the beginning of the 2015 season, only Matt Carpenter has provided more value to the club, according to fWAR. He has been a consistent and reliable presence at the top of the rotation, posting a FIP over 4.00 in only two of the fourteen regular-season months he’s pitched in (one of which was the very first). He has overcome the tragic death of his close friend Oscar Taveras and done extensive work to help those living in poverty in his native Dominican Republic. Over the offseason, he and the Cardinals agreed to a $51 million extension that cemented him as a core component of the organization’s future and will likely keep him in the Birds on the Bat through the 2023 season.

Despite all this, Martínez has never managed to escape a particular frame that the team’s broadcasters, most notably those at FSM, are determined to impose on him: constant evaluation of his temperament, his emotional state, his mannerisms and behavior. Halfway through 2015, Bernie Miklasz criticized this tendency to treat Martínez like “some sort of hyperactive, temperamental, overgrown toddler,” and nearly two years later, nothing has changed. Carlos is a grown-ass adult and the team’s best pitcher, and yet when he’s on the mound, talk of mechanics and pitch selection and opponents’ talent and simple bad luck all take a backseat to reductive, paternalistic attempts at amateur psychoanalysis.

McLaughlin, later in the Yankees game: “You don’t know what’s going [on] inside the head of Carlos Martínez, but we’ve seen him throw a lot, seen him pitch with the animated way that he goes about it. You hate to say a guy is disinterested, because you don’t know.”

McCarver: “I think pensive is the word that could be used. You don’t want to see Martínez lethargic in any way.”

In his next start, on the road in Milwaukee, Martínez had another rough first inning, allowing a one-out, three-run homer to Travis Shaw, then issuing two walks before finally retiring the Brewers’ eighth-place hitter. On the call was FSM analyst Al Hrabosky, who has spent years critiquing Martínez’s displays of emotion despite his own well-documented history of embarrassing on-field lunacy. Faced with a player who was now doing the opposite, Hrabosky was eager to jump on the new narrative.

“One thing I noticed in that [Yankees] start,” he told McLaughlin before Martínez had thrown his first pitch, “is, you know, we’ve always tried to say he’s got to calm down a little bit, not be so animated—I thought he was too calm.” After the first-inning home run, he continued: “I think what you said, ‘disinterested,’ is a pretty accurate description of what we’re seeing from Martínez. And that’s disturbing.”

Then, once again, Martínez put his early struggles behind him. As he retired his tenth batter in a row to end the fourth inning, McLaughlin sounded mildly impressed: “He’s starting to get locked in.”

It was a highly revealing sequence of events and commentary. Here are some images of a “disturbingly” “disinterested” Carlos Martínez:

And here are some images of a “locked-in” Carlos Martínez:

Having trouble noticing a difference? That’s okay, here, maybe putting them side-by-side will help:

Two innings in the same game, from the same pitcher, with the same demeanor. The only difference is that he had good results in one and bad results in the other, and the crew at Fox Sports Midwest—and consequently many Cardinals fans—is seemingly incapable of ascribing bad results by Martínez to anything other than a lack of mental fortitude.

So deeply ingrained is this tendency that even a relatively new broadcaster like Jim Edmonds has quickly fallen into the pattern. In Martínez’s most recent start, another strong performance at Coors Field, he allowed a run on a Charlie Blackmon triple in the third inning. It was the first run of the game, on a quintessential Coors extra-base hit by one of the hottest hitters in the majors, but Edmonds didn’t hesitate about where to place the blame. “The concentration level,” he said. “[Martínez is] cruising along, and all of a sudden loses a little bit of concentration out on the mound, and you look up and it’s one-nothing. … I think when he starts cruising, he gets a little lazy, a little lackadaisical, and then all of a sudden, bam, he’s down by a run.”

Let’s face it: there is an unavoidable racial dimension to how we evaluate and discuss different players. Empirical studies have repeatedly proven that subconscious racial bias affects the way broadcasters and sportswriters characterize athletes; white players are disproportionately described as having positive mental attributes (intelligence, hustle, etc.) that allow them to overachieve and outperform their physical shortcomings, while nonwhite players are disproportionately described as having mental deficiencies (poor temperament, lack of focus, etc.) that get in the way of their natural athletic ability. As I’ve tried to make clear when writing about these issues in the past, to acknowledge this undeniable pattern in the way players of different races are talked about is not to slander any particular broadcaster as racist—but that shouldn’t be where the conversation ends.

In the case of Carlos Martínez, it’s possible that the constant talk of his supposed mental shortcomings has less to do with received cultural stereotypes about hot-blooded or lazy Latinos than a simple communication issue. Martínez wouldn’t have gotten to where he is today if he didn’t have the baseball IQ and work ethic to rival any other Cardinals starter, but while broadcasters and reporters can talk at length and in great detail with Adam Wainwright about his curveball grip or with Michael Wacha about the kinetic chain, the language barrier makes such conversations with Martínez much more difficult. Color commentary abhors a vacuum, so in place of a nuanced look at strategy or mechanics, fans are treated to simplistic judgments about emotions and temperament.

Regardless of why it’s the case, Danny Mac and his various partners in the booth—every single one of whom, let’s note briefly, is white—need to find some better ways of talking about Martínez. He’s not a kid anymore, not even by baseball standards, and it’s well past time for broadcasters to stop treating him like one, and start treating him like what he is: the team’s best, toughest, most dependable starting pitcher.

[double-birds-blog]

What Are the Cardinals For?

By Chase Woodruff

Heavy rains caused devastating floods across parts of Missouri, Illinois, and Arkansas last week, including in and around St. Louis, where the Meramec River crested at record levels and inundated homes and businesses in communities like Pacific, Eureka, and Fenton. Many smaller rural towns, lacking levees, manpower, and other resources, were hit even harder. At least 13 people were killed, and nearly 10 million people remained under a flood warning heading into the weekend. In many areas the effects are reported to be as bad or worse than the floods that hit the region in late December 2015, which damaged or destroyed over 7,000 structures in Missouri alone and totaled hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and cleanup costs.

Among the organizations helping with disaster relief efforts were local sports teams. The River City Rascals partnered with the St. Louis Area Foodbank and are offering free tickets to opening weekend in exchange for donations of bottled water. The Blues, who were in the middle of a heated playoff series against the Nashville Predators, teamed up with the Red Cross and turned Friday night’s Game 5 at Scottrade Center into an ad-hoc benefit of sorts. They even coordinated with the Predators to raise additional funds from fans in Nashville.

“We realize,” said Blues CEO Chris Zimmerman in a press conference on Friday, “that sports franchises in our cities play a really critical role: one, to bring attention to suffering, in this case, and the needs of our community; and on the other side, seeing how we can step up, both financially and in other ways to support the efforts.”

The Cardinals, who were rained out three times at Busch Stadium in the week leading up to the floods, don’t appear to share Zimmerman’s view of the role sports teams should play in their communities; the club hasn’t said a word about the flooding or how to help on its website, in a press release, on any of its social media pages, or through any other medium. With over twice the online audience and nearly three times the annual revenue, the Cardinals dwarf the Blues in influence and resources, and yet the smaller organization was the one that worked to make an impact last week, while the larger one couldn’t be bothered to do so much as tweet a link to a donation page. The contrast didn’t go unnoticed.

On its own, the club’s lack of immediate attention to a natural disaster stretching across the heart of Cardinals country, while conspicuous, may not be massively consequential. But it would be easier to excuse this kind of lapse if it weren’t consistent with a pattern that the club has fallen into over the last several years: the Cardinals, for all their on-field success and deeply-rooted popularity, have become a woefully aloof and disengaged organization. In an increasingly connected world, the club seems more out of touch than ever, and in turbulent times for the city and the country, it’s failing to pass even the most basic tests of social responsibility.

In its most benign form, the club’s lack of engagement manifests as simple traditionalism and outdatedness, as was the case with the long-standing shoddiness of its approach to social media, which it finally took steps to improve somewhat last year. Even with the improvement, the Cardinals still seem much more comfortable with the top-down, one-way traffic of television, radio, and print than they ever have with the looser, more democratized and interactive modes of communication that define the internet and new media. (It’s no coincidence that when it comes to what remains of an “independent” old media, the club knows it can count on near-universally favorable and deferential coverage.)

Far more troubling, regardless of medium, is the organization’s extreme unwillingness to take a stand when a situation demands it. After Tyler Dunnington spoke out about experiencing homophobic abuse during his time in the Cardinals’ minor-league system, management pledged to investigate; more than a year later, it hasn’t said another word about it. It’s irrelevant what the club’s internal reasoning for its silence on the matter is; the failure to address Dunnington’s allegations publicly sends an unequivocal message that the organization is not particularly bothered by what he alleged.

Similarly disgraceful was the organization’s silence when protesters were subjected to racist abuse from Cardinals fans outside of Busch Stadium in October 2014. Even as the incident made national headlines, the club couldn’t be bothered to release a simple statement affirming the right to civil protest and condemning the abusive behavior from fans. Again, regardless of intent, to ignore such a high-profile case of offensive fan behavior is in effect to condone it.

Contrast the Cardinals’ repeated failure to do even the bare minimum in declaring bigotry unacceptable with Orioles COO John Angelos’ response to the unrest that gripped Baltimore not long after similar scenes in Ferguson. Replying to a radio host on Twitter, Angelos spoke up in defense of protestors, whom he called “innocent working families…whose lives and dreams have been cut short by excessive violence, surveillance, and other abuses of the Bill of Rights by government.” It’s impossible to imagine anyone in Cardinals management displaying even a fraction of that level of social awareness and conviction.

Of course, while words can make a real difference when coming from an institution as beloved and influential as the Cardinals, they’re ultimately less important than actions. The club deserves credit for the impact it makes in the community through various charitable programs, but there’s reason to think that impact could be a lot larger than it is. The team’s philanthropic arm, Cardinals Care, distributes about $500,000 in grants to various nonprofits each year; that’s half of what the Cincinnati Reds distribute annually through a similar program and only a quarter of the $2 million total the Kansas City Royals handed out in 2016.

There’s no reason that the Cardinals, in a city with a large African-American population and a long history of racial inequity, shouldn’t make it their goal to have the very best RBI-style initiatives in the country. Instead, they are by all accounts merely average, if not below. Information about St. Louis-area RBI efforts is hard to come by; unlike many other teams, the Cardinals don’t have a dedicated page for the program on their website. Nor have the Cardinals shown any interest in operating their own Urban Youth Academy, as teams like the Reds, Royals, Phillies, and Astros do. And as the Post-Dispatch reported last year, many of the fields in North St. Louis built with funds from Cardinals Care are opened with ribbon-cutting photo-ops but soon fall into disrepair—all of which makes the Cardinals’ “charitable” contribution of $500,000 to Mike Matheny’s POWERplex project in an affluent West County suburb all the more objectionable.

There are plenty of other steps the Cardinals could take to avoid falling behind the rest of the league when it comes to social responsibility. They could do what 13 other MLB clubs did last year and hold an official LGBT theme night at Busch Stadium. They could aggressively expand their Spanish-language communications staff and broadcast program. They could use the leverage that comes with their new 30% equity stake in Fox Sports Midwest to begin to reverse the network’s abysmal diversity record.

But for the Cardinals to truly be an engaged, active presence in the community requires more than simply playing catch-up with the rest of the league—it means having the vision and resolve to get ahead of the curve and pioneer new ways of making an impact. The unfortunate reality is that St. Louis does not lack for problems waiting to be solved, dialogues waiting to be had, good works waiting to be done. Few institutions are in a better position to help lead the community in facing those challenges than the Cardinals could be, if they wanted to. To paraphrase a thought from Derrick Goold: not long ago, the organization had the foresight to embrace a bold, innovative overhaul of its scouting and development strategy; why shouldn’t it make a similar commitment to a forward-thinking approach to social issues and civic engagement?

Otherwise, we’ll be stuck with the cold, corporate, transactional version of the Cardinals we have now—unmistakably a Harvard MBA’s idea of what a baseball team should be, with KPIs and benchmarks and a balance sheet in place of courage and creativity and a conscience. It’s worked for the DeWitts and their ownership group up to this point, of course, and it may work for a while yet. But detached and disinterested institutions don’t exactly inspire devotion, and so if the Cardinals continue not to care about genuine engagement with their fanbase and community, don’t be surprised when for more and more would-be fans, the feeling eventually becomes mutual.

[double-birds-blog]

Matt Holliday Got Screwed

By Chase Woodruff

There will come a time this year when Matt Holliday won’t look quite like the player he does now. He won’t have posted a 174 wRC+ in his last 39 plate appearances. He won’t be getting rave reviews from the famously fickle New York City media. He may pick up an injury or two.

There will also be a point—probably, maybe, dear God I hope so—when the Cardinals’ lineup doesn’t look quite like the bizarre, helpless mess that it often has in the first couple weeks of the season. There’s still time for Jhonny Peralta to turn it around. There’s still time for one or both of Randal Grichuk and Kolten Wong to finally assert themselves as key everyday players. There’s still time for Mike Matheny to abandon the Matt Adams experiment, or for John Mozeliak to further coax and contort the roster into something Matheny can’t find a way to misuse.

If and when all of this happens, though, what many Cardinals fans are going to feel on a visceral level this weekend will still be true: kicking Holliday to the curb late last year was an incredibly poor piece of judgment, unfair both to the player and to fans, and an obvious product of two of the organization’s most damaging and artificial limitations.

Barely 48 hours before the clock ran down on a frustrating 2016 season, the Cardinals let it be known that they wouldn’t exercise Matt Holliday’s $17 million club option for 2017, kicking off a surreal weekend during which fans were left to figure out on their own what no one would come out and say (that he almost certainly would not return to the Cardinals at all), emotionally process the departure of a franchise great, and watch a highly dramatic if somewhat haphazard series of farewells—all in the heat of a down-to-the-wire wild-card race in which the Cardinals came up one game short.

It was a lot, and for some of us there was an added layer of confusion. Why had the possibility of a new, reduced deal been so clearly ruled out? What kind of talks had been had? Was the club not willing to meet Holliday’s demands? Was he simply determined to test the free-agent market before making a decision?

On the Monday following Holliday’s final farewell, Derrick Goold, in a live chat at STLToday.com, offered some clarification—that is, if you want to call it clarification at all. Here’s the exchange in full:

QUESTION: Did ‘Mo’ approach Holliday with an alternative offer and he said no? Or did that conversation not happen?

GOOLD: It did not happen. The injury scuttled that plan, those planned conversations. Holliday went to Mozeliak this past week and wanted clarity on his future. Mozeliak gave it to him. A farewell weekend was planned.

Follow-up: The fact that Matt Holliday was taken out by an inside pitch that broke his hand is the reason we bailed on him? That sounds pretty lame, especially a guy with his track record. Is that to say that if he had not been hurt, we would have gone after him on a reduced deal?

GOOLD: Exactly. My stance/reporting on this has not changed through all of these chats. Waaaaay back in spring it became apparent that the Cardinals did not plan on exercising his option, and both sides wanted to have a conversation about folding it into an extension of some type that would give the Cardinals a reduced rate in the coming year and Holliday a chance to retire as a Cardinal.

The injury happened. The conversation didn’t happen. It’s a brutal business.

Despite Goold’s matter-of-fact tone, nothing about this explanation made any sense. Holliday’s fractured thumb was the kind of injury that could’ve happened to any player, young or old, and there was no reason to think it would significantly impact his outlook this year and beyond.

Holliday’s performance throughout his thirties had already consistently defied the aging curve, and even after two rough, injury-shortened seasons, various projection systems were confident that he could continue to be a solid contributor to a major-league team. He’d finally gotten around to playing a little first base, and there was every possibility of one of the best and most reliable hitters of the last ten years having a true bounce-back season.

The Yankees soon picked Holliday up on a one-year, $13 million deal. It’s almost impossible to believe that he wouldn’t have taken less to stay in the city he and his family had called home for the previous seven years, but regardless of whether or not the Cardinals would’ve had to match the Yankees’ offer, abruptly closing the door on an extension wasn’t just a poor decision—it was strange and out of character for an organization that had never lacked a willingness to hedge its bets and explore all options.

And, again, the attempt to pin this all on a poorly-timed broken thumb simply doesn’t pass the smell test. It’s far more plausible that Holliday became a victim of Mozeliak’s need to grapple with Cardinals’ two biggest organizational shortcomings: the Matheny handicap and Bill DeWitt’s spending allergy.

The optimal role for Holliday on the 2017 Cardinals would’ve had to have been dynamic, evolving based on his performance, his health, and where there was opportunity or need in the lineup—requiring a manager with both the critical-thinking skills necessary to effectively balance these concerns and the leadership ability to navigate the egos and clubhouse politics that may have complicated things; Mike Matheny has neither. Mozeliak went out of his way this offseason to build Matheny the most one-dimensional and un-mismanageable roster possible, and the Cardinals have already played over 27 of their 79 defensive innings this season with Matt fucking Adams in left fucking field.

And yet it seems entirely possible that Mozeliak would’ve rolled the dice if Holliday’s price tag had been equal to what the Cardinals are paying José Martínez (to be a younger, lesser right-handed bench bat/outfielder/first baseman) or Tommy Pham (to wallow in Memphis and sub-fave his employer). For all the talk of the money spent on free agents Dexter Fowler and Brett Cecil over the winter, the Cardinals’ payroll is at roughly the same level it was last season—and lower when adjusting for revenue growth—thanks to the departures of Holliday, Jaime García, and others. An extra $13 million or so would’ve been no burden whatsoever to the Cardinals, who have increasingly failed to spend to their level in recent years.

Even if Holliday wouldn’t have fully justified $13 million on the field—though at this point, it’s a decent bet that he will—there was value in him sticking around and potentially ending his career in the city where he’d been a star for so many years. Instead, we had to watch him celebrate his 2,000th hit in pinstripes, and are quite likely to have to watch him mash the hell out of Cardinals pitching for a mercifully short weekend at Yankee Stadium. Wherever the story goes from here, we shouldn’t suffer any illusions about why it had to be this way.

[double-birds-blog]

Mike Matheny, a Right-Wing Billionaire, and an Islamophobic Grill Salesman Have a Plan to Change the World

By Chase Woodruff

There is a crisis among America’s youth, a clear and present threat menacing our most precious hearts and minds, and the men of the BASE Foundation are determined to stop it, even if they’re not entirely clear on what it is.

“I’m concerned, quite frankly, about the culture of youth sports in America,” said Rick Sems, a local bank executive and the foundation’s new president, last week. He was speaking to a small crowd of donors at Ballpark Village, at a fundraising event emceed by Cardinals broadcaster Mike Claiborne.

If you’ve never heard of the BASE Foundation, don’t worry—you’re far from alone. It’s a small St. Louis-based nonprofit that offers a program, Baseball and Softball Education (or BASE) Training, designed to teach young ballplayers good sportsmanship; by its own account, a few dozen kids per year have completed the training since the organization was founded in 2006. But the BASE Foundation has plans to get much, much bigger, and soon.

“We’re talking about young lives,” said the next speaker, Cardinals manager Mike Matheny, who is involved with the foundation’s new project in a visible but publicly unspecified role. “We’re talking about changing the culture that we live in through sports.”

“As we create something that helps these kids, we’re changing the world that we live in.”

That “something,” it turns out, is the POWERplex, a $55 million youth sports facility in suburban St. Louis’ Chesterfield Valley, a few hundred yards from the levee that once broke to submerge the valley under 20 feet of water and a mile down the road from the property Matheny once went bankrupt on. Plans for the POWERplex include a permanent 225,000-square-foot sports dome, a smaller temporary dome to be raised every winter, and a 2,500-seat outdoor stadium—in addition to a hotel, restaurants, office and retail space, an urgent care center, a 300-seat auditorium, and other amenities. If all that doesn’t sound quite ambitious enough, don’t worry—it’s just phase one, with an as-yet-undetailed second phase scheduled to follow soon after.

The POWERplex is a joint venture of the BASE Foundation, the Buck Innovation Group, and Big Sports Properties, which is to say it’s the brainchild of broadcaster-turned-nonprofit-executive-turned-consultant Dan Buck, the man behind all three entities.

“What the BASE Foundation is going to achieve in the next three years,” said Buck at last week’s fundraiser, “is going to be truly one of the most remarkable things we’re going to ever see in American sports.”

To hear Buck tell it to the Ladue News in 2015, it was an on-air rant about the evils of Section 8 housing vouchers—“this multibillion dollar program…that just holds people down and disincentivizes work,” he says of the rental assistance that keeps millions of low-income families in their homes—that led the president of one of St. Louis’ most well-known charities to ask him to ditch his broadcasting career for nonprofit work. One way or another, Buck left his KTRS hosting gig in 2003 and went on to spend eight years as CEO of the St. Patrick Center, a Catholic organization that provides services to the city’s homeless.

Buck later joined SSM Health Care as vice president of philanthropy, before leaving in 2015 to start his own consultancy, the Buck Innovation Group, or BIG. The group’s mission, according to its website, is “to improve your business results and organizational performance through improved process, bold innovation and new idea development.” It’s unclear whether any businesses ever took BIG up on the offer; its only known project to date was The Manly Man Show, a product-showcase infomercial that ran for five episodes on Fox Sports Midwest last year.

Buck filed articles of incorporation for the BASE Foundation in Missouri in 2006, and has been pitching BASE Training to local youth teams ever since. By all appearances, it consists principally of material that teaches kids such lessons as how to “Honor the R.O.O.T.S. — Rules, Officials, Opponents, Teammates, and Self.” It’s difficult, however, to find much public record of the organization’s activities before last year; Buck only registered the domain for its website in December 2015. The IRS granted 501(c)(3) status to a separate “Base Foundation,” a Delaware nonprofit registered under the NTEE code for “Amateur Sports,” in July 2016.

Since plans for the then-unnamed POWERplex—and yes, the name is indeed an acronym for “Performance, Opportunity, Winning, Education, and Recreation”—were announced last October, the BASE Foundation has undergone some dramatic changes; its board has expanded to sixteen members, including Sems as president and local sports-development Sisyphus Dave Peacock as chairman. Buck no longer appears to be involved with the foundation in an official capacity; his name has been scrubbed from its website.

It’s unclear when Buck and Matheny’s paths first crossed, but there’s no doubt that it was a match made in heaven. Matheny, of course, had made the leap up to big-league managing after a post-retirement stint coaching Little League, during which time he’d authored a long, fastidious neighborhood listserv post that later became known as The Matheny Manifesto. Buck told the Riverfront Times last year that the book-length version of the Manifesto, published in 2015, “will be brought to life through a curriculum-based classroom program that will take place at this facility.”

If you’ve never had the pleasure of reading it, rest assured that the Manifesto is the perfect holy text for the BASE “curriculum”: headstrong, urgently written, and almost entirely devoid of substance. Mike Matheny has a message, and you may not like the message, but you need to hear the message, and the message is…players should hustle, and parents should be good parents, and Wouldn’t It Be Tight If Everyone Was Chill to Each Other.

A similar fervid, overdetermined vagueness permeates what little information about the BASE Foundation’s philosophy is offered on its website. For one short introductory paragraph it is relatively straightforward in describing the crisis it sees in youth baseball: a “great game…being disrespected on multiple levels,” from “angry parents” to kids’ “lack of respect” to “a glaring problem with ballplayers unable to control their negative emotions.” But if you’d like virtually any other details regarding the organization that wants to raise $55 million to open one of the largest indoor youth-sports facilities in the country—testimonials, perhaps, or sample materials, or evidence for its claim that sports psychologists helped develop its program—you’re out of luck.

The question that hangs over all of this is so obvious that not even Matheny can ignore it: “People ask me, why would you be involved in this? Why is there a need?”

“And the why is,” he said, gesturing beyond the donors gathered at Ballpark Village, “as you look out those windows and you see that stadium, the truth of the matter is, this is the greatest baseball city in the world. And when you have the greatest baseball city in the world, you should have some of the greatest baseball facilities in the world.”

This is an admirable sentiment; it would be terrific if young ballplayers in St. Louis had access to great facilities. It would be terrific, for example, if Ozzie Smith Field, near Vashon High School, had proper grading and drainage so that a little rain didn’t turn its infield into a swamp. It would be terrific if many of the other such fields in North St. Louis, built with funds from Cardinals Care and opened with feel-good ribbon-cutting ceremonies, didn’t soon similarly fall into disrepair due to a lack of resources.

There is a theoretical version of the BASE Foundation that, rather than waging a nebulous war on a supposed crisis of poor sportsmanship, is engaged in a battle actually worth fighting: reaching underserved kids in impoverished, predominantly black neighborhoods in North St. Louis and North County, providing resources and stability to communities that often lack them, helping reverse the decline in African-American participation in baseball in a city where the sport is a lingua franca, a civic religion.

That’s not the version the city is going to get, and as is often the case in St. Louis, the proof is in the geography. Chesterfield is about as far west as the suburban sprawl of West St. Louis County goes, less than four percent black in a metro area that’s nearly 20 percent black overall, and reachable by public transit from communities like Ferguson or Florissant only through an hours-long odyssey. Building the POWERplex within city limits, or even in a more central County location, could have sent a strong message about the degree of inclusivity and civic unity it aims to achieve; its planned address sends an equally strong message in the other direction.

Don’t assume, though, that this was simply the invisible hand of the market guiding Buck and his associates to the most efficient possible location. The most conspicuous speaker at last week’s fundraiser was Mark Harder, the St. Louis County Council Member representing District 7, which includes Chesterfield and other similarly lily-white suburbs like Ballwin and Wildwood.

“I know what you want to hear tonight,” Harder told the crowd. “All I can say at this point is that I’ve been working with [County] Executive Steve Stenger and the County staff on a multimillion dollar package to upgrade the infrastructure to this property.”

He’s referring to water and sewer service, which currently don’t extend to the area of the floodplain where the POWERplex is planned; according to journalist John Hoffmann, Buck had initially told the Chesterfield City Council it would take $4 million to cover these infrastructure costs, then revised the estimate to $13 million. Harder’s comments would seem to contradict Buck’s repeated assurances that no public funds would be directed towards the project—as well as his public confidence that POWERplex is a done deal.

Obtaining County funds isn’t the only hurdle the POWERplex has left to overcome, either. The Army Corps of Engineers must conduct testing on the floodplain before approving the construction plans. And in order for Chesterfield to move forward with a plan to purchase the land and lease it to the BASE Foundation, Buck must secure an initial round of $23 million in binding financial commitments.

While it’s light on details regarding exactly what the program, you know, does, the BASE Foundation’s website is positively overflowing with information on how you can help them reach that $23 million goal. For the price of $200,000, up to nine “Field Founders” will get one of the facility’s turfed fields named after them. “POWERplex Heroes” will receive a place on the “Heroes Wall” in exchange for a $100,000 commitment, and the “Champions Walkway” will feature both large bricks (honoring $30,000 commitments) and small ones ($5,000). A mere $1,500 gets you on the “All Star Wall of Gratitude,” while $100 is only good enough for the “MVP Video Monitor.”

It’s important to emphasize that these are not investments that the BASE Foundation is asking for, but charitable donations. Dan Buck would like very much for some very rich people to give him enormous sums of money, please—not to provide adequate facilities and equipment to young athletes in low-income areas, not to help bridge the tragic divide between kids growing up in North St. Louis and those in West County, but precisely to exacerbate it. He’d like to devote his life to reciting banalities about sportsmanship to bored 12-year-olds, and he’d like to do it at a lavish suburban sports complex with a zip line and a climbing wall—for which his for-profit LLC, Big Sports Properties, will serve as property manager.

Cardinals Care has chipped in with a $500,000 contribution, but the largest donors to date have been the Sinquefield family, who have become notorious figures in Missouri politics over the last decade by spending heavily to promote right-wing economic causes. Matheny is a close friend of Rex Sinquefield, having lent his support to another of Sinquefield’s pet causes, the Chess Club and Scholastic Center of St. Louis. In honor of the family’s $6 million donation to the POWERplex, young athletes who play at the facility will be taught at the “Sinquefield Center for Human Development.”

If his views on Section 8 housing weren’t enough of a clue, Buck’s political leanings came across quite clearly in a call-in appearance on a local radio show in late 2015, as flagged by the Riverfront Times last year. In voicing his opposition to allowing Syrian refugees to enter the country, Buck called the Koran “frightening” and Islam “an entire religious doctrine that promotes jihad against the founding religion of our nation.”

And as the donors at Ballpark Village bid on big-ticket items in a charity auction—“The IRS always believes a thousand dollars,” Buck cajoled the crowd—there was little doubt what kind of room the speakers were playing to.

“In the words of our president, this is going to be huge,” said Harder—one of the County Council’s two Republican members—as he wrapped up his remarks, prompting laughter and applause. “Let’s go POWERplex!”

I don’t have kids and have never coached youth sports; my only prolonged exposure to that world came as a young player, years ago. So maybe I’m wrong to doubt that the “culture of youth sports in America” is in crisis. Maybe I’m wrong to think that kids are still kids, and parents are still parents; that people love their kids, and sports are a competitive environment, and sometimes that can lead to friction and drama and angst; that the way to deal with this is for adults to be adults, and to communicate with each other, and to try to be good parents to their kids; and that slideshows full of ham-fisted acronyms and trite platitudes about sportsmanship are neither necessary to address this nor capable of making much difference.

Maybe I’m wrong, also, to see the BASE Foundation’s worldview as not merely ancillary to but thoroughly the product of the reactionary politics of its backers. Maybe I’m wrong to think that J.D. Vance-style moralizing about “culture” and “character” isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on; that the best way to make a positive impact on young people’s lives is to provide material aid to the kids most in need of it; that if you want to “change the world,” you should do that; and that if you want to build and run a fancy sports complex in an affluent white suburb, you should just say so.

The clock is running on the POWERplex, with proof of the initial $23 million in donations due to the city of Chesterfield by June 1st. There’s the matter of the County infrastructure funding, and the Army Corps of Engineers study, and then, if all goes well, the hard work of turning big promises and glitzy architectural renderings into reality. But I don’t doubt Dan Buck can pull it off, if for no other reason than that in the world we live in, those who are in a position to ask favors of men like Rex Sinquefield and Mike Matheny and Dave Peacock rarely fail. One way or another, I think, Buck will get a chance to prove me wrong on all of this. Then again, maybe I’m wrong about that, too.

[double-birds-blog]

Picking Up the Pieces

By Chase Woodruff

Here’s a needlessly elaborate version of a hypothetical first proposed to me by sometimes Double Birds contributor Adam Felder: On Sunday evening, just before the Cardinals open the regular season against the Cubs at Busch Stadium, an Omnipotent Time-Traveling Baseball Genie appears before you in a blinding seraphic vision. He offers you a deal: he will guarantee that the Cardinals win 100 games and the World Series this season, but they will do so at the cost of having traded away or released every single player in the organization over this past offseason. Tell the genie to snap his fingers, and the Cards will open play on Sunday night with an equivalently talented roster full of random major-leaguers—some you like, some you don’t, some you’ve never really thought about or even heard of—and will go on to be World Series champions. If you want, the genie will wipe your memory to maximize your enjoyment of their title run, and there will be no adverse effects on the organization’s long-term outlook.

If there were ever a time that Cardinals fans should want to take this deal, it’s now-ish. The Big Three who formed the competitive heart and cultural soul of the team for almost a decade are nearing the end of the line; one of them is already gone, and the other two will be before long, one way or the other. There’s some above-average young talent on the roster and plenty of promise in the farm system, but nothing that quite yet resembles a new core. The Cubs look to be in a dominant position in the NL Central for years to come, and few things would be sweeter than immediately answering their first world championship in 108 years with the Cardinals’ twelfth.

Still, there’s no way I take the deal. For me, the experience of watching the Cardinals and the thrill of seeing them win—whether it’s a World Series or a division title or a getaway-day game against the Brewers in mid-June—has too much to do with the connective tissue between the present and the past. I’d ultimately rather watch Alex Reyes and Carlos Martínez and Matt Carpenter and, yes, a mobility-scooter-riding Yadier Molina try to battle their way into contention in the next few years than watch a guaranteed world champion full of players I’ve got no history with. My love of the Cardinals depends on the sense—even if it’s really more of an illusion—that there’s a naturalistic order to who they are and how they came to be, that they’re not just an arbitrary collection of interchangeable run-production and -prevention machines.

This is not everyone’s perspective. It’s probably not most people’s perspective, these days. Free agency forever changed the way fans conceived of their relationship to the local nine, and much in the last few decades has reaffirmed that shift. The internet turned fantasy sports into a phenomenon and put everyone in charge of their own dream team. The sabermetrics revolution made heroes out of general managers and stats geeks and punctured many of the game’s old player-driven pieties. Games like The Show and Out of the Park allow us to simulate running our favorite clubs to astounding degrees of depth and realism. The democratization and fragmentation of media have brought fans into the conversation like never before; to follow a baseball team in the age of blogs and Twitter and text lines is to swim in a sea of nonstop amateur analysis and debate about how the team is run.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this, of course. The reserve clause thoroughly deserves its place on the ash heap of history. Advanced stats have helped us better understand the game than ever before, and the digital counterculture that grew symbiotically with them, from Baseball Prospectus to FanGraphs to the SB Nation network and beyond, is home to some of the best baseball writing you’ll find anywhere. No small part of the fun of modern baseball fandom comes from thinking like a GM would: agonizing over lineups, wishcasting trades, debating extensions and call-ups and position changes and defensive shifts and future free agents. There’s a reason why I’ve spent an unhealthy percentage of my spare time in the last ten days on OOTP 18 saves and fantasy drafts.

But if you’re looking for signs that baseball fandom’s new analytics-driven, GM-centered normal is starting to bump up against its own limitations, and maybe twist into something more sinister, you can find them. Outflanked by smarter, nimbler outlets on the analysis front, traditional media have retreated into roles as access brokers, peddling scoops and laundering spin for front offices and skewing the conversation back towards the interests of management and ownership. Sabermetrics evangelists created a movement just popular and sacrosanct enough for Major League Baseball to co-opt, and the communal DIY ethos of its mid-aughts heyday has given way to the era of MLB Advanced Media’s opaque, proprietary Statcast™, doled out on MLB Network or by approved media outlets in doses just frequent enough that you don’t forget they’re Powered by Amazon Web Services™.

You could see the results in something like last month’s World Baseball Classic, which managed to achieve a degree of success despite the steady stream of cold water being poured on it by team executives fretting about injury risk and spring-training disruption and the pundits and columnists dutifully echoing their concerns. For many in and around the game, the obvious excitement and emotional stakes for players and fans of every country not named the United States—not to mention some great baseball—weren’t enough to make the tournament anything more than a novelty, if not a nuisance. One thing it was, of course, was an opportunity to roll out the newest Statcast™ metric, Catch Probability™, which will grade outfield catches on a scale from One Star Plays™ to Five Star Plays™. If you don’t think we’re headed for a world where Randal Grichuk can make a Papa John’s™ Four Topping Catch™ Measured by MasterCard™ Presents Statcast™ Powered by Amazon Web Services™, I’ve got a Papa Slam to sell you.

If modern baseball has become a cult of the front office, then Cardinals fandom is one of its most radical sects. That was evident even before this spring, when a substantial minority of Cards fans began talking themselves into being okay with needlessly showing Yadier Molina the door, but it’s certainly unmistakable now. Few fanbases in sports are more reliably willing than we are to trust the process, to accept that Mo Knows, to prove that we are the savvy dispassionate experts to every other team’s fickle emotional mob. There are different strains of this frame of mind out there—dull Cardinal Way moralism for some, I Fucking Love Sabermetrics triumphalism for others—but they’re united by an abiding faith in the system, in upper management, in the virtues of technocracy.

It wasn’t always this way, not even in the Moneyball-chic days of the mid-aughts. Walt Jocketty built some of the best Cardinals teams of any of our lifetimes by trading aggressively for the elite veteran talent other teams couldn’t afford; whether in spite of or because of the star power he assembled, he never had much of a profile of his own. Even after he’d become a casualty of the new era represented by Jeff Luhnow and the MV3 had shrunken to an MV1, the formidable twin presences of Albert Pujols and Tony La Russa remained most central to the Cardinals’ identity.

That all changed over the course of a single offseason, though, and both the Cardinals and their fans leaned hard into their new self-image as the team that actually definitely didn’t want Pujols back, anyway, thanks. It helped immensely, of course, that the club was finally starting to reap what had been sown by Luhnow—who, ironically enough, had left at the end of 2011 with the other two—and results were very good. They hired a room-temperature bowl of oatmeal as field manager and it didn’t seem to matter much. The legend of the 2009 Draft Class grew. Michael Wacha, compensatory draft pick for the loss of Pujols, embodiment of the Cardinals’ drafting and development wizardry, pitched us to the World Series and we all said, See?

As recently as a year ago, many of us still wanted to believe that that particular golden age hadn’t ended yet, that the Cardinals were still the team of the Wacha who’d outdueled Clayton Kershaw twice and not the Wacha who’d been trotted out by the bowl of oatmeal to give the season away a year later. The Cubs looked to have surged ahead over the course of an offseason or two in part by doing what the Cardinals wouldn’t, hiring a competent (if profoundly obnoxious) manager and spending aggressively on top-tier free agents to augment their cost-controlled young talent. But plenty in St. Louis still managed to convince themselves to trust the system. “TIME TO SHINE,” proclaimed the Post-Dispatch on Opening Day 2016, after one of the most disappointing offseasons in living memory. “Grichuk and Piscotty are the centerpiece of the Cards’ plan to ramp up offense and stay on top with homegrown talent.”

It’s one of the great fallacies of our time, in baseball and elsewhere, that a well-intentioned managerial class can serve a set of interests distinct from those of ownership and capital. The Cardinals have been enormously successful in persuading fans that their emphasis on “homegrown talent” and “internal options” and aversion to spending big on the free-agent market had everything to do with sound front-office strategy and nothing to do with the club’s league-high profit margins. It’s not at all dissimilar to corporate elites’ success in convincing an entire generation of young people that temp jobs without benefits and plummeting homeownership rates are just part of The Flexibility That Millennials Want. So maybe it’s not a surprise, then, not entirely coincidence, that in the space of a week, 2016 taught us two indelible lessons about the terrible shit that can happen when we place too much faith in technocratic managerialism. The system won’t save you, because that’s not what the system was designed to do.

And now we move forward; it’s Todd Ricketts’ world, we’re just living in it. Dexter Fowler arrived to remind us of all the ways in which a player can be valuable that don’t show up on FanGraphs or a front-office spreadsheet—and to spell it out quite explicitly in case anyone missed it—but the truth is that not much could have changed in the Cardinals’ offseason, and not much did. We may or may not have to wait until 2018 for a test of whether Bill DeWitt is willing to adapt to the new reality, but Fowler wasn’t it, and Edwin Encarnación probably wasn’t, either.

If the Cardinals somehow manage to put together a run in 2017, it will be an especially gratifying season, because it will mean that some combination of the many things we want to be true actually are: that Aledmys Díaz is for real; that Carlos Martínez is a true ace; that Fowler can produce like he did last year; that Lance Lynn is Lance Lynn again; that Stephen Piscotty can be not just good but great; that Waino is not finished; that Yadi is going to live forever. If it all breaks right, though, for once the credit shouldn’t go to the system, or the process, or the Way. The fun won’t be because this was all part of the plan, but precisely because it wasn’t.

[double-birds-blog]

Hey, Remember the Tyler Dunnington Story?

By Chase Woodruff

More than a year ago, the LGBT-focused sports website Outsports broke a disturbing story: former Cardinals minor-leaguer Tyler Dunnington, who came out as gay after his retirement, revealed that he had experienced anti-gay bigotry throughout his time in baseball, including during his brief professional career with the GCL Cardinals in 2014. “Two teammates in particular,” reported Outsports’ Cyd Ziegler, “questioned their straight teammate on how he could possibly be friends with a gay person, even his brother. They even mentioned ways to kill gay people.”

“Each comment felt like a knife to my heart,” wrote Dunnington in an email to Outsports. “I was miserable in a sport that used to give me life, and ultimately I decided I needed to hang up my cleats for my own sanity.”

Dunnington’s allegations made local and national headlines—briefly. In a Post-Dispatch story the next day, Cardinals GM John Mozeliak called the reports “very disappointing” and pledged to “look into this further” and “take this very seriously.” A week later, the P-D ran a brief update on a separate allegation involving one of Dunnington’s coaches at Colorado Mesa University.

And then the story seemingly disappeared down the memory hole. At no point in the last year did the Cardinals ever disclose, or the media report on, the results of the club’s investigation into what Dunnington alleged. We don’t know how the club conducted its review or what it concluded; we don’t know if any players were disciplined or counseled; we don’t know if any other actions were taken or policies put in place to prevent something like this from happening again.

The Cardinals did not respond to my repeated requests to provide that information for this story. My attempts to reach Dunnington himself were also unsuccessful; he has mostly eschewed media coverage and public comment since the story broke, though he did speak last July at a fundraiser for the Missouri Courage Scholarship, a college scholarship program sponsored by Pride St. Louis. In a video of his remarks at the event, Dunnington gives a bit more detail about the things he’d heard: “Teammates of mine…were talking about how [homosexuality] is very much a choice, and ways to kill him, talking about hanging him.”

While it’s absurd to expect organizations to police every stray remark made in a clubhouse full of college-aged athletes, conversations about “ways to kill gay people” indisputably cross a line from typical juvenile offensiveness into something that needs to be addressed. The radio silence from the club and obliging disinterest from the media make it hard to say anything else very definitively. Worst of all, perhaps, is the fact that the apathy towards Dunnington’s story suggests a cynical hierarchy when it comes to who we care about protecting from abuse; it’s hard to imagine that all of this would’ve been so quickly and thoroughly forgotten if it had been a top prospect, not a 28th-round pick and major-league longshot, who had come forward with these allegations.

Make no mistake: it’s a near-certainty that there are dozens of gay men currently playing professional baseball. Tyler Dunnington was undoubtedly not the first and won’t be the last gay player to pass through the Cardinals’ minor-league system. But the club isn’t interested in telling us, and local media apparently aren’t interested in finding out, what steps it has taken to try to alter an environment that was already hostile enough to make one ballplayer quit the game.

Meanwhile, outside the baseball world, activists are bracing for a potential assault on LGBT rights under a unified Republican federal government, and the Trump administration has already rescinded Obama-era guidelines aimed at protecting transgender students. A “bathroom bill” similar to the notorious North Carolina legislation that has led to widespread boycotts of the state is being debated in the Missouri Senate. And Missouri continues to lag far behind other states when it comes to protections for LGBT people, having consistently failed to pass even basic anti-discrimination laws that prevent people from being denied employment, housing, or public accommodation on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

So here’s a simple suggestion for the Cardinals: hold an official Pride Night at Busch Stadium this summer, and invite Dunnington and others to speak to the media and fans about their experiences and the ways all of us can do better. Thirteen major-league clubs held official LGBT theme nights last season, but the Cardinals—despite an annual unofficial group event sponsored by Pride St. Louis, and despite the Blues holding their first Pride Night earlier this year—were not one of them, nor do they have one scheduled this year. There’s no reason that shouldn’t change.

The need for such an event is particularly acute given the featured speaker at this year’s “Christian Day at the Ballpark”: former Cardinal Lance Berkman, who controversially appeared in a 2015 political ad opposing an equal-rights ordinance in Houston, and later defended his involvement by remarking that “tolerance is the virtue that’s killing this country.” The Cardinals’ institutional buy-in to the long-running Christian Day event is significant, with manager Mike Matheny and many players regularly participating. On its own, Berkman’s appearance might not be conspicuous, but in conjunction with the organization’s reticence on Dunnington and resistance to holding a Pride event, it sends an unfortunate message.

I’ve made a habit out of defending Cardinals fans against what I believe is a groundless, counterproductive, often sneeringly classist caricature of them as bigoted backwater hicks. But I absolutely agree with Will Leitch on one thing: the Cardinals themselves have consistently failed to live up to their responsibilities as a community institution.

Whether out of ideological conviction or simple organizational caution, the club is constantly two steps behind, absent from stories it shouldn’t be, and out of touch with and unreflective of the city it’s supposed to represent. Its silence when racist abuse was hurled at protesters outside Busch Stadium in 2014 was disgraceful, and of a piece with its chronic lack of engagement with its African-American fanbase. It has used its growing in-house media operation to advance revisionist narratives about the history of its relationship with the City of St. Louis and public stadium financing. Its chief broadcast partner (which it now owns a 30% stake in) has the worst track record of on-air diversity in baseball.

Quite frankly, the Cardinals as an organization have not done enough in the past to rule out the ugliest possible interpretation of their handling of the Dunnington situation: that they ultimately aren’t all that troubled by what he alleged. Mozeliak’s vow to “take this very seriously” is entirely incongruous with the club’s handling of the matter since then—how, then, are we not to conclude they weren’t just lip service from an executive eager to put some bad press behind him? It’s bad enough that the organization might think this way; it’s much worse that it might have worked.

[double-birds-blog]

There’s Only One Acceptable Reason Not to Extend Yadier Molina

By Chase Woodruff

This offseason marked five years since Albert Pujols, quite possibly the greatest Cardinal ever, turned down an incomprehensibly lucrative offer to remain a Cardinal for life in favor of a slightly more incomprehensibly lucrative offer to go elsewhere. The occasion passed without much notice, but if you’ve listened closely enough, you may have heard some doubt start to seep in at the edges of the prevailing narrative of Pujols’ departure—i.e., the largely positive one, in which the Cards made off with bucketfuls of prospects and payroll space while cutting bait on an aging star at exactly the right time. Maybe, it’s whispered, it would’ve been worth it to be able to watch an all-time great continue to rack up accolades and milestones and contribute to contending Cardinals teams, even if things would’ve gotten a bit ugly on the back end of the deal.

That’s once again a relevant question for the Cardinals, who are in the middle of having to make a series of decisions regarding three players who have formed the core of the franchise for almost a decade. The first of these, of course, resulted in the club’s borderline nonsensical refusal to engage Matt Holliday in any kind of extension talks at all, and his subsequent signing with the Yankees for chump change. That stings for some of us, and it will sting a lot more if he bounces back in the Bronx and the Cards’ outfield proves as thin as it looks, but as a player who didn’t join the Cards until age 29 and will debut for his new team at age 37, Holliday was probably always going to be the easiest of the three to let go.

Next up, though, is Yadier Molina, who could be a free agent as early as the end of this year, if either he or the club chooses not to exercise a mutual option for 2018. Drafted by the Cardinals in 2000, Molina is already the franchise’s all-time leader in games caught, a mainstay behind the plate all the way from the MV3 days through two World Series titles and the departures of Pujols and Tony La Russa and into whatever is coming next. Though his streak of eight consecutive Gold Gloves and seven consecutive All-Star nods came to an end last season, a second-half surge helped him post his best offensive numbers since 2013 while catching a career-high (and frankly insane) 1,218⅓ innings.

This is, in short, everything the Holliday decision really wasn’t. It’s the biggest call the club has had to make since Pujols, and while the dollars and years involved will pale in comparison, in some ways this feels more momentous. If a way can’t be found for a player as beloved and essential as Yadi to retire in a Cardinals uniform, maybe the economic realities of the modern game and the cruel, relentless march of Father Time just can’t be overcome.

The worst possible outcome, then, would be for an extension to be derailed not as a result of some intractable impasse but by avoidable stupidity—which is what makes the subtext of Ken Rosenthal’s story today on the subject a little concerning:

Molina needs to recognize that his age works against him, even if (and perhaps partly because) he played in a career-high 147 games last season. He also needs to recognize that if he wishes to remain a Cardinal, he likely will not surpass Buster Posey’s $18.56 million average salary, the highest of any current catcher. …

At some point the Cardinals will want to mix in catcher Carson Kelly, their top position prospect. Yet, the club also would find it difficult to justify a reduction in Molina’s $15 million salary.

So, back to the original question: What would Molina be worth on the open market?

Rosenthal has, if nothing else, a lot of well-placed sources in and around the industry, and while it’s possible he’s just speculating in a vacuum, his analysis seems awfully fixated on the question of what an extension would cost. If this narrow focus is an accurate reflection of how John Mozeliak and his staff are approaching these talks, that’s extremely discouraging.

Barring unthinkably high salary demands on Molina’s part, the price tag on an extension should be an absolute non-issue. The Cardinals are already punching well below their weight payroll-wise and have a massive new broadcast-rights deal kicking in before next season. A potential Molina extension is almost certainly going to be a two- to three-year bridge to retirement, not some long-term albatross, and in the meantime the club will be employing his heir apparent, Carson Kelly, for next to nothing.

It’s the hoped-for transition from Molina to Kelly that should factor in to this decision, albeit to a lesser extent than many seem to think. Kelly may be the real deal, but as a 22-year-old who made his Double-A debut last April, he’s a long way from banging down the door to a major-league starter’s job. There’s no harm, and probably a lot of benefit, in another two or three years of Molina and Kelly coexisting on the roster.

The one and only deal-breaker, from the Cardinals’ perspective, should be some extraordinary set of demands from Molina regarding his playing time or future role with the club. If and only if Molina is highly antagonistic toward the idea of gradually yielding to Kelly and determined to catch 150 games a year until he’s 40, the club would probably be wise to hold the line and be willing to part ways, if it came to that.

But while it’s impossible to know for sure—and Molina is nothing if not a diehard competitor—this strikes me as deeply implausible. It’s not unusual for veteran players to seek certain assurances during contract negotiations, but for Yadi to demand to remain in his current (and already fairly uncommon) super-starter role long enough to represent some kind of existential threat to Kelly’s future would be unheard of. And while navigating the transition, prior assurances or not, may prove challenging, it’s Mike Matheny’s job to handle it; the solution to his potential inability to do so isn’t to alter your personnel decisions years in advance, it’s to either help him become a more capable manager or find a new one.

All of us were sad to see Pujols and Holliday go, but the circumstances of their departures were defensible in their own ways; who knows, meanwhile, what sort of circumstances we’ll be staring down with Adam Wainwright in a year or so. There’s only one possible reason, though, for the Cardinals not to do everything they can to prolong the Pax Molina into next season and beyond, and it doesn’t seem very likely to apply—so if we once again get robbed of the chance to see a beloved franchise great retire in the birds on the bat, it’ll be an awful shame, and worth taking a long, hard look at why.

[double-birds-blog]

Just Be Honest About What You’re Doing

By Chase Woodruff

On Saturday, in response to a question from ESPN’s Mark Saxon, Dexter Fowler voiced his opposition to the Trump administration’s failed attempt to ban entry to the U.S. by nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iran, where his wife Darya was born and many of his extended family still live. The story got picked up on social media, and Fowler quickly became the target of waves of criticism and abuse.

The volume and intensity of the backlash was shocking. Here’s just a small sample of some of the comments made in response to the story: “We pay your salary. I don’t give a shit about your political views!” “Maybe he should have brought them over sooner then he wouldn’t have a wet diaper.” “Fuck fowler who cares what he thinks.” “Why is it that the only athletes that are displeased with the President are black? Who’s the one’s being racist?” “Why the hell do these over paid actors and sports figures think WE GIVE A FUCK WHAT THEY HAVE TO SAY. Just do what you are paid to do and that is to entertain normal Americans.” “I have no patience anymore for dumbass stupid ass people who keep assisting that illegal aliens are simply immigrants.” “Many Presidents have done this, even Obummer. Fowler is just butthurt.” “He can share all his contract money with the immigrants.” “I don’t want to hear that b******* we pay him to play ball and that’s it.” “Fowler deserves a fastball right between his racist eyes.” “Shut up and go enjoy your $80 million how stupid.” “You’re paid to play, not to spew your political bullshit.” “Uneducated about what the Pres is trying to do for Blacks. Too bad.” “Move to Iran Dexter.” “I guess Dextor was thrilled with all the killings in Chicago last year, as he didn’t post anything about that.” “Wow another overpaid minority has an issue with a Republican?? Shut your ass up.”

No one gave a shit about any of these comments, though, because all of them were posted on a Facebook page called “Chicago Cubs True Fans” (I have no idea, either). Here are some more: “Glad he left.” “Traitor.” “That’s why he went to St. Louis.” “Well he obviously dont like winning hating trump and going to the cards.” “Guess it’s time to burn my Cubs Fowler jersey!” “Go to your St Loooey hellhole and stay there… an oh yeah, STFU.” “Thank Goodness we got rid of him, another crybaby…” “Go Cubs! Go Trump!” “Dexter just became the enemy even more now for me.” “Shut the fuck up traitor!! Who cares what you have to say!” “And I care what you think, why??? You overpaid incredibly lucky, person. Glad your no longer in Chicago!!!” “He isn’t worthy of the phrase former cub.” “Glad your gone BLM MAN FOWLER, and in the mean time , just maybe you can get your head out of clintons corrupt ass ? FUCK YOU SNOWFLAKE MFER.”

This went on and on and on—Cubs fans, hundreds of them, taking time out of their day to hurl cruel and in many cases plainly racist invective towards a player who doesn’t even play for their team anymore.

But as usual, the only abuse Baseball Twitter cared about or bothered to acknowledge was the abuse posted to “St. Louis Cardinals True Fans” (again, no idea). By now this process is so rote that there’s little need for me to explain what happened. The anonymous parasite behind the account @BestFansStLouis took screenshots of some of the worst comments and posted them to Twitter. They went viral, first and foremost among Cubs fans. The c o l o s s a l p i l l a r o f w a s p e g g s internet’s healthy and edifying aggregation ecosystem, from HardballTalk to The Comeback to SB Nation to Uproxx, jumped at the prefab content. Monday arrived and we hit the thinkpiece stage. Cardinals fans objected to being singled out once again, and here I am, writing the same shit I always do.

This is a tremendously efficient feedback loop, and it kicks into gear whenever any of the millions of people who proclaim themselves Cardinals fans do something stupid or offensive, and—let’s be clear—does so only when that happens. It kicks into gear when Cardinals fans say awful things to protesters outside Busch Stadium, but not when Orioles fans get physically violent with protesters outside Camden Yards. It gets activated on a massive and instantaneous scale when a single anonymous Twitter user lies about hearing slurs at Busch on a national TV broadcast, but not when David Price himself reports hearing racist taunts from Red Sox fans at Fenway. It’s why Oakland A’s fans are not notorious for their homophobia. It’s why this t-shirt is infamous and these aren’t.

And it’s why the story that got reported over the last couple days wasn’t that Fowler had been attacked by Cubs fans, or even that he’d been attacked by baseball fans in general—or by Facebook users, or by morons and bigots, or by older, conservative white men, all of which are true. The story was only that he’d been attacked by Cardinals fans. To report it any other way would risk disrupting the feedback loop.

There isn’t, and there never has been, any evidence that this is a useful way to frame this story or others like it. There is no evidence that the Cardinals have a singularly racist fanbase. There is no evidence that, as Will Leitch argues, Cardinals fans are disproportionately from rural areas, which are presumed to be more racist than urban areas (the gap is probably smaller than you think). There is only—there has only ever been—the @BestFansStLouis feedback loop, lizard-brain sports-fan tribalism, heaps of confirmation bias, and more than a small amount of naked classism and snobbery.

I am so unbelievably fucking tired of having to talk about this. I’ve given up hope that the cycle is ever going to end; the incentives—social and professional, emotional and economic—for the people involved to perpetuate it are just too great. But here’s my request, if you’re one of those people: for the love of God, try to be a little more honest about what you’re doing. If you like tweeting about the awful racist meth-addled BFIB, be honest about the fact that you just want to feel a little momentary superiority, to be comforted by the sense that your fanbase isn’t the Bad One. If you’re a baseball blogger writing up a @BestFansStLouis screenshot, be honest about why you know that post is going to do good numbers. If you want to wax soporific about America Is Us and We Are America and What It All Means, or if you want legitimize an unsubstantiated, counterproductive narrative by reaffirming your status as One of the Good Cardinals Fans, be honest about it, even if only with yourself.

Just don’t tell yourself or anyone else that you’re waging a high-minded battle against the forces of ignorance and injustice by posting get_a_brain_morans.jpeg for the thousandth goddamn time. No one seriously engaged in that fight has ever given a moment’s thought to who was or wasn’t in which brand of children’s-game laundry, and anyone who does—anyone whose reaction to bigotry or abuse depends on the fanbase it’s coming from—is only admitting that they’re privileged enough not to have to give a shit in the first place.

[double-birds-blog]

The Matheny Roster Cycle Has Repeated Itself

By Chase Woodruff

For a moment there, right after the Fowler signing, the Cardinals actually managed to convince some of us that they weren’t going to call it an offseason. The club, wrote Derrick Goold, “could become more aggressive than previously believed, turning toward free-agent sluggers Mark Trumbo and Edwin Encarnación as possible pursuits.” Maybe such a change in strategy was actually on the table; maybe this was a bit of empty chest-puffing from an organization that finally sensed some fan discontent over its tight-fisted approach to the free-agent market.

In any case, nothing came of it. Encarnación signed with Cleveland for a lot less than expected; Justin Turner returned to the Dodgers and José Bautista appears to be headed back to Toronto. The Cardinals are reportedly looking to bring a left-handed outfielder and possibly another bullpen arm to spring training on minor-league deals, but what plenty of us knew in our hearts to be true back in December is now beyond doubt: they’re done. Having dumped nearly $40 million in salary via the departures of Matt Holliday, Jaime García, and Brandon Moss, the club enters 2017 on track for not just another sharp drop in revenue-adjusted payroll but a slight nominal decrease in payroll from last year.

It wouldn’t be fair, though, to blame another middling offseason entirely on Bill DeWitt’s spending allergy. That much became clear a couple weeks ago, when the Royals agreed to trade Jarrod Dyson to the Mariners in exchange for right-handed nonentity Nate Karns. The Cards had previously signaled interest in Dyson as a platoon candidate, and as a left-handed hitter and elite defender, he’d fit well into an outfield still lacking for both of those things.

The issue with Dyson may have been what else he would bring to the team: questions. Would he be used as a fourth outfielder or in a platoon? If the latter, with whom? When would it be best to bring him off the bench as a defensive replacement or a pinch runner? When he plays, where does Fowler go? How long a leash should a struggling Grichuk (or, for that matter, Piscotty or Fowler) get before Dyson got a shot to play every day? Would Tommy Pham ever see the field again?

It’s not that there aren’t good answers to these questions. It’s that the Cardinals have a manager who is incapable of coming up with them. Every potential move the front office could make to improve the team’s depth and flexibility comes at the cost of giving Mike Matheny more opportunities to use his roster inefficiently.

This is one half of a vicious cycle identified by Viva El Birdos’ Craig Edwards in an excellent overview of Matheny’s tenure last season. You should read the full post for all the details, but here’s his tidy summary of John Mozeliak’s recent attempts to build a Matheny-proof roster:

- Provide depth in 2014, Matheny uses it poorly.

- Provide stability in 2015, Matheny uses it poorly.

- Provide depth in 2016, Matheny uses it poorly

- Provide stability in 2017…

Assuming it wasn’t just general negligence, failing to acquire Dyson might be the clearest sign that the Cardinals are over-correcting towards stability in 2017, but it’s far from the only one. Just about every move the club has made or hasn’t made this offseason can be understood through the lens of making things as simple as possible for Matheny, after a season in which Mozeliak publicly conceded that he’d given him “too much roster flexibility.”

Giving the boot to Holliday, a marquee player and clubhouse leader? Simpler than figuring out how to get him some playing time in left and at first and seeing if he could still be worth what it would’ve cost to keep him, which wouldn’t have been much. Lining up Eric Fryer for a Tony-Cruz-style, three-starts-a-month-if-he’s-lucky backup role? Simpler than trying to achieve a better balance with Brayan Peña or someone similar in the interest of Yadi’s health. Passing on Turner, Encarnación, Bautista, and others? Simpler than further muddying the situation in the infield, where the mere existence of Jedd Gyorko will probably be more than Matheny can handle.

Some of these moves may have made the Cardinals better, some may have made the Cardinals worse, but all of them made the Cardinals simpler. Throughout the offseason, we’ve seen Mozeliak, like an expectant parent trying to child-proof a house, all but affixing giant block-letter labels to players’ foreheads. Matt Carpenter: “FIRST BASEMAN.” Kolten Wong: “SECOND BASEMAN.” Maybe he’s finally gotten it right, and put together a team that Matheny won’t find a way to mismanage.

Or maybe we’re just in for the second half of the cycle, the one where players get hurt or underperform or wear down from overuse, and the team doesn’t have the pieces to cope. Maybe Grichuk struggles again and can’t turn it around this time. Maybe one injury-free season doesn’t mean that Yadi is invincible. Maybe Holliday bounces back in the Bronx, and Matheny is right about Wong, and we’re right back where we’ve been before, wondering how the Cardinals ever hoped to compete with such a thin and one-dimensional roster. And round and round we’ll go, and the obvious solution will remain the same.

[double-birds-blog]

Municipalize the Cardinals

By Chase Woodruff

The Cardinals are a successful and beloved baseball club, and in reading and writing about them we are always eager for new narratives and feel-good turns of phrase: the Cardinal Way, Baseball Heaven, the Best Fans in Baseball. Occasionally, these flights of lyrical enthusiasm will flirt—even if only unconsciously—with the idea that the team and its fanbase are not just closely bonded but one and the same, two components of an indivisible whole. The Cardinals, you might hear someone say, are an integral part of St. Louis. A great asset for the city. A civic trust.

This is always meant metaphorically. That should change. It’s time to municipalize the Cardinals.

In a recent post, I surveyed the history of Bill DeWitt’s ownership of the club, which—while having delivered no small measure of on-field success—has also seen DeWitt and his investment group reap an enormous financial windfall at the public’s expense. The Cardinals, acquired for peanuts and now worth nearly two billion dollars, have consistently ranked among the most profitable clubs in Major League Baseball even as they’ve received hundreds of millions in subsidies and tax breaks, cut workers’ pay and benefits, and under-delivered on development promises.

As I tried to make clear, the problem lies not necessarily in DeWitt’s particular qualities as an owner or as a person, but in the ownership model itself. As long as private individuals continue to own our favorite sports teams, those individuals will be incentivized to extract vast sums of money from us via the stadium hustle and other means, and face minimal accountability for doing so.

The fact that we’ve gotten so used to this being the way we do things doesn’t mean there can’t be another, better way. If the Cardinals are going to be of St. Louis and for St. Louis, why shouldn’t they also be owned by St. Louis?

One obvious model for a municipally-owned Cardinals team can be found in another of the region’s most cherished cultural institutions: the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District (ZMD), the public entity that oversees the St. Louis Zoo, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis Science Center, Missouri Botanical Garden, and Missouri History Museum. The Zoo, in particular, is often rated one of the best in the world, and it alone rivals the Cardinals in attendance with over three million visitors annually. Collectively, the ZMD’s five subdistricts are roughly comparable to the Cardinals in the size of their financial footprint, with an annual operating budget of about $180 million and net assets totaling just under $1 billion.

It’s imperative that any public entity created to oversee the Cardinals encompasses a wider geographic area than the ZMD, which has been increasingly challenged by a free rider problem as residents of surrounding counties enjoy its benefits without contributing their fair share of tax revenue. At a minimum, then, the new Cardinals governing district would need to include St. Charles and Jefferson counties. Perhaps the existing ZMD could even be amended, with the addition of the Cardinals as its sixth subdistrict serving as the catalyst for neighboring counties’ long-awaited participation.

The ZMD and other such tax districts must be authorized by the state of Missouri. While a new Cardinals-centric entity or reconstituted ZMD would ideally include counties in the Metro East—as does Bi-State Development, the agency that oversees Metro Transit—the additional complexities that lie in the authorization and administration of such an interstate compact mean it may not be worth the trouble. And although it may give short shrift to Cardinals fans in southern Illinois and elsewhere, making municipalization strictly a Missourian endeavor might help it win support among state officials and legislators.

As for actually bringing about the transfer of the Cardinals’ assets to the public, there are basically two options. The vastly more desirable of the two would be to simply enter into good-faith negotiations with Bill DeWitt and his ownership group and reach an agreement for the sale of the club at a fair price. Perhaps DeWitt would jump at the opportunity to become a civic hero, a transformative figure in sports history, and pocket a greater sum of money than anyone could ever hope to spend in a lifetime for his trouble. Perhaps he could be persuaded to do so only by a sustained campaign of public pressure—advocacy, activism, collective action, and the like.

In the unfortunate event that such an effort isn’t enough to get Cardinals ownership to the table or agree to a reasonable price, the team will have to be seized. While its use would undoubtedly be controversial, the mechanism for doing so is pretty straightforward: eminent domain. Maryland famously attempted to use it to keep the Colts in Baltimore in 1984, and they weren’t the first—the city of Oakland had attempted it four years earlier to prevent the Raiders from fleeing to Los Angeles. It didn’t work, but the resulting litigation ultimately prompted the California Supreme Court to hold that “providing access to recreation to its residents in the form of spectator sports is an appropriate function of city government,” and that the state legislature could accordingly authorize the use of eminent domain to carry out that function. Courts in New Jersey and Pennsylvania have ruled similarly.

Regardless of how a sale is facilitated, of course, quite a bit of money will need to be raised; Forbes estimates the Cardinals’ value at $1.6 billion and rising. While that’s a larger sum than any local government has ever raised to fund the construction of a stadium, the process would be similar—just with a fully publicly-owned sports franchise at the end of it, instead of a massive handout to a billionaire. Ideally, a small but significant portion of the acquisition cost would be covered by the state of Missouri, with the rest raised primarily by the issuance of municipal bonds by the governing district’s constituent counties.

In return, the people of St. Louis would finally have a baseball team that is truly theirs. A small body of elected or appointed commissioners would replace the team’s current ownership at the very top of the organizational chart, and the rest of the club would continue operating in the same way it does today. Fans would get full transparency with regard to revenues, player salaries, employee wages and benefits, community initiatives, charitable giving, and more. Any surplus operating income—like the combined $133 million DeWitt and company cleared in 2014 and 2015, according to Forbes estimates—could be reinvested in the team and the community however fans saw fit. And when the time came that that meant upgrading or replacing Busch Stadium III, the people of St. Louis wouldn’t have to worry about getting fleeced.

If you’ve been waiting patiently for me to say it, fine: this plan is insane. Even to get it to approach a funhouse-mirror version of plausible requires a great deal of hand-waving and heavy lifting. The resources and willpower required to even initiate such a process are better spent elsewhere; it would face opposition at every level and too many legal challenges to count. Even if, by some series of miracles, it passed muster in the legislature, courts, local governments, and with voters, there’s the matter of Major League Baseball’s bylaws, which prohibit public ownership.

Ultimately, though, most of these obstacles aren’t material but metaphysical. They’re the product of conventional wisdom, long-held opinions, calcified judgments—stories we’ve told ourselves so often over the years that we’ve stopped asking if they might not be a little insane, too. And somewhere along the line, the idea that in order for St. Louis to enjoy good baseball a Cincinnati billionaire must make a personal profit of tens of millions of dollars per year became one of those stories.

There are other, more reasonable solutions in the middle ground between outright municipalization and the current broken, exploitative model of private ownership. Rather than fully integrate team operations into the machinery of local government, it could simply be placed in a public trust, much like Joan Kroc tried to do with the San Diego Padres in 1990.

Best of all, perhaps, is an alternative model that has already proven viable in a major American sport. The Green Bay Packers have operated as a community-owned nonprofit for almost a century; the team’s 360,000 shareholders, none of whom are allowed to own more than 4% of outstanding shares, elect a board of directors, who in turn elect a seven-member executive committee that acts in the same capacity that an owner would. Half a dozen minor-league baseball teams, including Triple-A affiliates like the Syracuse Chiefs and Rochester Red Wings, have a similar corporate structure. Overseas, public ownership is even more common; the two most valuable and beloved soccer clubs in the world, Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, are member-owned, as are nearly all of the top clubs in Germany.

Getting Major League Baseball to end its prohibition on publicly-owned teams would be no small feat, but it can be done—most plausibly through federal legislation like the Give Fans A Chance Act, which has been introduced by Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon several times over the years and would end the federal antitrust exemption for leagues that refuse to allow public ownership. Team owners aren’t going to stop doing everything they can to make a buck at our expense. Maybe it’s time to start telling ourselves some new stories.

[double-birds-blog]

Bill DeWitt Is Not Your Friend

By Chase Woodruff

One year ago next week, St. Louis sports fans had their hearts ripped out of them by a grotesque Thomas Nast cartoon of a team owner. Stan Kroenke, a wigged weirdo who’d lucked into his fortune as a tapeworm in the intestines of the Walton family, persuaded a roomful of equally talentless and vicious old men—silver-spooned dilettantes, gout-ridden oligarchs, adjudged fraudsters, Dan Snyder—to let him do it. They did it out of greed, they did it because they could, and they did it with a sociopathic disregard for the people they’d lied to, extorted, and spat on in the process.

Not long afterwards, the Blues played the Hurricanes, and before the game Bill DeWitt III, president of the Cardinals and son of majority owner Bill DeWitt Jr., joined Blues chairman Tom Stillman for a ceremonial puck drop. Fans cheered, but mostly they chanted: “Kroenke sucks, Kroenke sucks, Kroenke sucks.” It was a cool moment.

It was also the beginning of a deeply bizarre consequence of the civic trauma that Kroenke and his fellow NFL owners had put St. Louis through: a renewed, unconditional reverence for the men who owned the city’s two remaining franchises. Stillman and the DeWitts were suddenly “the Anti-Kroenkes.” Local media hailed their “show of solidarity,” their “St. Louis pride,” their “support for St. Louis and its fans.” On Twitter, the praise went on and on: “classy owners,” “class acts,” “pure class,” “world class,” “the definition of CLASS,” “more class in their toenail clippings than Stan Kroenke & Jerry Jones ever dreamed of having.”

Rather than come away from the Rams ordeal with a vivid understanding of the ugly truth about the relationship between fans and owners, many in St. Louis seemingly just wanted to feel good again—to believe that the experience revealed nothing at all, to be comforted by the idea that Kroenke was just an anomalous supervillain and that nothing bad would ever happen again. The Cardinals’ and Blues’ PR departments, along with plenty of local journalists, were happy to oblige. This went on all year, most notably throughout the announcement, promotion, and staging of last week’s Winter Classic; it will certainly last through Sunday’s closing-ceremonies event at Busch Stadium, and probably for a long time to come.

Even if this instinct is understandable, it’s also wrongheaded and dangerous. The unlikelihood that Bill DeWitt will ever do something as deceitful and as damaging as Stan Kroenke did doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold him, and all other team owners, to a higher standard than simply not being Stan Kroenke. Whether it’s the Cardinals, the Blues, a future MLS team, or anything else, it’s our responsibility to assess individual owners on their own merits—to look at facts, data, and the historical record, and judge them on the evidence.

Major League Baseball was in rough shape in 1995. A quarter century of labor strife, set against the backdrop of widespread doomsaying prompted by the rise of the NFL, had culminated in the costliest work stoppage in the history of professional sports. Television networks, bitter over lost revenue, deserted the league. When play finally resumed, fans took their anger out on owners and players alike. Ratings and attendance plummeted.

The situation in St. Louis, one of the game’s traditional strongholds, was especially dire. The Cardinals hadn’t made the playoffs in eight years and, as a small-market team highly dependent on gate revenue, had been hit particularly hard by the post-strike attendance drop. In October, Anheuser-Busch shocked the city with the announcement that it planned to sell the team after more than forty years of ownership. The brewery, which claimed the Cardinals were losing tens of millions of dollars annually, pledged that it would sell only to buyers who were committed to keeping the team in St. Louis, but many fans weren’t convinced.

Within a few months, however, their fears were assuaged. A new ownership group with local roots swept in to purchase not only the team but also Busch Stadium II and its surrounding parking garages for a total of $150 million—a price tag that fell significantly below expectations, which had already been low given the league’s financial woes.

Perhaps quite purposefully, the ownership group was initially presented as a triumvirate of sorts, with Drew Baur, Bill DeWitt Jr., and Fred Hanser comprising the principals. Baur, a local bank executive, and Hanser, a partner at Armstrong Teasdale, were established members of St. Louis’ elite; DeWitt had been raised there but made his home (as he does to this day) in Cincinnati. His father had been an executive and owner of both the St. Louis Browns and Cincinnati Reds, and DeWitt fils had himself owned minority stakes in the Reds, Texas Rangers, and Baltimore Orioles, which he’d narrowly missed out on buying a few years before Anheuser-Busch put the Cardinals up for sale.

Even at a cut-rate price, many investors cast a skeptical eye towards the deal, citing baseball’s “downhill slide” and declining real estate values in downtown St. Louis. The new owners seemed to lean into this idea, declaring themselves “fans…interested in owning one of the great franchises in history,” rather than businessmen simply out to make money. “Each member of this group,” Hanser told the Post-Dispatch in January 1996, “could find a better economic investment than the St. Louis Cardinals.”

Whether or not Hanser was sincere, it wasn’t long before that sentiment began to look absurd. Less than a year after agreeing to terms with Anheuser-Busch, the team’s new owners struck a deal to sell the stadium’s four parking garages for just shy of $100 million, thereby recouping two-thirds of the group’s original investment.

Naturally, the new regime also went about looking for costs to cut. Heading into the 1997 season, that turned out to include a plan to force Busch Stadium’s cleaning staff to accept a huge reduction in their hourly pay; when the employees refused the new contract, they were fired. The Post-Dispatch’s Bill McClellan captured some of their stories:

“We’re out there in the rain, and at night, and even at our old wages, we were barely keeping our heads above water,” said Duane Garry. He is 33 years old and the father of 10-month-old twins.

“If I lose this job, I might have to go on welfare,” said Caroline Haywood. She’s 35 and the mother of two. “It isn’t like we had it easy. Sometimes the team is gone on a trip for two weeks, and we’ve got to stretch out money out.”

Florence Pulley seemed shellshocked. She’s been on the Cardinals’ cleaning crew since 1955. Her mother and sister, both now deceased, were on the cleaning crew before her. …

“This isn’t fair,” she said of the decision to terminate the cleaners.

After a public backlash and union intervention, negotiators eventually settled on a contract that included a less severe pay cut but slashed the employees’ benefits entirely.

That same spring, the club’s new owners signaled an abrupt about-face on their previously announced intentions to keep the Cardinals in the 30-year-old Busch Stadium II. “We were really novices at first,” Baur would later tell the Post-Dispatch. “We really didn’t realize how outmoded Busch Stadium was.”

A trip to Jefferson City in early 1997 began a five-year effort to secure public funding for a new stadium. The Cardinals entertained proposals from no shortage of communities in and around St. Louis, playing them against each other and threatening to leave the city for the first time in the club’s hundred-year history if its demands weren’t met—a move that, make no mistake, would have been devastating to downtown St. Louis and therefore, according to basic principles of urbanism and economic development, badly damaged the metro area as a whole. When a preliminary deal fell through in May 2002, city officials sounded desperate:

The Cardinals hope that they’ll benefit by a bidding war between area communities eager to be the site of the team’s planned new ballpark to replace 36-year-old Busch Stadium. …

[Mayor Francis] Slay and his aides fear that the Cardinals’ departure could touch off a new urban exodus that could derail already precarious efforts to resurrect downtown and rescue city neighborhoods. Losing the Cardinals “would be a terrible, terrible blow,” [Jeff] Rainford said.

Unable to contribute funding in a more direct manner, the city ultimately agreed to a massive concession: the full and permanent abatement of the five-percent amusement tax previously applied to Cardinals ticket sales. Assuming even a modest rate of growth in ticket prices over Busch Stadium III’s first few decades of operation, that’s a tax break on the order of several hundred million dollars. When added to a package of various other tax credits, abatements, and subsidies totaling about $107 million, that means the vast majority of the stadium’s cost was ultimately shouldered by the public—in spite of the team’s ludicrous insistence that it was 90% privately financed.

Support for public funding among city officials and the public hinged on ownership’s fulsome, repeated assurances that the new stadium would be accompanied by “Ballpark Village,” which the team described as “an entire residential, business and entertainment district that will help spur economic revitalization in downtown St. Louis.” Approval of the stadium deal, said the Post-Dispatch as the club and city continued to negotiate in 2002, “depends heavily on the prospects for Ballpark Village.”

After years of delays and downgrades, the first phase of Ballpark Village finally opened in 2014; a second phase, which will add residential and commercial developments but still fall short of the vision the team publicly touted during stadium negotiations, is scheduled to begin construction later this year. The Cardinals and their development partner, Baltimore-based Cordish Companies, obtained tens of millions of dollars in additional tax breaks for each phase.

But even as ownership has justified those tax breaks by emphasizing Ballpark Village’s positive economic effects on downtown St. Louis, some city leaders have criticized it for just the opposite. Phase One’s handful of dining and entertainment options, say critics, have done little more than funnel money that would otherwise be spent in surrounding bars and restaurants into the Cardinals’ pockets.

The team didn’t exactly help to counteract this perception when, late last year, it refused to waive a height restriction on the BPV-adjacent property owned by longtime Cards broadcaster Mike Shannon, blocking a rare potential new development in a city center that badly needs it. The feud has reportedly been resolved, but the message was clear: Cardinals ownership is happy to “help spur economic revitalization” downtown, as long as it’s on their terms, and in their interest.

In the years following its acquisition of the Cardinals, the “Baur-DeWitt group,” as the Post-Dispatch had initially dubbed it in December 1995, began to take on a decidedly more singular shape. Hanser’s official role gradually diminished, first from chairman to vice chairman and then, in 2010, from vice chairman to director. Baur served as the club’s treasurer, but he, too, became a less visible part of the organization as the years went on; when he died in 2011, longtime St. Louis journalist Alvin Reid eulogized him as the co-owner who “fell silent” during stadium negotiations and “never got his due.”

DeWitt, meanwhile, quickly asserted himself as the managing partner and public face of the club. He appointed his son, Bill DeWitt III, the team’s Senior Vice President of Business Development, and in 2008 installed him as its President. While information about ownership shares and how they may have changed over the years is exceedingly scarce, news reports have identified DeWitt as majority owner since at least 2000.

Whatever the ownership group’s exact composition, the investment it made in 1996 has been an astoundingly successful one. The franchise DeWitt and company bought for a bargain price of $150 million—essentially reduced to $50 million by the sale of the parking garages—was last year estimated by Forbes to be worth more than $1.6 billion, good for an annualized return of nearly 19 percent.

Despite playing in a small market, the Cardinals, buoyed by stellar home attendance, regularly rake in some of the highest revenue totals in the league, according to independent estimates. When measured as a percentage of total metro area personal income, per figures released by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the team’s average annual gate receipts are the highest in the league. Put another way: the people of St. Louis spend a higher proportion of their money on the local nine than any other fanbase in Major League Baseball.

Particularly in the last few years, however, the Cardinals’ virtually unrivaled levels of fan support haven’t been matched by ownership’s investment in the on-field product. In 2015, the team’s opening-day payroll represented only 41% of the previous year’s total revenue—a ratio that ranked 23rd in the league, a few spots above the Madoff-crippled Mets and a few more above Jeffrey Loria’s notoriously parsimonious Marlins. Figures released by Forbes and other sources may not be accurate to the dollar, but the broad-strokes picture they paint is of a Cardinals organization that has gotten cheaper and cheaper over the last decade or so—from a 56% payroll-to-revenue ratio in 2008 to barely above 40% heading into the 2017 season. That’s a far steeper decline than the league-wide ratio’s two- or three-point drop over the same period.

The gap between the Cards’ top-tier fan support and low- to mid-tier spending levels has made them one of the most profitable clubs in baseball. Their 2014 operating income of $73.6 million was the league’s highest; the paltry $59.8 million they made in 2015 ranked third. In those two years alone, then, the franchise earned DeWitt and his ownership group nearly three times the amount they had paid for it twenty years earlier. A few more years at that clip, and the team that claimed it needed several hundred million dollars in public assistance to finance the construction of a new stadium will have turned a profit equal to that sum in all of a half-decade.

Cardinals ownership is swimming in cash, and the pool is only going to get deeper. Not only will a new broadcast-rights deal that begins next year raise TV revenues to an annual average of $67 million over its 15-year term—more than double the figure the team received in the last few years of its current deal—it also gives the team a 30% ownership stake in Fox Sports Midwest, income from which isn’t subject to MLB revenue-sharing system. DeWitt, who is influential among his fellow owners and close to commissioner Rob Manfred, also stands to make further truckloads of money via his share in MLB Advanced Media and its spinoff BAMTech, which landed a billion-dollar investment from Disney last year.

The Cardinals are, in short, an outrageously lucrative business venture—a fact that seems to be an open secret everywhere but in St. Louis, where great care is taken to present an image of the club as a plucky underdog that can only succeed on the field by avoiding high-dollar free agents and only remain viable off the field with ample amounts of public funding.

Bill DeWitt is not your friend. You may, having read some flattering profiles of him over the years or seen him wave smilingly in your direction at a World Series parade, feel a certain friendly affection for him, but he is not your friend. Your interests and his are rarely aligned, and they are often entirely at odds with one another.

It’s probably true that you would both like the Cardinals to win baseball games, but that’s pretty much where it ends. You’d like to buy tickets, concessions, merchandise, and TV subscriptions at the lowest possible prices and enjoy the highest-quality possible products in return; DeWitt and his ownership group would like to turn the largest possible profit by maximizing revenues and minimizing expenses, a goal that is materially, fundamentally, definitionally contradictory to your goals as a fan.

None of this is to say that Bill DeWitt is a bad person, or even that he’s a bad owner; it’s simply to accurately describe the fan-owner relationship, which is far more adversarial than it is collaborative. That’s fine—at least, fine insofar as this is the system to which we as a society have consented—as long as this reality is clearly understood.

To obfuscate that reality, though—to lionize Bill DeWitt as the Anti-Kroenke, an omnibenevolent caretaker motivated only by a desire to bestow good baseball upon St. Louis and reinvest all the money we give him in the team and community, in the face of so much evidence to the contrary—is not fine. And while it’s natural to expect that the Cardinals themselves would want to advance that narrative, when you see anyone else do it, it’s worth asking yourself whose side they’re really on.

[double-birds-blog]

You Can’t Separate Sports, Race, and Politics

By Adam Felder

The Cardinals signed Dexter Fowler, a pretty good center fielder, to a five-year deal at the end of the Winter Meetings, for the like half dozen of you who’re reading a Cardinals-centric site but somehow missed this crucial detail.

It’s a good deal, as free agency goes. The Cardinals had a clear hole (largely of their own making thanks to the odd handling of Matt Holliday) in the outfield. Now they don’t. Randal Grichuk can go do his Pedro Cerrano impression in left field while Fowler puts up a superlative on-base percentage in center and Stephen Piscotty shouts random obscenities in the direction of on-field mics in right. All in all, a pretty ok outfield.

It won’t help the Cardinals catch the Cubs, of course. The Cubs are so much better than the Cardinals that really nothing was going to make that happen in 2017. The Cardinals entered the offseason as strong contenders for a wildcard and extreme long-shots for the division title. They’ll exit the offseason as stronger contenders for a wildcard and extreme long-shots for the division title. On an absolute basis, they’re better. Relative to the Cubs…this move doesn’t matter so much.

But you can get “was signing Fowler a smart baseball move” analysis largely anywhere. (Though I’d strongly recommend starting with this piece by Viva El Birdos’ managing editor Craig Edwards.) I’m not going to bring much to the table that hasn’t been said about Fowler, his contract, his defense, how on-base skills change with age, and so on, that hasn’t been said already.

So let’s look at something else. Fowler, in addition to being a pretty good center fielder with elite on-base skills, is a black man. Which prompted Mark Saxon of ESPN to tweet this out on Friday.

Part of what may be an overpay on Dexter Fowler. The #STLCards aren't deaf to need of having a star African-American player in this market

— Mark Saxon (@markasaxon) December 9, 2016

Part of what may be an overpay on Dexter Fowler. The #STLCards aren't deaf to need of having a star African-American player in this market

…and, predictably, people got Real Mad Online for daring to suggest that race might’ve been a factor (not even the factor, just a factor) in evaluating Fowler’s fit on the Cardinals. Immediately Saxon was accused of “injecting race into something that had nothing to do with it,” and trying to turn Fowler into a token.

Saxon was doing neither—he was making a completely correct observation. If both the Cardinals front office and Fowler didn’t consider his race, they’d either be space aliens or they’d be committing malpractice. That doesn’t make the Cardinals’ front office, or Saxon, good or bad—it just makes them cognizant that baseball players are humans, not a collection of numbers on a spreadsheet. Like it or not, you cannot separate sports, race, and politics.

Truly I must be getting old if I’m making the “you can’t just look at numbers on a spreadsheet; these are human beings” argument. Someone please check on Murray Chass and make sure he’s not using me as a horcrux or something. Yet it happens to be a damned good argument in this instance. Consider the following:

• A significant portion of St. Louis is black, and a significant portion of MLB is not. There’s no controversy here; it’s fact. Even premier Cardinals blog Viva El Birdos toed the line of its “no politics” rule when John J. Fleming wrote an excellent post on Fowler this weekend. He pulls out the gory details: only 8% of MLBers last season were black, down from 19% thirty years ago. It’s not a problem unique to the Cardinals, though they’re certainly part of the problem. Outside of Jason Heyward in 2015, the club hasn’t had a prominent black player since…Edwin Jackson for half a season in 2011! When you can count a club’s black players in Mike Matheny’s tenure on one hand, and two of those fingers include luminaries like Adron Chambers and Jerome Williams, it’s not exactly a stretch to say the Cardinals are lagging even by MLB standards.

Meanwhile, as Fleming points out, the plurality of St. Louisans are black, and there’s half a million African-Americans in the larger metropolitan area. It’s a portion of the fanbase that’s underserved when it comes to this particular aspect of the roster.

Which isn’t to say that black fans can only root for black players, and so on! I daresay that anyone who grew up rooting for the Cardinals in the 80s as I did counts some combination of Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee, and Vince Coleman among their favorites. Somewhere in my parents’ closet, I suspect my beat-up Ray Lankford shirsey is hanging up. A huge number of my favorites growing up were black, and I look like the dude from the movie Powder. Last season, I watched a young African-American kid in a Bryce Harper shirsey two rows ahead of me absolutely lose his mind when his hero came off the bench to deliver a game-tying home run in the ninth.

But I strongly suspect that “who I can root for on my hometown team” matters less to me because damn near everyone in positions of power looks like me. I’ve never seen a player who looks like me have his name anglicized against his wishes in an effort to make him more palatable to white fans. Most players in Ken Burns’ various chapter-innings of Baseball look like me. All but one American President looks like me. If given the opportunity, I’d never need to touch the hair of the President because I couldn’t believe my own eyes that he might actually look like me. In other words, it’s entirely possible that this is yet another blind spot for white fans borne out of privilege, and we shouldn’t substitute our own experiences for those of the literal plurality of the town our beloved team plays in.

That alone should be enough to render Saxon’s tweet relevant, but we might as well unpack the whole thing while we’re at it if it helps even one fan take pause and consider the implications of racism in baseball and beyond.

• The Cardinals—and St. Louis—don’t exactly have a great history when it comes to race relations. To be sure, the Cardinals aren’t uniquely bad when it comes to this, but “not being shitty when it comes to race” shouldn’t be referenced against other MLB teams or cities, but rather in absolute terms. It’s not enough to be “less racist than another fanbase”; you should just try and not be a shitty person for its own sake. It’s why I get so annoyed when fans of other teams throw “racist” at the Cardinals fanbase like it’s just another form of trash talk. Trying to prove whose fanbase is most racist is a great way to score cheap points and downplay a legitimate and serious issue that quite literally worsens and shortens the lives of millions of Americans.

It’s why I’m 100% on board with Deadspin wanting to shame racists that happen to be Cardinals fans, but upset at the framing that one can flog a single fanbase for a societal plague and not acknowledge that there are tons of assholes of all allegiances who need shaming. But hey, I’m sure it draws page views.

There’s a reason the debunked “Heyward got called the n-word on a hot mic” story went viral—it felt plausible. When the greater St. Louis area makes national news after the death of Michael Brown, and when some Cardinals fans think it a swell idea to turn their David Freese jerseys into impromptu Darren Wilson ones, one can hardly blame people for taking a logical leap. The Heyward slur story had that perfect amount of Colbert-esque truthiness to it to get picked up without anyone bothering to fact check. Hell, maybe it was the first #fakenews article of 2016. Good job, random guy online.

It’s not as if this is a recent phenomenon when it comes to the Cardinals, either. MLB’s history with race (and labor abuse) includes former Cardinal Curt Flood as a significant chapter.

Or if you prefer something a bit more recent: let’s think back to 1996, when the current ownership group took over, importing Tony La Russa and company. La Russa and Ozzie Smith feuded. Ron Gant all but called La Russa a racist, citing the manager’s treatment of several black players (including Smith and his replacement, Royce Clayton!), on his way out of St. Louis. I have no idea whether Tony La Russa is a racist or not, but when prominent players are suggesting it, you can be damned sure the question is on the mind of other players. It came up again just last season when La Russa addressed Adam Jones’ comments on race. Fairly or not, it’s a perception that needs to be addressed.

Which brings us to the current Cardinals manager, Mike Matheny. Matheny has something of a checkered history when it comes to young players, especially players of color. His treatment of Oscar Taveras, Carlos Martinez, and Kolten Wong over the last several years has been…puzzling, to put it charitably. When you’re busy trotting out the husks of Allen Craig and Mark Ellis instead of better players, it’s worth questioning just why you’re making such poor decisions. For my own part, I think Matheny’s actions as manager aren’t racist, but rather the textbook definition of Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” But one could hardly blame a player of color for having second thoughts before coming to play for Matheny, as Fowler allegedly did.

Given all of that, it’d be rather hard to claim that the Cardinals and Fowler weren’t cognizant of his race when negotiating and eventually signing a deal.

Yet that’s only the St. Louis-specific portion of this. Race and the Cardinals is a thing, but it’s just a microcosm of the fact that race and sports is a thing.

• Let’s go back to the aforementioned Adam Jones and his comments. Jones called baseball a “white man’s sport,” correctly pointing out that there are relatively few black players. The comments came in response to a question on why Colin Kaepernick-esque protests weren’t happening in MLB. Jones’ response was reasonable. It was correct. And despite not joining Kaepernick in his protest as other athletes in other sports did, people still got mad at Jones.

It’s not a stretch to suggest that black athletes have a different experience than their white counterparts. Kaepernick’s protest was explicitly in response to police brutality which disproportionately targets men of color, with no repercussions even when all the evidence is damning. Yet somehow Kaepernick’s protest got characterized as being about “the troops,” that sacred sports idol that has nothing to do with real issues like the woefully inadequate medical treatment of veterans and everything to do with commercializing the military, integrating it into our Sunday football alongside endless Papa John’s advertisements. Even support for Kaepernick was measured in commercial terms, as Kaepernick jerseys sailed to the top of the charts. Given this, it’s probable that Fowler—by all accounts a smart dude—had at least some of this rattling around when deciding where he wants to spend the next five years of his career.

• Further, the very language the Cardinals used all offseason when describing their ideal outfielder was racially coded. The word that came up most when describing the Cardinals’ outfield need was “athletic.” Which can mean any number of things, surely! Mike Trout is athletic! Ichiro Suzuki is athletic! Why, this could mean anything! And, perhaps, when Mozeliak and Matheny cited their ideal “athletic” outfielder, it did mean anything.

But as it turns out, there are certain adjectives used when describing athletes that are highly influenced by that player’s race. When Al Hrabosky (or anyone) talks about a player’s hustle or “baseball intelligence,” those terms tend to get used more or less often based on the player’s race, wholly independent of that player’s skills, contributions in the game, and so on. “Gritty” players tend to be white. “Emotional” players tend not to be. And “athletic” players tend to be non-white as well.

There’s a term for this phenomenon, broadly: implicit bias—and it’s one that has more to do with how we’re wired as human beings than it does any intentional racial animus. In this case, as with Matheny, none of this suggests that announcers are malicious—if this bias exists, it’s surely subconscious. But it’s real, nevertheless: when the Cardinals said they wanted an “athletic” player, there’s a pretty good chance they were picturing someone non-white.

Given this, I was half-expecting the Cardinals to trade for Rockies center fielder Charlie Blackmon, only to experience buyer’s remorse when this dude showed up. Want a conscious example of this bias rearing its head? Here’s current Nationals manager Dusty Baker—a black man—talking about how the Nats need more non-white players in order to increase team speed.

Speaking of Baker, he had some other comments at that press conference—about domestic violence and Aroldis Chapman. He all but apologized for Chapman’s actions, even blaming the victim a little while he was at it. I know several Yankees fans who were disgusted when the Yankees traded for Chapman, unable to separate the player’s ridiculous fastball and K/9 from the fact that he’s also a domestic abuser. They’re even further disgusted after the Yankees’ hypocrisy bringing him back after pretending to care about domestic violence issues.

There’s nothing in Chapman’s Baseball-Reference page that makes him anything less than a great acquisition for the Yankees, yet nobody would bat an eyelash at saying that fans should think about more than just his baseball stats. Similarly, I see Adam Wainwright celebrated for his Christian faith, something that has nothing to do with his sick curveball when it’s working. Why are these cases OK to consider when taking into account a player’s identity or actions, but not when it comes to race?

Look, I get it. Race is a shitty and touchy issue. Talking about it makes people uncomfortable at best and angry at worst. But ignoring it is how you end up not making progress. Much as we wish otherwise, racial prejudice is as American as baseball, and we’re not going to make the problem go away by ignoring it, or by allowing our own experiences to supercede those of players or journalists of color. When a Kaepernick says something, fans need to listen, even if they don’t agree. When a Bomani Jones writes something, fans need to consider it, even if they don’t agree. And when Saxon mentions that Fowler’s race had merely a non-zero factor in his signing, we need to accept it even as we acknowledge it’s Fowler’s baseball stats that brought him the big bucks.

For my own part I’m far more excited about Fowler’s sky-high career on-base percentage and the suggestion that changing his depth in center field has turned him into an above-average defender. I can’t wait to see him at the top of the order instead of the brutal OBPs of Kolten Wong and Randal Grichuk, and I’m so glad I won’t ever have to see “Stephen Piscotty: center fielder” again. Somewhere like 89th on the list of reasons I’m glad Fowler is a Cardinal is because he might help some kid I’ll never meet fall in love with the Cardinals.

But that’s the point: my experience as a white American, as a Cardinals fan, as a human being, isn’t the same experience everyone has. And to suggest that because it doesn’t matter to me that it shouldn’t matter to anyone is an incredibly foolish thing to say. We cannot disassociate race from sports just because it’s more convenient.