ST. LOUIS • More than six years ago, as Cardinals scouts descended on a classic college ballpark for opening night of the college baseball season, there weren’t many seats and the weather was even less accommodating.
The Cardinals had dispatched as many as four scouts, including several of their highest-ranking officials, to see that night’s starter for Texas A&M.
“As they say in the scout vernacular, ‘There was some heat,’” the director of the Cardinals’ draft, Dan Kantrovitz, told me a year later for a story detailing Wacha’s scouting and development. “The Cardinals had some heat at that ballgame.