The Cardinals’ hearts match their minds in the Piscotty deal

[EasyAce]

By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/12/14/the-cardinals-hearts-match-their-minds-in-the-piscotty-deal/


Piscotty, shown sliding home here, just got the best slide home he could have asked
for with his mother stricken with ALS . . .

When the Cardinals were bumped out of their final National League wild card hope at September’s end,
I observed several things. Including the trio of Stephen Piscotty, Randall Grichuk, and 2016 rookie star
Aledmys Diaz dropping off the OPS+ table to a collective 87 between them. The Cardinals, I noted, were
going to have to figure out how to re-adjust the trio.

Shows you what I knew. Piscotty played with a monstrous weight on his heart. He took a leave from the
team for a week in May, when learning his mother was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS).

“It was time to get back and spend time with her,” Piscotty told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch when he
returned to the team. “It just really puts life in perspective. When I got the news it was a little tough
to focus, and I felt it was the right decision to go home and Mike was great about making that real
easy. I was very thankful for that, especially my mom. It’s time to get back to work and get rolling.”

Piscotty would have to have been beyond human to roll very well the rest of the season after receiving
news like that, even with the Cardinals putting him onto every last medical connection they have in and
outside baseball for assistance. And manager Mike Matheny knew it.

“Our world revolves around winning for nine months out of the year and we tend to lose sight – or at
least compartmentalize and put stuff off to the side on the backburner,” the skipper told the Post-Dispatch
when his man returned. “That’s how most of the guys are wired. But when something like this comes
up, that can’t happen. You’ve got to go deal with the tough stuff.”

As the winter meetings began to wind down, the Cardinals showed they have more heart than many
when it comes to helping a man deal with the tough stuff. In baseball terms, strictly, trading Piscotty to
Oakland—after he became an odd outfielder out with the fire-selling Marlins dealing them Marcell Ozuna
—made enough sense.

But the Athletics play their home games a mere 25 miles from where Piscotty’s mother lives. And while
the Cardinals had interest in Piscotty from other teams, they were going to do right by him and his family
if they could help it.

“You are never making a player trade simply for geographic or sentimental reasons,” said team president
John Mozeliak. “It had to be something that made sense for us. There were certainly some opportunities
to move him elsewhere. When you are looking at how to break a tie, clearly that did play into it.”

A day before the deal was done, Matheny told A’s beat writer Susan Schlusser of the San Francisco Chronicle
that they wanted to get Piscotty to the Bay Area if they could help it.

“You just hurt for him,” Matheny told Schlusser. “You can’t even really go there to understand him and
at his age and what it is that he had to endure or what that is like for a family. You let him know that you
care. You acknowledge. You have compassion. We’re trying to be support for him, and we have to look to
do anything we can.” (Piscotty is 26.)

After his breakout 2016, during which he hit 22 home runs, drove in 85 runs, and hung up a respectable
.800 OPS with just shy of three wins above a replacement-level player, Piscotty’s 2017 season was torpedoed
by his family burden. Playing so much closer to home should lift a huge burden off his heart, if it can’t
relieve his mother of the insidious disease.

Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig’s name became attached to it after the Yankee first baseman took himself out
of the lineup and retired; the disease killed him two years later. Hall of Fame pitcher Catfish Hunter turned
up with ALS almost two decades after he retired; he died a year later after a fall in his home injured his
head too severely. Former college baseball star Peter Frates inspired the Ice Bucket Challenge after
receiving his ALS diagnosis.

When her son went home for that week, 54-year-old Gretchen Piscotty watched a few Cardinals games
with him on television before all but ordering him to get back to work. “I know she enjoys watching me
play, so I want to give her that,” he said when he returned. “She thought it’d be a fun, weird idea to have
me there watching. So we did that. The whole family was able to come back and spend some time and
kind of gather ourselves. My mom is very strong. So we’re going to be behind her.”

She’ll get to watch a lot more of him now that he’ll be wearing Athletics silks. And he’ll get to be behind
her and next to her a lot more often now, thanks to the hearts in which his now-former bosses showed
themselves abundant. Don’t be shocked if that’s her you see in a choice field box hollering her fool head
off for the son who wishes only that he could make her battle easier than it’s going to be.
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