Cards have high hopes for performance department

JUPITER, Fla. -- A little more than a year ago, Dr. Robert Butler left his position as a clinical scientist and assistant professor at Duke University to accept the task of reshaping how the Cardinals organize their medical and strength/conditioning operations.
By bringing all of these areas under one umbrella, the Cardinals envisioned the potential for a competitive advantage. In the same way sabermetrics once changed the landscape of player evaluation, the Cards saw the creation of a performance department as baseball's potential next frontier.
The goal?
"One of my favorite lines is the best ability is availability. So we start there," Butler said. "The whole goal is antifragility."
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In the simplest of terms, this involves creating a system in which recovery, strength/conditioning work and medical treatment all work toward the same aim of having a player ready to perform at his peak potential at the time of the next first pitch. By having these departments collaborate, there is less risk that they are inadvertently working against each other when it comes to direct player preparation and treatment.
One benefit of this, the Cardinals believe, is a better position from which to identify the why, not just the what, when it comes to injuries.
"We're really looking at how we can as an organization help better optimize player performance," general manager John Mozeliak said. "That can be in various shapes and sizes. That can be on the baseball side. That can be understanding sleep, understanding fatigue, understanding diet, rest. All of those things come in play."
The best way to visualize the function of the performance department is to head across the street from the Cardinals' Spring Training complex and into the lower level of a private office building. Here, the Cards have transformed rented space into a hybrid facility for the organization's Minor League players.

It's laid out the same way Butler's vision is, with various departments under one roof, working in synergy toward an end goal of optimizing player performance. The training room is adjacent to the workout room, which is also where various baseline testing takes place. Communication is open, and processes are transparent.
"We expect chaos to happen," Butler said. "But we want our athletes to get stronger through the chaos. That comes through collecting data, understanding the data we have and learning how to respond to it in a more efficient manner."
The way the Minor League performance facility operates in Jupiter is a microcosm of a larger procedure that, if working optimally, runs from the lowest levels to the Major League team. It's not simply the need for collaboration and cooperation across levels, but also a consistency of language and evaluation that is necessary.
The aim of the performance department is to minimize the gray areas that can creep into medical or recovery evaluation. One way this is done is by measuring player strength and exertion during different points in the season. That way, anomalies can be easily identified and addressed, potentially before more serious injury occurs.

These tests include grip strength, hamstring stability and wearable monitors that calculate workload. Those monitors, for instance, have been worn by some players underneath their jerseys throughout Spring Training.
All this information is stored in a database so that it lives beyond a player's stint at one particular affiliate. That way, if he is promoted to a higher level, the new staff overseeing his work has the same information as the staff previously monitoring him.
"The whole point behind our process is to minimize the error on our daily decision-making and our daily process so that they're repeatable at every level," Butler said. "Every book you read on the Cardinals talks about how there is a process, there is a lineage. And this is no different."
Butler estimates that about one-third of Major League teams have something similar to the Cardinals' performance department. The Cards have increased the size of this staff over the last year, and they understand that there is plenty of new ground still to cover.
The organization just hopes to have had a head start.
"If in 10 years you're talking about the performance department like we talk about the analytics group, that'd be great," Butler said. "We just want to fit in with the successful history of the Cardinals and we want to support that as much as we can -- to allow the players to leave the jersey in a better place, to maximize their overall development and not provide a distraction from what the goals or the organization are."