Shortly after his hiring, Rob Cerfolio brought out a whiteboard and filled it with prominent names across the industry. As the St. Louis Cardinals’ new assistant general manager and director of player development, Cerfolio knew helping transform the organization’s player development system would not be easy. He also knew it needed to be collaborative, and the staff members he brought in would be instrumental to the success.
With the help of adviser Chaim Bloom and president of baseball operations John Mozeliak, Cerfolio dove in on an extensive group of candidates, scouring the industry for people he had either tried to hire or had identified as leaders in their specific fields. After a multi-month process, the trio decided on three new directors: Larry Day as farm director, Carl Kochan as director of player performance and Matt Pierpont as director of pitching.
Once an industry powerhouse in player development, the Cardinals lost their edge. This group will be tasked with rediscovering that edge, then redefining it. Under Bloom, who will succeed Mozeliak as president of baseball operations after this season, Cerfolio, Day, Kochan and Pierpont represent the foundation of a new era of Cardinals baseball.
“We were going to innovate, we’re going to learn, we’re going to find a way to beat the industry — that’s the mentality from top to bottom,” Cerfolio said. “And we’re going to do it with people that we love and that share those common values.”
Known throughout baseball as an insular organization (sometimes to a fault) — and one that doesn’t often stray from change — the Cardinals have now turned to a group of external hires to right their ship. Already, major groundwork has been laid.
New coaches will be entrusted with getting the most out of promising young players like JJ Wetherholt. (Joe Robbins / Icon Sportswire via Associated Press)
Cerfolio wasn’t exactly looking for a new job last October. He was a bit preoccupied. The Cleveland Guardians, with whom Cerfolio spent the past 10 seasons, were in the thick of another postseason run. But when Bloom called with an opportunity to interview with St. Louis, Cerfolio knew it was a call he needed to take.
This was not the first time Bloom and Cerfolio had spoken about potentially working together. Cerfolio interviewed for a position with the Boston Red Sox when Bloom was the chief baseball officer. Bloom’s experience, dating to his time with the Tampa Bay Rays, has made him a respected figure in the player development world, and the fruits of his labor with the Red Sox can be seen in the state of Boston’s farm system, widely regarded as one of the top in the sport.
Cerfolio, 32, is seen as a rising star in player development. After beginning with the Guardians as an intern in baseball operations and player development in 2015, Cerfolio rose through the organization’s ranks. He served as an amateur scouting assistant for three seasons before advancing to player development and being named the department’s director in 2022.
When the Cardinals requested permission to interview him, it became clear to Cerfolio that the opportunity was too intriguing to pass up.
“My whole goal was to try to understand where the Cardinals felt they were as an organization, and where they’re trying to take it,” he said. “I think the thing that was exciting about this organization was what it had stood for for a long time, it was an honor to even have been called.”
By mid-October, Bloom and Mozeliak decided on Cerfolio to take over as director of player development, replacing longtime director Gary LaRocque, who stepped down last September. Immediately, Bloom and Cerfolio started looking at constructing a new staff. For years, the Cardinals had one of baseball’s smallest player development staffs. In contrast, the Guardians had one of the largest.
“The big thing for me is, there is this bucket of strategy of ‘How do we be great as a baseball organization?’ and there’s this other bucket of the people that you work with every day, that really matters to me,” Cerfolio said. “That’s what I really loved about my work environment in Cleveland.”
Cerfolio wasn’t just looking to hire a couple of new faces. Fortifying staff throughout all levels of the minor leagues was important. But to get there, he had to decide on his directors first, which meant extending that talent pool as far and wide as possible.
“I’ve been in one organization for 10 years,” Cerfolio said. “There is real strength to that. But there’s also, ‘How can I expose myself to people that are working on the same problem, but solving it in a different way?’ That’s going to make my own process better. So how do we bring in other smart people — people smarter than myself — that have gone about the same problem I have but done it in a different way?”
Cerfolio targeted people who excelled in different areas. Pierpont came from the Seattle Mariners, an organization known for its advancements in pitching development. Kochan spent six years with the Los Angeles Dodgers, a club considered one of the best across the board.
“Step 1 was, as quickly as I could, come into the organization, start building relationships and assess the things that this group is doing well that shouldn’t change,” Cerfolio said. “Then what are the types of things we need to add on to that to make us top?”
“It’s people and process, but there’s also the element of results that matter, right?” he added. “We were intentional about some of the organizations we tried to tap into.”
That included Cerfolio’s prior organization. In hiring Day, who spent the last decade alongside Cerfolio with the Guardians, Cerfolio knew firsthand he was landing someone who would be hands-on, not just on the field but behind the scenes.
“His role with me in Cleveland was leading and driving our offseason work,” Cerfolio explained. “So much goes into how we’re thinking about player development holistically. How are we making them bigger, stronger, faster, more resilient athletes?
“His experiences as a minor-league manager, a hitting coach, a fielding coordinator were really specific to how he could complement my skill set,” Cerfolio added. “He’s real comfortable telling me if something’s not a good idea, and I want people who are going to do that. Having someone that I have experience and trust with, that can model that in front of the rest of our leaders and be OK telling me if something isn’t a great thought — I think has value.”
Day’s vision for the Cardinals’ farm system is simple. Last October, Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. pledged a change in team resources, stating the organization would make “significant new investments in staffing programs and infrastructure, beginning immediately.” That meant allocating money to increase staff hires and upgrading technology that most teams already had in place.
“It was important to know there were going to be resources to support the players,” Day said. “When it comes to the vision of player development, now that the organization has allocated all these resources to player development, let’s use them. How can we take our baseball group and our performance group and then assess our players from different lenses?”
Ensuring the Cardinals bulked up their minor-league coordinating staff was essential. Last season, the Cardinals had the fewest full-time coordinators in baseball with five. Most MLB teams had staffing in the double digits. This was an area Bloom and Cerfolio identified early as a priority. Once Day was hired in November, the group began adding in bulk.
By December, the Cardinals made several coordinating hires and reassignments. After not carrying a catching coordinator for years, St. Louis brought in Ethan Goforth from the Pittsburgh Pirates.
They also added a field coordinator, Ryan Barba, from the San Diego Padres, and Austin Meine as a pitching coordinator from the Baltimore Orioles. Former Double-A Springfield manager Jose Leger was reassigned as an assistant field coordinator and base running coordinator, two positions the Cardinals did not hold for the last several seasons. José Oquendo, who served as the Cardinals’ instruction coordinator last year, was named the team’s fundamentals coordinator — an especially noteworthy position given the internal complaints regarding the lack of players’ fundamental skills last year.
“It’s really hard for affiliate staff, given everything else they have, to prepare players for the game, execute the game, get players ready to play tomorrow, to also be thinking about, ‘How are we scaling our program all the way from Triple A to a minor-league coordinator?’” Cerfolio said. “There were some critical positions where, if you don’t have a math chair in school, how are you certain that your school is teaching everything from algebra to calculus effectively? We can use this analogy: Each level of baseball is like a grade of school. So we need people leading, innovating and scaling a program from all corners of the organization.”
St. Louis also kept numerous people in their same positions, including hitting coordinator Russ Steinhorn and pitching coordinator Rick Harig. The idea was to blend approaches, something critical to Day.
“There is a rich history and tradition of tremendous player development stories here,” Day said. “And there still are. The opportunity to be a part of an organization that is retooling itself, leveraging the veteran Cardinal staff and then bringing in an abundance of thoughts and ideas from outside the organization … that’s really exciting.”
Cerfolio and Day didn’t want to limit the interview process to just a few people. The Cardinals’ staff included several current major-league coaches, many of whom have extensive experience in player development. Manager Oli Marmol spent six seasons coaching various minor-league affiliates before joining the major-league staff in 2017. Third-base coach Pop Warner spent 17 seasons in the organization’s minor leagues. First-base coach Stubby Clapp managed the Triple-A Memphis team for two seasons. All participated to various extents in the coordinator interviews, as did long-time bullpen coach Jamie Pogue and bench coach Daniel Descalso, who came up through the Cardinals system as a player.
“When it comes to philosophy and what we’re teaching, it was really important to have that input,” Cerfolio explained. “I think it’s a huge credit and speaks volumes of those guys to be in those interviews and give their time in the offseason. Their ownership and buy-in were really important, not just for who ended up walking in the door, but sending the signal that we are one organization and we’re going to think about solving problems together. We’re not just going to think about minor league or major league problems. We’re going to do that in unison.”
It’s also important, Cerfolio feels, to ensure player performance is not siloed from player development. In prior years, the Cardinals ran those two areas of the organization separately. Now, the organization is committed to running them together. What Kochan is planning from a performance and health standpoint will run in tandem with Day’s vision. The same will be said for Pierpont’s ideas from the pitching side.
“We’re utilizing the assets and the people that we have to really make individualized programs for players based on their needs, and based on what the organization needs that player to do on the field,” Kochan said. “We’re trying to integrate what’s happening from the training room to what’s happening in the gym to what’s happening on the field. People think that this happens in silos, when in actuality it doesn’t. So we’re trying to reverse engineer what’s happening on the field to what we can do indoors.”
An example of this is a recent meeting Kochan held with the hitting and pitching coaches at the team facility in Jupiter, Fla. The meeting was based on functional anatomy and centered on teaching the coaches how movement affects the body beyond a swinging or throwing perspective. The idea behind this is to help enforce the same understanding of language, whether conversations are taking place on the training tables, on bullpen mounds or in the batting cages.
“We’re trying to give our staff the empathy and the runway to do what they need to do and make sure that things fall into what’s specific for the player and what’s valued for the player in the organization,” Kochan added. “This way, the player can make good decisions, not only now, but for what we envision him…in the future.”
Pierpont shares a similar line of thinking. With the prices of veteran starting pitching soaring to astronomical heights, the pressure to develop arms is rising. The Cardinals have fallen well behind their peers in this department, lacking adequate staffing and modern technology over the past several years. Already, that is changing. St. Louis will continue using TrackMan, but plans to implement Hawk-Eye — a computer vision system used to track ball trajectory and profile — in all its affiliate ballparks. The organization will also begin implementing biomechanics with ball flight metrics, something Pierpont says the best teams are leveraging.
Developing starting pitching goes beyond what’s best for the specific player. It has now become what makes an organization the most profitable, at least from a roster standpoint.
“What I saw done really well in Seattle and what I learned there is, when you create homegrown starting pitchers that have a ton of value, that saves the team a lot of money in terms of spending on your roster,” Pierpont said. “Now that can be allocated somewhere else. Starting pitchers from within your system can add a crazy amount of value to the organization, so that will always be the top priority.”
After years of falling behind, things are changing in St. Louis. Cerfolio knows it will take years for his vision to bear fruit. But he believes he has the right people in place and is ready to bring the Cardinals back to the forefront of player development.
“I want us to be seen as an industry leader when it comes to consistently making the most out of the players that our acquisitions teams bring in, thinking about development from the major leagues all the way down to the earliest levels of the minor leagues, and doing that with great people who are curious, want to learn and have the mentality that we’re going to be best in class,” Cerfolio said.
Easier said than done, he knows. But at long last, the Cardinals feel they are off to a good start.
(Top photo of Victor Scott II: Jim Rassol / Imagn Images)
