JUPITER, Fla. • Four months after Carson Kelly graduated from high school and shortly after he reached legal voting age, the Cardinals pulled him out of the clubhouse and asked him to cast the deciding vote on a move that would change his career.
On the first day of the Cardinals’ 2013 instructional league — a fall camp for select minor leaguers — 18-year-old Kelly was invited into a coaches conference room. Farm director Gary LaRocque and five or six other officials were on one side, leaving Kelly alone at his side of a table.
“OK, so I either did something wrong,” Kelly recalls, “or something is up.