‘A Rage to Master’: The childhood bond of the Cardinals’ top two prospects

‘A Rage to Master’: The childhood bond of the Cardinals’ top two prospects
By Mark Saxon
Nov 25, 2020

Players at the St. Louis Cardinals’ summer satellite camp had a lot of downtime when they weren’t working out or playing camp games at Hammons Field. With a pandemic raging, their choice of diversions was limited.

The team’s top-rated pitching prospect, Matthew Liberatore, filled many of his idle hours in his hotel room playing Fortnite on shaky WiFi with his best friend, Nolan Gorman. He also picked up a new hobby while he was holed up in Springfield, Mo.: golf. It was one of the few leisure activities the players were permitted to do.

Advertisement

As anyone who has ever picked up that maddening sport as an adult can attest, it takes a while before you can hit the ball squarely, much less for distance. Now back home in his native Phoenix, Liberatore has continued to climb the game’s learning curve rather aggressively.

“As soon as I got home, I bought a set of clubs, got a net for my backyard and I take 200 swings every single night because it bothers me I can’t hit my drives straight,” Liberatore said. “Anything I do, I can’t stop doing it until I’m perfect at it or I get as close as I can be to perfect.”

The people who know the Cardinals’ 6-foot-5 lefty can attest to that singularity of focus and drive. His father, Anthony, saw it begin to take root in baseball shortly after a relative gave him MVP Baseball for his Nintendo GameCube when he was 5 years old. He went from chasing ladybugs in the outfield to grasping the rules and, within a couple of years, trying to dominate his tiny peers.

Anthony Liberatore already knew his son had an unusually strong left arm after he took him to a Diamondbacks game and witnessed him hit 40 mph on the radar gun, drawing a crowd on the concourse. A couple of years later, that focus manifested itself in a club game.

“He throws a pitch and drills a kid right in the back. They’re 7 years old, so he goes down like a shot,” Anthony recalled. “The ball hit him so hard, it rolled about halfway back to the mound. He starts walking toward home and everyone thinks he’s going to check on the kid he just hurt. Halfway to the plate, he picks up the ball, gets back on the mound and gets ready to throw the next pitch. It was kind of that mentality like, ‘Hey, I’m here to compete. We’re between the lines,’ and that was, I thought, unusual.”

Advertisement

That personality type isn’t always the easiest to live with. Matthew Liberatore said his parents often get annoyed or concerned when he is in perpetual motion, spinning his car keys or flipping his cellphone in the air and catching it. He finds it hard to stop. He needs his body to follow his constantly racing mind.

“I think that obsessive desire can be a little overwhelming at times,” he said.

To describe his son, Anthony Liberatore borrows a phrase from psychologist Ellen Winner, who set out to describe a set of personality traits for gifted children and came up with “A Rage to Master.” Many major leaguers fall into a similar personality type. What made Liberatore’s so unusual was that, from his elementary school days on, he had a fellow traveler in the rage-to-master club: Gorman.

They first met playing rec ball when Gorman was a freckle-faced 4-year old and Liberatore was 5. Those two teams were combined into a select club team the following year, with Gorman playing with kids two years older and Liberatore playing up one year.


Liberatore (left) and Gorman (center) played club ball together for five years. Here, Liberatore was 9 and Gorman was 8. Also pictured is Jake Vesecky, now a catcher at LSU Shreveport. (Courtesy of Anthony Liberatore)

From ages 9 to 14, they played on one of the most dominant club teams the Phoenix area has seen, the Stetson Hills Stealth. The players often met 90 minutes before the scheduled practice time to do speed-and-agility ladders or to work on their running form. Anthony Liberatore and Brian Gorman, Nolan’s dad, were two of the coaches. By the age of 12, Gorman and Liberatore were so close that Gorman spent many nights at the Liberatore home. When they were 12, they would wake up at 5 a.m. and ride their bikes to a gym four miles away for baseball workouts.

“Maybe there are 12-year-olds who do that nowadays, but I don’t see it too often,” Gorman said. “We kind of understood what the possibilities were, you know?”

The possibilities are pretty much laid out in front of them at this point. Now that Dylan Carlson has graduated to the majors, Gorman, a power-hitting third baseman, is widely rated as the Cardinals’ top hitting prospect. Liberatore, 21, was so impressive in summer camp, Cardinals executive John Mozeliak blurted out in a Zoom call with reporters that he had moved into the competition to make the team’s rotation as soon as 2021. If Gorman is behind his best friend in his development, it’s not by much. The team said they both excelled at satellite camp.

“Libby pitched exceptionally well. He was probably our most effective pitcher down there, and that included a lot of guys who saw big league time,” Cardinals general manager Michael Girsch said. “Regardless of what level batter he was facing, he just pitched great. He walked very few guys, his K rate was among the highest of anyone down there.”

Advertisement

Gorman, 20, may have been a tick behind older, more experienced players such as John Nogowski and Justin Williams at camp, but Girsch said he made strong defensive strides working with infield coach Jose Oquendo and that his “exit velocities were off the charts.”

The fact they’re still playing together is remarkable. They were taken three picks apart in the 2018 draft, Liberatore going 16th overall to the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cardinals taking Gorman at No. 19. Both players opted to go pro rather than take scholarships to play together at Arizona. The Cardinals traded outfielders Randy Arozarena and José Martínez to the Tampa Bay Rays for Liberatore in a January deal that included four players and two draft picks, reuniting the best friends.

Many a St. Louis baseball fan can tell you about Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola growing up across the street from one another in the The Hill neighborhood of St. Louis, but Garagiola signed as a teenager with the Cardinals while Berra played his entire professional career for New York teams. The notion of Liberatore and Gorman playing together from coach-pitch to the majors is almost unheard of.

“If you wrote it and proposed it as a movie script, someone would tell you, ‘No, it’s too implausible,’” Anthony Liberatore said.

The last time The Athletic’s Keith Law ranked MLB’s top prospects, back in February, he had Liberatore at No. 54 and Gorman at No. 82, but with so many of the players on that list having graduated to the majors, both figure to move up before the next list.

Neither player seems willing to coast on his talents. Here’s the scouting report Liberatore gave of Gorman:

“The first thing I would write down is, ‘Power.’ I’ve not met many people in my life who are as strong as that dude, let alone being able to use that strength to hit a baseball as far as he does,” Liberatore said. “The second thing I would put down is that he’s very, very smart. He’s a deep thinker even if he doesn’t let you on to that. I’ve been fortunate enough to see the notebooks he keeps pregame and I’ve been blown away by how detailed and insightful it was on opposing pitchers.”

Advertisement

Gorman had similar things to say about Liberatore, who he faced several times a week throughout satellite camp. Gorman, who bats left-handed, said this camp was an opportunity to improve his approach against lefty pitchers with elite stuff, such as Liberatore and Zack Thompson. To prepare, he strapped on a virtual-reality headset and set it to the pitches of former American League Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell, a fellow lefty with an excellent breaking pitch.

“He’s just really good at mixing his pitches and trying not to have the same tendencies against guys he might face over and over again like you do in the big leagues,” Gorman said. “He’s really good at playing the mental game, being one step ahead of the hitter and always trying to set them up for that next pitch. You’ve got to be ready for anything. He has slow moves to home, then quick pitches. He just keeps you on your toes as a hitter. I don’t think too many people knew about that before this camp, but it was fun to watch.”

The Cardinals’ front office has heard the complaints of many fans after Arozarena scorched practically every pitch he swung at in the postseason, batting .377 with 10 home runs in just 20 games for the Rays. It has responded by urging patience. Liberatore has yet to pitch above High A. If he and Thompson stay healthy and continue to progress, they could give the Cardinals a formidable lefty presence in a rotation already anchored by righty Jack Flaherty. And, yeah, Liberatore is a huge baseball fan. He saw what Arozarena accomplished and doesn’t begrudge him the success one bit.

“Just because I was on the other side of what he got traded for doesn’t mean I wish him a lack of success to boost my own ego or position or status or whatever,” Liberatore said. “I hope everyone has success, and I’m going to go out and take care of what I can take care of. At the end of the day, if he does what he does and I do what I do, then that’s that.”

There already is a full-length feature film in the works on Arozarena’s path to October glory. According to the Tampa Bay Times, it will come out in late 2022 or early 2023. Maybe some day after that, a credulous Hollywood producer will dig into the lifelong friendship of the two young players the Cardinals have bet their future on.

(Top photo of Liberatore, left, and Gorman after the Under Armour All-American Game at Wrigley Field in 2017. Liberatore was named MVP after pitching three scoreless innings: Courtesy of Anthony Liberatore)

Get all-access to exclusive stories.

Subscribe to The Athletic for in-depth coverage of your favorite players, teams, leagues and clubs. Try a week on us.