The Cardinals are at the centre of a new provincial player development organization.

The West Coast Baseball Collective is a new player development organization founded here in British Columbia, with the Abbotsford Cardinals at the centre of it.

It brings together elite coaching, strength and mental performance, individualized year-round training, and high-level competition, with one philosophy running through all of it. Rooted here. Aimed well beyond BC’s borders.

Cardinals players get full access to what we’re building, from training to facilities to placements. The Collective is bigger than the Cardinals, with select roster spots open to players outside the Fraser Valley. Meanwhile, the Cardinals continue exactly as before in the BCPBL. Nothing changes there. What’s new is everything around them.

The idea underneath it is older than any of us. Until about the 1920s, a young ballplayer’s development was left mostly to luck. Coached one way in one town, then another way in the next, and whether he became what he could become depended mainly on who had him that summer. Then one team decided to grow players from the ground up: same coaching, same standards, same opportunities. That team was the St. Louis Cardinals, and it was the beginning of the farm system, where a major league team invests in minor league clubs to own the whole development pathway. Everyone said it wouldn’t work. It turned out to be one of the most influential ideas in baseball.

And now it’s a lesson ingrained in the game: the best players are grown.

We get about five years with our players. But it’s the five decades that come after that matter most to us. The growth that happens here is simply preparation for leadership within the game, and without, on the West Coast, or beyond.