Yesterday, after a long and depressing build-up, the Cardinals traded fan-favorite shortstop Brendan Ryan to the Seattle Mariners for Maikel Cleto, a pitching prospect with a high-90s-mph fastball and a history of getting hit really hard in the minor leagues. It’s the most recent in a long line of moves that shows just how high the buy-in on a Tony La Russa-managed team has always been, and another example of the Cardinals putting themselves at a quantifiable disadvantage for the sake of La Russa’s unquantifiable managerial style.
It’s always been clear that some players don’t respond to the environment that La Russa creates in a clubhouse that seems, from the outside, to be perpetually intense and strangely paranoid. La Russa wants players whose primary baseball tool is hustling, who aren’t bothered by his tendency to play hunches that lead to inferior players getting starts at crucial moments, who look and act, generally, like Skip Schumaker.
Brendan Ryan wasn’t that guy. He was too clearly anxious at the plate, too smooth and slick in the field. Scott Rolen wasn’t that guy—he was unwilling to go along with the idea that La Russa’s for-the-good-of-the-team move to spot-start stereotypical grinder Scott Spiezio ahead of him in the 2006 playoffs was actually for the good of the team. J.D. Drew was too quiet and calm to be that guy; Ray Lankford struck out too much.
Sometimes these trades make the Cardinals better; Woody Williams came over in the Lankford trade in 2001, and Adam Wainwright in the Drew trade after 2003. But it’s not because La Russa’s obsession with scrappy types is being placated. So long as the Cardinals are willing to risk trades like these in favor of a clubhouse dynamic that they can’t quantify, they’ll be giving wins away like this every time someone finds himself in La Russa’s doghouse.
