The guide to sustainable farming

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ONE YEAR AGO, on backfield No. 6 in Tempe, Ariz., where players breathe the helium that floats spring training optimism, 165 Angels minor leaguers took a knee and 55 Angels minor league coaches stood at attention. Scott Servais, the club's assistant GM overseeing player development, was in the middle. It would be his only chance all year to address everybody at once.

"How many of you here played in the playoffs last year?" he asked. Denny Hocking, the Angels' new rookie ball manager, hired from Baltimore's Double-A affiliate, was the only one who could raise his hand.

"Baseball America thinks we have the worst talent in the game," he continued. "How does that make you feel? You play in the worst organization in the game."

Third baseman Kaleb Cowart, LA's top prospect at the time, recalls looking at the faces of his teammates as Servais spoke: "They're like, Wow. Was he really just that open about it?"

But it was true. The critics had spoken, have spoken, continue to speak: Even now, a year later, Baseball America considers the Angels' future to be windswept and barren, again ranking them 30th in organizational talent.

Servais is the guy who was hired in 2011 to fix them. It's a job he's done before. As the Rangers' director of player development, he took an organization that had baseball's 28th-best farm system and in two years turned it into the best. But if that was a nifty trick -- like juggling eight balls and a chain saw -- turning around the Angels' system is like repeating it, blindfolded and on roller skates. The best routes for adding talent aren't available to him: The Angels forfeited three top draft picks to sign Albert Pujols, Josh Hamilton and C.J. Wilson, and the loose rules that had allowed the Rangers to sign half of Latin America and hoard draft picks have since been tightened.

Since the Angels have few avenues to acquire impact talent, Servais is left to develop it. So he recently burrowed into his home on 35 acres in Colorado to compile a guide to player development, a manual to be read by everybody from ownership on down. It would lay out the Angels' organizational philosophies and offer step-by-step development strategies for each skill a player must master. It would help modernize the Angels' player development department; it would make the team more like the one every organization in baseball wants to be -- the Cardinals.

St. Louis reached last season's World Series with a roster that featured 17 players the club had drafted and developed. None of the three other teams in the LCS had more than six drafted and developed players. The Cardinals are, as Servais puts it, "the hot team in player development." And three years ago, they gathered all their organizational intelligence into a manual: the Cardinal Way, a proprietary 117-page document. As Cardinals Double-A manager Mike Shildt told a newspaper reporter at the time, "This is the blueprint."

When I meet Servais this winter in a Denver hotel lobby, he says, "They've got it going on."

What do the Cardinals do differently?

"Well ..." He smiles. "Let me see what I've got here." He reaches into his attaché, pulls out a document -- 117 pages. It is the Cardinal Way.

"They don't know I have that," he says. I open it. A warm, golden glow envelops me.

This is really it?

"That's the secret," he says.