I'm your host, Katie will Hear with a very special guest.

Super excited about this episode.

It's something I've been wanting to do for a while.

Cardinals assistant general manager Rob Stortfolio joins the show.

Surf.

Welcome, longtime listener, hopefully first time partaker, Welcome to the show.

Yeah, it's like the old Francesca Collins first, first time, long time.

Yes, I appreciate you having me, so be It'll be fun.

Glad to talk with you and then all the listeners, so beget I hope.

So pressures on me to deliver some good questions here.

I think when we look at this twenty twenty five transition season, the main focus was on player development, and while you were brought in after the twenty twenty four season to kind of oversee what him and Bloom would like to do with the minor league system.

I mean, this is something that's going to impact both the minor league and major league teams.

And levels for multiple seasons.

That's just kind of the nature of where the organization is trending.

I think we'll just go right into it.

For Cardinals fans, who most of them, the wide majority, have not had to experience an era like this, or a transition season or a revamping of a payer development system.

What can you tell fans about what the minor league system currently looks like so that they can understand the changes that have been made over the last year.

Yeah, there's there's a lot of layers to that question, right, you know.

I think the one of the big things is is it takes time and patience.

And you know, I think one of the things for me as a as a new guy coming over here, going all the way back to my own interview, is like, there's a lot of pieces of this organization that's worked well for a long time, and all those banners that are flying around Bush Stadium, like, that's not by luck.

And so I think as a new person and with all the new people that came in here, it was like really trying to understand what are those things that have worked really well for a long time.

And that's not just performance, right, That can be values, can be ways in which the game has been taught being great at base running, defense, offense, not really taking concessions in any one area, the cardinal way, which as a as a new guy, has been really fun to just try and learn what that actually means to every person that's here, and so it takes patience because you need to uncover what those things are.

You have a lot of new people bringing other ideas into the organization, and now like the whole system is learning, both players and staff.

Okay, like, what's the new version of this of this Cardinal's way call it that we want to really scale and hopefully produce a lot of great outcomes over time.

And and you know it kind of goes to like, especially with young players, just developments not linear.

You don't always see immediate results of what you did yesterday.

You're kind of like a farmer that's planting, watering crops and doing that well over a long period of time and always asking yourself, like in the middle of that, is this process working?

Are there things we need to adjust?

Are there holes that we're missing?

Who from the outside can come in and help us think about this problem better.

But it does take a little bit of time.

And that's not because things were so far away from being good.

Like, there's a lot of players that were products of this minor league system that have impacted the major leagues this year, which is awesome.

And now it's just trying to continue to make those guys even better that have debuted and put other great pieces around that, both with staff and player acquisition streams.

So that was the main focal focus point of when you were first hired, and you worked with him about expanding the staff first of the entire farm system as a whole, added more coordinators, added more positions, and then you both work to modernize technology.

And both of those phrases sound a little vague, especially to a fan base that hasn't really had to really see the modernization of a farm system.

Can you expand on why adding both staff and technology was important before you've been started the twenty twenty five season.

Yeah, I mean we can start with the staff.

I mean I think, like, really, you're only as good as your team.

And the analogy I like to make is because you know, this resonates I think with a lot of people, especially anybody that has kids, is every person wants to put their kids in the best school possible.

So how do you know if a school's great?

Well you look at well, if it's a high school, what college do they send people to?

What average sat at or act scores?

The does the school produce?

And so there's measurables right for that with a minor league baseball system of how well is this group continuously producing major league players that are winning major league players, not just guys that get there, but stay there and help a team actually achieve results at the big league level.

And so in order to have really good outputs, like the best schools on Earth hire the best teachers and they have the best curriculum, and that's how they scale their product to every student.

And it's really no different for a baseball organization.

It's you have to have a math chair, you have to have an English chair, you have to have multiple people in all of the spaces that impact players getting to the big leagues and then staying there and hopefully being winning players for a long time.

You need that same approach in the minor league so that there's great communication between the big leagues and the minor leagues and everybody's kind of reading off the same sheet of music.

They're solving for the same outcomes they're aligned towards.

When that TRIAA player walks into the major leagues for the first time, that coaching staff knows that and had input on the things that that player was coached towards so that it's a seamless transition, or as seamless as it can be given some of the factors that these guys go through, you know, emotionally and just being in a new physical location.

So we really tried to attack that off of you know, that's a really broad analogy, but I think it's maybe something that the average person can can resonate with because it's the same way that you would try and in place your child in the best school possible, and you just want those curriculums to be really good and the people that are leading them to be really skilled and great leaders and influencers of both players and staff that when that coordinator is not there, the actual programming and the curriculum is really sound, and the players understand it, and the coaches of the affiliate understand it, and they know exactly what they need to do to carry that action out.

And if we do that.

Every friggin day, it's monotonous.

But if we win the one to five o'clock period with our process and how we're working on those skills, then the game is just a barometer of how well our work is translating.

And so, you know, that was really the whole thought, and I'd spend a lot of years in Cleveland kind of helping lead like the hiring process over there.

So for me, it was a cool opportunity to really action a lot of the names that I had either hired in the or interviewed in the past and not hired in Cleveland and had an opportunity to bring over here to Saint Louis.

So I'm pretty excited about the group that we've got.

We've got more to come in the upcoming off season, which would be really fun.

Even though it's a lot of laborious work, but it's it's really important to get those people in.

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And I think something that you have talked about saying, that Jim has talked about or alluded to in his end of season press conference last year, is the ability where you're not necessarily losing the cardinal way.

There's many many things that this organization has done well.

I mean they were pioneers in player development.

When you're adding new coordinators, you're adding new staff members, you're adding new technology.

The goal isn't to just replace the what was already here in the cardinal system, it's to expand it, right, And when you're telling that, how to do that with bringing in a new group of people but keeping a majority of the same because it really hasn't been that much turnover in terms of people leading positions.

Why is that important to have a balance of the tradition of this organization and also modernizing it so you're not completely losing the identity of the franchise, You're just kind of making it better.

That's it, And you nailed the dynamic right there.

And the first thing we challenged myself any new person is like to really spend time on, like what are the parts of this organization that people that have been here for a long time would take a bullet for and things that are producing results, like really have an actual understanding of what those things are.

Those were some, honestly the most.

Fun conversations during the off season was really once we kind of finished that first wave of hiring, was then getting all those new people with the people that have been here for a long time, including the major league staff, into We did a lot of it virtually but in the same virtual room, to like ask the hard questions of who do we want to be about like what are the values that have been here for forever that we feel really strongly about, and then how have other people from new places thought about that same challenge, whether it's infield development or hitting development, Like what are some other like the diversity of thought piece of that to then ultimately just and we'll continue to stress test what we believe in and make sure that it's producing results.

And we feel really good about that process.

So that that was the way that we started that.

I'm sure there's probably one hundred ways that we could do that better and hopefully, you know, this time of year is always a great time year where we're asking staff for feedback and like what does year two's worth of growth look like for all of us?

And that'll be a huge part of it.

But you're exactly right, it's the what are the parts of this organization?

I spoke to the banners that are flying around Bush Stadium, like, that's not by luck.

That's because this word, like the word you said, was a pioneer in a lot of different ways with the way they thought about the draft, player development, having a minor league system of great teaching, and let's never lose track of any of that and let's find new ways on the margins to even make that better.

All right, So, player development around baseball is a vague term, and most it's usually kind of relegated to the minor league system or prospects because that is where you're essentially developing players.

But for the case of the Cardinals, at least this season and probably for the next couple of years going forward, player development is going to take place across the board, at both the minor league levels and the major league level.

We spent an entire season this year talking about transition, runway, use your favorite buzzword, and the primary emphasis of these buzzwords were to emphasize that players are going to develop at the major league level this year.

For years, that was not the case.

In Saint Louis.

You were either a major league player and you are ready to contribute to a postseason run, or you were back.

To Triple A.

But this is not a phenom that's necessarily specific to just the Cardinals.

You're seeing this across major League baseball, depending on team market size and payroll.

Your specialty surf is player development.

Why is this important across the board?

Well, first off, specialty is probably a strong word, but I'll take it.

Yeah, I think the first part's mindset.

And I think that's one of the things that I've really enjoyed working with Ali and his staff, Like goes all the way back to the second I showed up and had you know, he was part of my own interview process and we got into the weeds, the weeds on this and whether it's player combos, right, whether it's like Nado or Donnie or really any of our players guys that have had success at the major league level, the second you stop getting better, whether it's baseball, whether it's sudoku puzzles, whether it's ping pong in the basement, Like it really just doesn't matter when you stop getting better at a thing, like especially in our world of sports where we're we're performing at the highest level in high competitive environments, Like when you stop developing, you're in trouble.

And I think that just mindset wise, is like we have a lot of players that already think that way, which is phenomenal, and now like scaling that across the entire organization I think is hopefully something that can be a competitive advantage for us and especially you know, if you spoke to like the market right of there are teams that the bigger market teams like, they'll go out and pay for players that the entire industry knows is really good, and that's certainly a way of doing it.

And the other way for teams that maybe don't have that same luxury is what are you doing with your own players every year to not necessarily reinvent.

Who they are, but really ensure that their.

Superpowers are never lost and the things on the margins that will help them take the next step forward are intentionally getting better, not just hoping by luck, but having a real process.

Whether it's a guy that has won five MVPs in the big leagues or a guy that's played five games in rookie ball.

Kind of the overall framework of the ideology is the same.

It's just a different strategy and set of tactics on how you bring that to life and the types of things that you're focusing on for each player.

But I do think this.

Mindset is really important for just this organization, especially the types of players and kind of the we've seen this with some of the younger guys this year, and making sure that we're never wasting a day for those guys that continuously get better.

When your best players own that mindset, it really just becomes the fabric of how your organization goes about its business.

And you can see that.

Even I thought Nolan Arnotta was a great example here.

He's one of the best defensive third basemen of all time and he's out there every day trying to take extra reps and get better.

Brendan Donovan has really emerged as a winning kind of player, has that kind of grittiness that fans saw in the twenty tens when the Cardinals were in their last legitimate true run.

You can kind of see this now with the way that players have stepped forward, whether it's Mason Win solidifying himself defensively as shortstop, Alec Burlison.

As an all around hitter, of Von Herrera as a true bat.

These are going to take times for some of these young players to really develop into their careers, but you do see this.

I mean, I think Burlison is a great example here in terms of someone who was challenged to become better defensively because they needed him to.

You know what you have in Burlison as a bat, high contact rate, He can put a lot of balls in play, he needed to refine his approach a little bit so he wasn't getting out as much, and he did.

But in order for him to stick, he had to be better defensively and he did that and it took some time, but he was able to develop in games and now he's an all around better player.

Is that kind of the example that you're looking at when you evaluate these guys at the major league level?

That's it?

And then you ask yourself that question year over year, and it's like, Okay, Burley, what a great season this was for you?

You talked about the approach stuff, you know, digg into some of the the behind the scenes numbers there and his chase rates and just the amount of times that he's getting himself in more favorable, more favorable counts to do it.

He do to do what he does best with hitting the ball hard frequently.

That's there, and that is directly tied to some of the ways that he challenged himself to train.

And you know, Burley and Brownie and all those guys like his teammates that helped that process deserve a ton of credit for being willing to get their hands dirty in season and just like you know, we talked about that mindset and mentality of just the whole organization always thinking that way is is really important.

But he's such a great example, like the work that he's done with JJ and the outfield to really elevate his game to be like not just a guy that has to play the corner outfield, but somebody that you're excited about playing the corner outfield.

And now, like, what's the next step for that of being you know, wherever he is in terms of the excuse me, the metrics of a corner outfielder, Like what's the even better version of that?

How can we tie.

That to how he prepares in the senc nutrition space, Like all those things matter, and I think his willingness to attack those things in season in like a very interesting transition year speaks a lot to the type of mindset that you want your best players to have.

And I think when you're looking at the Cardinals fan base, I mean, they're a very loyal fan base, as you know, and they really know their baseball.

So when you're able to see a player in real time like Burleston adjust and adapt, like that's tangible evidence that they can see, they may not realize it in real time.

I know sometimes I don't either.

Where you look up and after a month you say, wow, this player has really expedited his growth or has really made these adjustments, because when you're playing every like a game a day for almost two hundred days, including spring training, it can be hard to really see that on a day to day basis.

But listen to your point as an example, Herrera offensively as an example.

We can go down the list.

Kyle Lahey, Mike McGreevey.

Yea.

In terms of the minor.

League system though, something that isn't as a parent or easy to access as the major league team on TV every day, what changes can fans expect to see because we have made whether it's the organization or media, we made such a big idea about the revamping of the Cardinals minor league system, and there hasn't really been a lot of clarity as to what exactly these fans can look like other than adding staff members and adding technology.

What can you point to fans where they can look and identify and see, Okay, this is different and here's why it's being done.

Yeah, that's a great question, and it's in some ways it's a hard question.

To have like a real black and white answer to because you know, I said this comment earlier of like, developments never linear, and there's no better example of that than minor league baseball, where you're working with a bunch of eighteen twenty one year olds and not only are they developing as human beings and adults, but you're asking them to develop skills and knowing that those skills take time to see real change towards.

But I think there's a whole bunch of things behind the scenes, right, a process.

You talked about technology, right, Like that's such a broad thing, but there's real specificity to like.

Examples of that.

So I think everybody knows, like major league stadiums they have hawkeye technology, and that allows you to do so many things in terms of performance.

Can be a lagging indicator, like you talked about sometimes you have to actually wait a month for to have a big enough sample size or just enough confidence that.

Okay, this change was real.

And some of this technology allows you to really like shrink the amount of time that you need to feel confident that a change is happening.

And a change is happens there's guesswork there, right, It's a hypothesis.

We think if this player does this movement differently, that it'll allow them to perform better in this way.

But if you do that for a long enough time and you mess up a lot of them like I have, you can figure out which ones have some proof of the putting to it.

And so you know, I think hawkeye is like an example of something that we are expanding to all levels of our minor leagues, and you kind of work backwards from here.

Are things that we know, like evidence based approach.

We know that these things work at the highest level in the big leagues, and now how do we bring that to a player that's in a ball And you might not see that player in a ball necessarily throw harder that next month, but we are then able to connect things about how they move and their delivery, how we build a great like throwing program and plyocare routine.

Same thing for a hit or we can see the speeds that they create with their bat and the angles which they're back like by way of how their body moves works through the zone, and we can see if that's what great major league hitters do or don't do, and then we can help that player in the immediacy, So it really allows you to shrink the amount of time that you need to wait for performance to stabilize or you don't get tripped up by Okay, well this guy was an A ball All Stars.

That actually mean he's going to be a major league All Star?

Definitely not.

There's players that are really good in the minor leagues that just don't have the skills to even get to the big league.

So it really allows you to like isolate the skills that major leaguers have.

And then there's a bunch of things around that of like being winning baseball mentality and running the bases and knowing game awareness and all those things like on the margins, Yes, but it allows us to have it allows us to miss less of those big rock skills that major leaguers just have more.

Times than minor leaguers have.

So that hopefully is a little bit of like a window into that answer, but it's really complicated, and ultimately you're just trying to have the most evidence based process that you possibly can have and use a bunch of people that are experts and information that give you as much data as possible to just make great decisions to help our players.

All right, No, we have just a couple of minutes left because you are a very busy man and have lots of things to do.

We've had a lot of discourse about JJ Wetherholt this season, obviously for rifle reasons.

He just I think has really seized an opportunity this year and we'll come into spring training next year as someone with a lot of eyes on him.

And then you look at someone like Quinn Matthews, who came into spring this year with a lot of eyes on him after a stellar season in twenty twenty four.

As fans, all they really want to know is like one of these guys going to be at the majors and one of they can to impact this club and just how well.

And that I understand because I want to know that too.

But the priority for these guys especially, you'll throw on someone like a Liam Doyle and I know to co Rob we had Tommy John but up until that he was very much a.

Part of this group.

For a young core that should impact the major league level, how important is it, surf to really make sure that they are ready to be promoted to the majors and ready to contribute rather than just rush them up out of need or maybe a desire to see them at the big league level.

Yeah, it's a it's a great question, and it's this is a hard question when, like people ask all the time, it's like, well, why isn't this player promoted.

It's there's so much that goes into it.

It's always not just the well what's their box score, what's their stat line?

Like I think, first off, the gap between the major leagues in Triple A has probably never been wider.

And some of that's just like straight out of the player's control, right, Like there's over the last couple of years, like the minor league shrunk, you know, there's less total players that you have, So as a result of that, players have really moved faster.

And so when you have the opportunities to expose these guys to to just do everything that they would be asked to do in the big leagues before they get there.

I've always thought of it as like, you know, you're the farm director's job is to ensure that we're not asking a player to do something for the first time in the big leagues, and we spend so much time like Larry Day and his crew, that's really managing the day to day.

They're spending hours trying to answer that question, and that's one of the fun parts of it.

But it you know, makes it less black and white.

But if you have that mentality to everything right, it's like how they go about their pregame routine, how they're studying film.

You look at like a guy like Jimmy Crooks that comes up to the big leagues.

And by the way, catching is really hard to do, much less harder to do when you're a rookie and you don't have relationships with all of the pictures that you're catching or and so how we tried to use the clock with him this year in the mind and in his time in TRIAA to here's exactly what they're going to ask from you in a pregame meeting with your staff, and let's really make sure that not only can you run that play well, but that you understand the why behind that.

And we coached.

Jimmy pretty hard on that, and it goes all the way back to like April May, and to his credit, he leaned into that even though and he probably thought we weren't very nice about coaching him pretty directly, but hopefully he now feels like, you know what, those guys were kind of a holes back then, but they set me up for walking into that first pregame meeting and having the skills that I need to excel.

And so it's a hard question to answer, like when is a player ready?

But ultimately the performance on field matters and the process around that, who they are as a teammate, how they go about their business from a preparation standpoint, how they go about reflecting the next day from whether they had results or not, and how well are they learning and responding to that.

All of those things really matter.

And you know, there's not a it's not a math equation.

There's not one right answer if when a player is right or ready or when he is not ready.

But if you really have a way to try and uncover the answers to those series of items, at least in my experience, you feel more confident about when that answer is is yes.

That's such a good point about Jimmy Crooks in his short time in the majors.

Olie Marble has praised his professionalism, how.

He comes in and he leads the meetings.

To your point, he has less than thirty days of major league service time, and here he is with you know, a couple veterans on that pitching staff, and he's able to identify exactly what the game plan should be.

And he's able to say something that really impressed Ben Johnson down in Triple A was you know, they'd come up with the scouting report and Jimmy would say, I, actually I disagree and here's why.

And he's not afraid to have that discourse.

That's the kind of player that you need at the major league level because, yeah, he's coming up, he's young, he's a rookie.

There are things he's going to learn on his own.

But being able to have that skill set for preparation and that confidence to know, hey, this is a different level.

I still have things to learn, but this is my job and I know this that is going to be key in bringing winning players and sparking them.

Through this rebuild.

Yep.

Well, so all right, Surf, I know you've got a ton of things going on.

I want to thank you so much for making time to do this.

I think hopefully fans can take a lot away from this.

We'll be seeing you and hearing you a lot more once this season comes to an end.

Just nine more.

Well, I guess when this episode airs, a week.

Of games left, anything that you want to communicate to fans that they don't know or where they can become more familiar.

With your work and what you guys are doing down in the minor leagues.

Well, I appreciate you having me on first off, and maybe apologies in advance if it's true, he said of people having to hear my voice more freely.

So, but no, I appreciate you you having me on anytime we can speak to just the work that you don't see, the necessary the immediate results of tomorrow is always really fun to to top through and that's why I enjoy doing these is as much as I can with with not you yourself, but you know the rest of the group that's really doing a great job covering all the things major league development, minor league development.

It's all in an effort to try and help us have future success.

So appreciating what you do to to cover all that