Adolis García’s ALCS performance brightens spotlight on Cardinals’ offseason decisions

For a long while on the night of Wednesday, September 26, 2018, Adolis García sat at his Busch Stadium locker with his head in his hands and tears welled up in his eyes and staining his cheeks.

Eventually, the Cardinals’ public relations staff said he was too emotional to speak to the media that night, and that he’d speak after the off day in Chicago.

By the time a much smaller group of reporters reached him at Wrigley Field, the division race was already largely settled, having mostly ended when he stumbled while racing around third base with the team down by one in the bottom of the eighth inning. Deadlines had passed, and there wasn’t much to say.

Yes, he was remorseful he fell. Yes, he felt bad about it. But what was done was done.

Whatever tears he shed Monday while holding aloft the trophy he received for being named most valuable player of the American League Championship Series certainly had a distinctly different feeling, but strangely, they symbolized the same thing. What was done was done. Five years ago, he wouldn’t get a do over. This year, he wouldn’t want one.

The Cardinals designated García for assignment following a disappointing 2019 season in which he saw no time in the big leagues and then shipped him to the Texas Rangers for cash. Before firming him in ink as their cleanup hitter, his new team also limited his 2020 appearances, and he struck out four times in six at bats.

Then, on the eve of spring training the next season, he was yet again removed from the 40-man roster in order to make room for Mike Foltynewicz, who gave the Rangers 139 terrible innings which, to date, have ended his career.

The gnashing of teeth which has accompanied García’s breakout has been to date somewhat more subdued than that around Randy Arozarena, in large part seemingly because the latter’s emergence happened on the game’s biggest stage. With García now doing the same – and with no tangible return received for him at all – the volume is likely coming.

What the Cardinals have said they’ve learned from the Arozarena experience is that they needed to be more flexible in giving players opportunities to perform in the majors after they’ve risen through the system. They have in large part made good on that correction, though Moisés Gómez has thirty home runs in consecutive minor league seasons and spent all of this year protected on the 40-man without having made his debut.

Gómez and Juan Yepez, among others, are strong candidates to go through the same process this winter which García underwent following the 2019 season. For players, that often comes with disappointment, but clearly also comes with opportunity. Through constant attrition, the Cardinals have seemingly finally settled on a set of corner outfielders in Lars Nootbaar and Jordan Walker, and even with the designated hitter in play, there are only so many options available for players who the team largely doesn’t trust in the field.

The relevant lessons of Arozarena and García are that the Cardinals have traditionally eschewed placing high values on players whose games inherently include so much variance. Arozarena’s wild trip around the bases in the 2020 World Series will appear on his career highlight reel, but could’ve just as easily ended terribly. García followed his strong reaction to a hit by pitch and a bases clearing situation with four strikeouts, immediately before he mashed a grand slam in game six and two more homers in game seven.

Static and steady have been preferred by the Cardinals for decades. Those preferences, like so many others, are in the process of being challenged after this season’s failed stress test.

There is no guarantee – not even a likelihood – that whoever the Cardinals let loose this winter will become yet another LCS MVP. Whatever mistakes were made in evaluating García were made twice by every other team in the league, save for Texas who only made the mistake once. Sometimes, a player improves by their own hard work and skill, and an organization has to shrug and accept the bad luck.

That’s why it’s vital to observe patterns in static even as a team is trying to filter out noise. Cycling the 40-man roster is a necessary part of baseball operations, and it’s a high-risk business. Surely that can’t scare a team away from making its best calculations and working out from there.

But that also doesn’t take much of the sting away from a baseball operations department watching a player it gave away for nearly free give his team a chance to win a championship from the couch. Everything the Cardinals do this winter will be viewed under a well-earned microscope, given the cascade of failures which naturally had to precede this season’s collapse.

Bad luck is indistinguishable from bad habits when it repeats in sufficient quantity. There will be no telling this winter whether the Cardinals have fallen in that trap, but it will set the scene.