FanPost

How Kent Bottenfield Defined the 21st Century Cardinals

The most important individual season for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 21st century, in which the team has won two World Series titles, four pennants, and nine NL Central titles (and that's not even counting the 2001 tie with the Houston Astros), happened in the 20th century to a player worth somewhere between 4.2 (Fangraphs) and 7.0 (Baseball Reference) career wins above replacement.

It's tempting to go with one of the MVP or MVP-caliber seasons: One of a multitude of Albert Pujols seasons, 2004 Jim Edmonds or Scott Rolen, 2012-13 Yadier Molina. It's tempting to go with a surprise season--2004 Tony Womack, 2008 Ryan Ludwick, or 2011 Lance Berkman. But the single most important season, the one which defined the illustrious decade which followed, was 1999 Kent Bottenfield.

For those of you unfamiliar with the baseball career of contemporary Christian music singer Kent Bottenfield, well, he was a Major League Baseball player from 1992 through 2001, and up until 1999, he was the embodiment of a journeyman. Bottenfield had pitched the 1998 season with the Cardinals, his fifth MLB team, and had his best season. By modern standards, a 4.44 ERA and 4.31 FIP in 133.2 innings alternating between the bullpen and rotation is mediocre-if-you-squint, but this was 1998. For a point of reference, in 1999, Rockies outfielder Dante Bichette hit 34 home runs and OPSed .895 and finished with a grand total of -2.3 bWAR. And speaking of 1999, that was when Bottenfield really took off. At least in the perception of his value. He had, given his era, a decent season. His 4.75 FIP was roughly league average: his FIP-, a league-weighted stat in which 100 is league average and a higher number is worse, was 101. But more traditional stats were what made Kent Bottenfield an all-star: his ERA- was 87 (with a 3.97 ERA) and he finished 18-7. And the 1999 Cardinals weren't even good, finishing 75-86.

As a ten year old who was naturally sabermetrically inclined enough to recognize his win total was fairly farcical but also took his good ERA at face value, I was excited about Bottenfield. Yes, he turned 31 in the offseason between 1999 and 2000, but he simply seemed to me like a late bloomer. But then, Cardinals GM Walt Jocketty did the thing I would not have had the good sense to do with Kent Bottenfield. He sold high.

Jocketty packaged one good season of Kent Bottenfield and Adam Kennedy, a formerly highly regarded prospect who had fallen out of favor with the Cardinals, to the Anaheim Angels for Jim Edmonds and, well, you know how that went. Edmonds loved St. Louis, he signed a long-term deal to stick around for below market value, and now he's a borderline Hall of Famer who, if inducted (I've learned to not care if anyone makes the Bonds-and-Clemens-less Hall, but that's just me), would certainly go in as a Cardinal. I try not to go too crazy about deals for expiring contracts--after all, the Cardinals could have just signed Jim Edmonds in free agency not too long after the Cardinals acquired him in a trade--but regardless, it's hard to deny the trade worked. But the Cardinals didn't stick with making a good trade. It continued to pay off.

By 2007, the Cardinals clearly needed to rebuild. After two terrific seasons in 2004 and 2005 and a so-so season that somehow wound up winning the World Series in 2006, the aging Cardinals had a losing 2007 and all of a sudden didn't look very good. So they started to trade away their declining parts, and that included Jim Edmonds. On December 14, 2007, the Cardinals traded Edmonds to the San Diego Padres for a decent but decidedly not blue chip third base prospect. That prospect was David Freese. I won't even cite any David Freese statistics. How could I?

The Cardinals got several good seasons out of David Freese, but by the end of the 2013 season, there were very serious questions to be asked about David Freese's future with the Cardinals. While Freese followed up his 2011 postseason heroics with an all-star 2012, his 2013 was problematic--his wRC+ dipped from 132 to 105 and his defense went from competent to outright hideous. In a 2013 season in which the Cardinals won 97 games, Freese was worth a paltry -0.4 fWAR. But even with natural third baseman Matt Carpenter emerging as an MVP-caliber player out of position at second base and the presence of consensus Top 100 prospect Kolten Wong ready to take Carpenter's spot, it seemed impossible to many Cardinals fans, myself included, that the team would trade its hometown hero.

And then, they did the seemingly impossible, trading David Freese and Fernando Salas, a middling middle reliever who had no apparent role on the 2014 Cardinals, to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (note the different team name usage from the Edmonds trade to this trade--the Angels are a silly, silly organization). In return, the Cardinals acquired Peter Bourjos, a mediocre hitting center fielder who nevertheless was expected to supplant, or at least challenge, incumbent Jon Jay thanks to his tremendous defense. And results have been mixed--tempted as I am to start a Bourjos vs. Jay fight (Bourjos/Jay internet disputes rank right up there in terms of agitation caused with yelling fire in a crowded theater, or contending that Adolf Hitler was an atheist), I will refrain this time. But while Peter Bourjos is probably not much longer for the Cardinals, he was not the only player acquired in the trade. And Randal Grichuk, who seemed at the time to be the Meg White of the Cardinals' return, has emerged as a future important contributor to good Cardinals teams. Much as David Freese and Jim Edmonds before him.

I recognize, nearly a thousand words in, that I'm rehashing a story that most of you know. But the reason I do this (HEY EVERYBODY WHO SKIMMED TO THE POINT WHERE I MADE AN ACTUAL POINT HERE IT IS PLEASE STOP SCROLLING RIGHT HERE EVERYBODY) is to show that the constant thing which has defined the incredible success of recent-vintage St. Louis Cardinals team is change. The Cardinals consistently eschewed sentimentality in favor of raw analysis. Walt Jocketty saw Kent Bottenfield as a player whose value had peaked and, having already derived the maximum value he could out of a true-talent mediocre pitcher, Jocketty acquired Jim Edmonds. And then John Mozeliak, in one of his administration's first moves, traded Jim Edmonds, he of 42.3 fWAR with the Cardinals and 2.7 fWAR after the Cardinals. And once the return was no longer necessary, Mozeliak passed on sentiment and acquired a player in Randal Grichuk who has been worth 3.6 fWAR in only 457 career plate appearances and has an eye-popping penchant for raw power which has yielded a .245 career ISO. And he's barely 24 years old. He may have another several terrific seasons for the Cardinals before he's done. And the Cardinals got this, this, and this for a player who was out of baseball less than fifteen months after he was traded.