NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Cardinals went to the bullpen and called upon bearded right-handed hurler Jason Motte, hopeful he’d help them pull out a clutch win. Only this time, Motte wasn’t being called to the mound. He’d been called to the stage in hopes of bringing the Cardinals luck in the second MLB draft lottery.
Alas, Motte didn’t have the magic touch on this night.
The Cardinals went into Tuesday’s lottery with the fifth-best odds of receiving the top pick in the 2024 draft. Instead, they didn’t even end up with the highest pick of any team in the National League Central Division.
The lottery, held in a ballroom during MLB’s winter meetings at The Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center, awarded the Cardinals the seventh overall pick.
Adding to the dismay for Cardinals followers, the Cincinnati Reds ended up with the second overall pick. The Reds finished this season above .500 with a record of 82-80, and they had just a 0.9% chance to get the top pick.
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The Cleveland Guardians, who were 76-86, will have the first overall pick in 2024. That franchise had never previously held the first overall pick in the draft.
“You know what, I wasn’t lucky enough today,†said Motte, who admitted to feeling some nerves in his stomach as the results were revealed. “It was a good time, coming here and being a part of it, seeing a bunch of guys and being around.â€
The Cardinals went into the lottery with an 8.3% chance at taking home the top pick by virtue of the club’s worst record (71-91) since 1990 and a last-place finish in their division.
The Cardinals are one of now seven teams that have never held the first overall pick in the MLB draft.
The last time the Cardinals picked in the top 10 of the draft came in 1998, when they selected outfielder J.D. Drew fifth overall.
Motte, selected by the Cardinals in the 19th round of the 2003 draft, spent parts of nine seasons in the major leagues. Six of those seasons came with the Cardinals, including a 42-save season in 2012.
He also has the distinction of having closed out the club’s most recent championship season as the pitcher who finished Game 7 of the 2011 World Series on the mound.
Motte explained why he both was and wasn’t caught off-guard when Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak called and asked him to be the club’s representative on the stage for the lottery.
“Mo had actually called me a couple months earlier completely on accident,†Motte explained. “There’s another Jason Motte, he’s the GM of the Chiefs in Peoria. So Mo called me a couple months earlier, and I was like, ‘Hey what’s up?’ He was like, ‘Wrong one.’
“So when he did call me about this, I was like, ‘Wrong one again?’ He’s like, ‘Nope. I actually meant to call you.’â€
Motte has remained in regular contact with the Cardinals, and he has even taken part in fantasy camp and makes trips to the ballpark for games with his children.
He’s currently the head baseball coach at Christian Brothers High School in Memphis, Tennessee, which is part of the reason Mozeliak said he reached out.
“First off, I don’t want to inconvenience people too much, and he does live in Memphis,†Mozeliak said less than an hour before the draft lottery. “So I was just trying to think about someone who does like to still have a connection to the Cardinals, and obviously, Motter was a part of a lot of our successes. So I reached out to him. I didn’t know if he was going to be like, ‘Ah, I don’t want to do that.’ But he was pumped.â€
Motte shared the stage with a former Cardinals teammate of his in retired outfielder Randy Winn, who served as the Seattle Mariners representative. Winn and Motte were teammates on the Cardinals in 2010.
Mott said earlier in the day he also spent time in the Cardinals suite talking with manager Oliver Marmol, general manager Michael Girsch and assistant general manager Randy Flores and Mozeliak.
While at the winter meetings, Motte also ran into former Cardinals teammates Jon Jay and Daniel Descalso as well as their former manager Tony La Russa.
Draft and develop
The Cardinals strategically targeted their trades this summer at bolstering the pitching depth in the upper levels of their farm system.
They’ve also been reassessing how they think about amateur pitchers as well as how they approach their player development on the pitching side.
This offseason, they also cut ties with a pair of pitchers who’d been first-round draft selections in right-handers Dakota Hudson (2016 draft) and Jake Woodford (2015). Both were supplemental first-round picks.
It’s too early to know if the Cardinals will target pitching with their draft pick in 2024, but Mozeliak has acknowledged an organizational desire to lean more toward pitchers with the ability to elicit swing-and-miss from opposing batters.
“You’re hopeful that this is a bottom-to-top sort of strategy over time,†Mozeliak said. “But I think when you look at how we draft or how we bring players into the pipeline, historically, it’s not necessarily just high-velocity guys. So that’s just something we want to focus on a little bit when you think about sort of entry on in.â€
For years, the Cardinals were successful targeting pitchers who excelled at pitching to contact and creating groundballs and weak contact.
“We are taking a look at our amateur model because there’s no doubt that we’ve made some pretty high picks, first- or second-round guys, that you’re not seeing some of their performance that they had in college necessarily translate into a successful pro model,†Mozeliak said.
“I’m not saying they’re done or we’re giving up on it. It just hasn’t been as quickly as we had hoped. So we are tinkering with how we think about that.â€
Mozeliak stopped short of getting into detail about what that “tinkering†might look like or the specific adjustments they’ve made or may make in how they think about the pitchers they bring into the organization.
“I don’t want to get into the weeds on how you think about our algorithm or something, but it is something internally that we are aware of, we’re conscious of and we would like to see some version of change,†Mozeliak said.
Mozeliak said this shift in approach will likely play out in both their draft and player development processes.
“You definitely need to think about how you draft on the pitching side,†Mozeliak said.