Las Vegas native Pham does his job by the numbers for the Cardinals

By Derrick Goold, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (TNS)

Monday, Jan. 15, 2018 | 3:13 p.m.

What became the achievements that defined Tommy Pham's ascendant season with the St. Louis Cardinals began, modestly enough, as a series of goals, scrawled neatly in Pham's tight, upright cursive on a white sheet of paper. He keeps a picture of it on his smartphone, and on Sunday dialed it up as proof that he once predicted he would be a 20-20 player in the majors and have a .900 OPS.

He did both of those things in 2017.

He wrote about them in 2012.

"An old mentor of mine (said) if you write something down you're 30 percent more likely to achieve it," said Pham, a native of Las Vegas, where he starred at Durango High School before graduating in 2006. "I feel like a lot of people don't believe anything I saw. After I do it, it's easier for me to be like, 'I told you so.'"

A breakout delayed is still a breakout, and Pham, for the first time in his career, attended the Cardinals' Winter Warm-Up as one of the featured players for the team and a fixture in the coming year's lineup. Already this offseason, a Cardinals executive flew personally to Las Vegas to tell veteran Dexter Fowler that they were moving him to a corner outfield spot to make room for Pham as the everyday center fielder. Just a few years removed from talking about releasing Pham, the Cardinals are now lauding him as one of the most productive outfielders in the game.

On Sunday night, Pham received the St. Louis Baseball Man of the Year Award from the baseball writers, joining a constellation of past winners that includes Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina, Adam Wainwright and a handful of Hall of Famers.

He's come a long way from jotting down goals to actually producing them, but that doesn't mean he's stopped.

"Personally, I think I'm a 30-30 player," Pham said, referencing 30 steals and 30 homers during a 28-minute talk with the media Sunday that mostly centered on his plans for the coming year. "My mindset is always the same. I'm very driven, determined, and hungry. I guess that's the same."

No player in the Cardinals' 126-year history with the National League has had 30 homers and 30 stolen bases in the same season. In 1998, Ray Lankford had 31 homers but came four steals shy of 30-30. Pham quickly pointed out he came close, too. He started this past year at Class AAA, and if his Memphis stats are included, which Pham did, he had 27 homers and 31 steals, falling just shy. To get him closer to 30-30, Pham plunged into the advanced stats. A regular reader of websites like FanGraphs.com and other sabermetric locales, Pham has become well-versed in the statistical galaxy that can define a player.

He defended his high BABIP (batting average on balls in play) on Sunday. He explained why he tracks his line drive rates. He said he read somewhere that no one slugged as well as he did on pitches on the inner third of the plate in the second half of the season. That's a thing.

"Actually, math was my best subject," he said, earnestly. "Outside of P.E."

He also enlisted the help of the Cardinals' analytics department this winter. Pham had already planned to spend this winter working on speed, and he wanted to try a workout called "overspeed training." He has shared video of this training on Instagram, and it shows him in a harness sprinting on a treadmill that seems to be going at Mach 1. Pham wanted to set a goal -- so he asked the Cardinals to provide stats on the fastest players in the majors. He received data on Washington's Trea Turner, Minnesota's Byron Buxton and Cincinnati's base-thief Billy Hamilton. Pham memorized their land-speed and set them as a goal.

During a recent overspeed workout, Pham kept up with the treadmill at 24 mph.

"You take 2 mph off the treadmill -- that's your ground speed," he said. "I'm only at 24. So my ground speed is 22 (mph). Turner ran 22.7 (mph). So, you see, I'm behind. ... I'm still looking to gain. Because when I've done my research on these certain players in the game, they're still ahead of me. I need to catch them."

Pham, 29, ditched plans to play some games in the Dominican Republic's winter league this offseason because he wanted to focus on the speed. He moved down to Florida about a month ago and will visit an overspeed specialist in the coming weeks to try to keep pace with Turner or catch Buxton.

What's driving Pham -- other than making good on his predictions -- is the notion that through speed more things are possible. If he's a step faster that's the five bases he didn't steal in the majors to get to 30. If he's two steps faster, maybe that's another four hits he can steal in center. If he can catch Turner, that could be the difference between scoring from first base on a double or outrunning a throw to first for a base hit. Pham became the first player in Cardinals history to hit better than .300, reach base at a clip better than .400, slug better than .500 and have at least 20 homers and 20 stolen bases.

He has written down more for 2018, when, despite having more than a decade in the Cardinals' organization, he'll still be making a nudge above the minimum salary. He isn't eligible for arbitration until a year from now, and that might be when the Cardinals talk multiyear. Might.

He offered no prediction on whether that will happen.

"Going out there and ballin'," he said. "That usually helps."

Pham said he has exchanged texts with fellow Las Vegas resident Fowler, though he said the veteran thinks he's some kind of "club animal," and it's hard to "club" in Vegas when speeding on a treadmill in Florida. He said one teammate, Harrison Bader, has challenged him to a race, but Pham declined so far because "I only race for money." His teammates have come to expect -- and now appreciate -- such blunt bravado. It didn't take long for Pham to reveal it this past season as he found his pace while the third-place team kept meandering.

"Tommy stood up in the middle of the clubhouse and started yelling at folks," starter Adam Wainwright said. "Guys were looking at me like, 'Are you going to do something to stop him?' I was like, 'Man, absolutely not.' I love that about this guy. He's 29 years old, not even a year in the show and he's got the stones to stand up and call out an entire big-league clubhouse full of a bunch of guys who are divas and go right at them?

"He brings an attitude to our team that we need."

Said Luke Weaver: "That guy means business."

The well of confidence that the Cardinals saw this past season has its source back on that sheet of paper. John Hartwig, a St. Louis businessmen, was hired by the Cardinals to establish their "Cardinal Core" program. He met with a selection of prospects that included Shelby Miller and Kolten Wong and had each player write down their goals. Pham was injured at the time -- his season undone by some ailment, be it shoulder or knee or his ongoing work to maintain his vision -- and still he found some potency with the pen that he couldn't with the bat.

He said Hartwig wrote down some goals for Pham, too, and that at the time there were three people who believed he could pull them off. Hartwig, himself, and John Vuch, the Cardinals' director of baseball administration. He had championed Pham as his spot in the organization was uncertain.

Pham enlarged the picture so that the details of the goal sheet from 2012 could be seen. He wrote about his health. He wrote about the OPS he could have. He wrote that he should have an 80 percent success rate on steals.

He shook his head.

Didn't get that one. He was at 78 percent.

"I believe that I could be a really special player," Pham said at the end of his day at the Warm-Up Sunday. "I just need time to show it."