Don't mean to hijack the thread but this 2013 article talks about how "The Cardinal Way" has meant many different things to many different people over the years.
You'll probably hear something about "The Cardinal Way" during this World Series. You probably have already. It suggests a secret manuscript, passed down through generations, containing the secrets of baseball. Or, at least, a really well-produced, internal training video. Even though it feels like an old, tired narrative, though, the Cardinal Way is actually a new thing.
That is, the phrase "the Cardinal Way" is new. But it's existed in many forms over the years, the idea that the Cardinals are doing something that's somehow unique. It used to be that former pitching coach Dave Duncan would take the world's slightly dinged pitchers and turn them into good starters. He was taking crap from a yard sale and turning it into a $2,000 coffee table. That's just what he did.
It was the Cardinal Way.
Over the last two years, I've been yammering about the Cardinals' ability to make hitters out of nondescript prospects. Then, suddenly, that became the Cardinal Way. Forget patching up broken pitchers. Just take a guy named Matt and make him hit ball good. Simple. Clean. Easy.
But there's a new new new Cardinal Way: Take a bunch of whippersnappers and teach them how to throw the ball really, really hard.
The other two guys were Michael Wacha and Carlos Martinez, who both were literally incontinent when Nevermind was released. And so now the new Cardinal Way has something to do with young, fresh arms. Which is the complete antithesis of the first Cardinal Way we talked about.
Transmogrified Tiger wrote:I'm in the middle of reading Verducci's book that talks about this at length. Character is probably the wrong word to use, because it's not talking about having a moral high ground or only having boy scouts on your team. The idea was that some human/subjective attributes(ability to deal with failure, being helpful to your teammates, etc) had become undervalued now that every front office is SABR-savvy. One of the examples the book talks about is being sure Rizzo was going to be a leader on the team after he charged the Cincinnati dugout(and Chapman himself, ironically enough) a few years back, which is not a good guy or 'high character' thing to do. Another talks favorably about Schwarber cussing up a storm when Theo interviewed him pre-draft and mentioning that they weren't sold on him as a catcher. There's obviously a lot of hindsight involved and there's plenty of room for that emphasis to be wrong or over-inflated, but they aren't saying that they're prioritizing better human beings.
Theo must not have had a good feel for Rizzo's "leadership" qualities before trading him to the Padres.
Major League Baseball plans to investigate domestic violence allegations made against Cubs shortstop Addison Russell via social media Wednesday night, an MLB official said Thursday morning.
Russell’s wife, Melisa, suggested in multiple posts late Wednesday the couple was breaking up.
In a subsequent comment related to one of the posts, a woman Russell’s wife referred to as a close friend, alleged him of “mentally and physically abusing her.”