Questions from John Mozeliak

Each winter, members of the United Cardinal Bloggers are invited to send questions to John Mozeliak and he’ll answer them. This year, he answered about 2 per person; below are the questions he answered for me.

Nyrdcast: As someone who has dealt with Covid, I’ve felt how long it’s taken to get back to “normal” as far as physical conditioning.  How much of an impact did that have on players like Lane Thomas and Carlos Martinez?  Was that the reason we never saw Edmundo Sosa with the big league club?

John Mozeliak: When people ask the question how COVID affected players, the easiest way to think about it is it’s not one size fits all.  When you look at the individuals who tested positive for COVID and were quarantined and not part of the team for a number of days or weeks, there was a spectrum of how players were affected.  

For some people, if affected them very little.  They spent their 10-12 days in quarantine and right when they got back, they were ready to go and contribute.  There were others though, where you can look at some of their performances last year and you could say to yourself that they never got to where they needed to be, to a point where their contribution was going to be more normalized.  So how can you determine statistical information for last year based on that?  I still think it has value, but we understand who was most affected versus who wasn’t, but overall, I think that data was important because something is better than nothing.

Nyrdcast: A few years back, Bill DeWitt III mentioned a pitching academy in Jupiter.  Is there any update on it?

John Mozeliak: Well it’s not an academy, but we do have a pitching and hitting lab now available to us down in Jupiter.  We will have a lot of different technologies installed in these tunnels that will allow us to study pitching from a different perspective than we’ve had in the past and it will also allow us to do more with our hitters.  Overall, it really increases our technology and puts it in a place where we can secure it, analyze it and share it.  

We will obviously utilize it during spring training and for minor league camp and with the restructure of our minor leagues, we’ll have our Low-A (Palm Beach Cardinals) and Extended Spring Training (Gulf Coast League Cardinals) teams at the complex during the season.  So we’ll have players that will have exposure to this area that are still very much in the development mind set.  It’s a great advantage for us because we have a lot of players who like to work out in Jupiter during the off-season and now we’ll have more tools to take advantage of to help them in their development.

I also asked questions about the draft, spending plans after some big contracts come off the books, the hall of fame, and who would play third base (this was prior to the trade for Nolan Arenado), but those will have to be answered another time.

Questions from other sites:
RetroSimba

Don’t forget to check the Cardinal Salary Matrix and the Cardinal Prospect Tracker for updates.