For more than a decade, Moises Rodriguez ’95 (CLAS), assistant general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, has traveled to the Dominican Republic to find the team’s Latin American baseball stars of tomorrow. He watches teenagers play their hearts out on hardscrabble fields, digging balls out of the dirt to make the kind of put-outs that put smiles on scouts’ faces.

The best of the best of these youngsters are signed to contracts (in Latin America, the minimum signing age is 16) and enter a baseball academy owned by a Major League team. Here they eat, sleep, take classes to achieve the equivalent of a high school education, and learn the fundamentals of baseball. The Cardinals, just like every other Major League team, has such a facility in Central America.

Before being promoted in 2017 to his current position, where he monitors player development within the Cardinals’ minor and major league system, Rodriguez spent a decade as the organization’s director of international operations. Every three weeks, he jetted to the Dominican Republic to supervise the players at the academy.

“It was a lot of long hours, and I made a lot of sacrifices for the team, but it’s worth it,” says Rodriguez from his office in Busch Stadium. “Trying to be an influential person in the process of building a World Series championship team is what drives me.” The challenge, he says, is finding youngsters who have the right combination of athletic skills and heart.

“Heart is subjective,” he says. A player has to show desire, the ability to learn and to make adjustments on the fly. “When watching these kids, I ask myself, ‘Are they gritty? Competitive? Resilient?’ But at the end of the day, it’s how they perform. Unfortunately, not everyone we acquire turns into a prospect.”