Free The Cardinals Way by Howard Megdal

this impact, great, left-handed high school pitcher, and I said, ‘Why aren’t we taking him?’ They said, ‘Well, you can’t. He’s not signable.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean he’s not signable?’ They said, ‘Well, he’s got Scott Boras for an agent, and if he doesn’t get a multimillion-dollar contract, he’s going to go to college.’ I said, ‘Oh, really? Is he a good student? Does he really want to go to college?’ And they said, ‘No. He wants to play.’”
    The price tag Boras floated was based on the year before, when Travis Lee, an elite prospect, had been declared a free agent and received $10 million from the Diamondbacks. Boras told teams it would cost something similar to keep Ankiel out of school.
    â€œAnd then I kept probing,” DeWitt said. “And they said, ‘Oh, well. It’s going to take at least three million,’ and I said, ‘Well, we’ll see. But I think we should take him,’ and so they took him.”
    The signing of Ankiel, who would become of the elite young pitchers in the game as a twenty-year-old for the 2000 Cardinals, before arm and psychological difficulties forced him from the mound and into a productive career as an outfielder, came down to the final day.
    â€œIt was a typical Boras scenario where he’s going to enroll in the University of Miami if he didn’t get three million,” DeWitt said. “And we said, ‘Two and a half million or have a good time in college,’ and he took the two and a half.”
    Mozeliak described this approach as a huge change from previous practices, which were, in his words, “almost penny-pinching, if I may say so.”
    No longer. The Cardinals grabbed another Boras client in the 1998 draft, J. D. Drew, who’d sat out an entire year rather than sign with the Phillies in the 1997 draft. They went above and beyond in 1998 to bring in the multisport star Chad Hutchinson.
    â€œBut my point of all of this is we were aggressive then,” Mozeliak said.
    The problem with the strategy change wasn’t the going-above-slot for players. But the failure to make the draft focus comprehensive didn’t change the overall quality of draft hauls beyond them.
    Ankiel and Drew paid off. Ben Diggins, drafted but unsigned in 1998, and Hutchinson didn’t. But the Cardinal drafts throughout the rest of the 1990s, into the early 2000s, left the franchise without the kind of steady pipeline of talent that helped the teams from that era compete. This was a minor problem within that era, but not one Cardinals GM Walt Jocketty couldn’t overcome, primarily through free agency and the salary dumps of other teams.
    As the twenty-first century commenced, that began to change, notably with the 2002 collective bargaining agreement (CBA).
    â€œBack then, the environment was such that a lot of clubs, for whatever reason—whether it was going younger, or financial constraints, or other reasons, were a little more willing to give up players we thought could help our club,” DeWitt said back in August 2013. “So we were able to make trades for Jim Edmonds, and Mark McGwire, Scott Rolen and Darryl Kile—really key players who had great seasons with us and really elevated the franchise over that period of time.
    â€œBut we could see the landscape changing. And frankly, we pressed the draft and were aggressive in the draft … but there wasn’t a lot of depth to that. When you sign free agents, you’re giving up draft picks. And when you make deals, generally you’re trading younger players.”
    Meanwhile, the 2002 CBA, which DeWitt describes as the same “intellectual underpinnings” as the subsequent 2006 and 2011 agreements, added revenue sharing at a level that allowed many more teams, even the bottom-feeding financial franchises, to keep more of their young players. Gone were deals to