The Cardinals Way Read online

  Plenty of George Kissell people stayed. Turco moved to the player-development side. DeJohn kept doing what he’d been doing for more than a decade. But alongside those veterans, those who bought into the new way of operating, were some of Jeff’s guys, too.

  “It was more about making sure we had the right personnel,” Luhnow said. “And there were a lot of good coaches. A lot of good hitting coaches and pitching coaches. But I was making sure that we had the right personnel, which is why I brought Strom in and why I brought Jeff Albert in and guys that appreciated the elements that we were looking for in the recruiting side and could help develop those, enhance those, through the development side and turn them into big leaguers. And Tim Leveque, and all the other guys that we started to bring in who were very nontraditional hires for player development, but who ended up being pretty spectacular baseball people.”

  But as Luhnow made clear, there wasn’t an effort to move away, even a little, from the way George Kissell taught:

  “The fundamentals of having to teach someone baseball really have never changed. Like, how you field a ground ball. How you swing. The basic fundamentals of how to throw a pitch. You need experienced teachers to do that, and the Cardinals had plenty of good teachers. The history—when I got there people talked about Hub Kittle and, obviously, George Kissell. There were a lot of really good instructors. And so it wasn’t necessarily about anything having to do with they weren’t getting the right instructions, just how you manage the player flow through.”

  Meanwhile, the team’s international program began to grow in scope as well. Mozeliak hired Matt Slater in 2007, an excellent baseball executive who became available thanks to the disaster that was Frank McCourt’s tenure owning the Los Angeles Dodgers. He and other hires, such as Oz Ocampo, a Columbia MBA who improved the Dominican academy and eventually expanded his work to the rest of the Cardinals’ international scouting, broadened the reach of an operation that hadn’t really existed just a few years earlier. Slater is particularly good at finding players deep in the talent pool, not simply relying on financial muscle or gut feel to get a few high-profile guys or a lottery ticket. Accordingly, the way the Cardinals found talent on the international market—plenty of it, at varying prices—mirrored their amateur-draft success.

  “You’ve got to take a hybrid approach,” Slater explained to me in an October 2014 interview. However, Slater’s hybrid approach limits subjectivity, unlike when this phrase is used by some others as an implicit contradiction of the growth of analytics in the game. Slater makes even subjective judgments subject to objective analysis. “We are hugely [reliant upon] our data analysts. We have analysis. We have tremendous young guys here in the office that can crack numbers for us. But they don’t just crack performance numbers. They crack the numbers that our scouts are giving us as well. The grades that our scouts put on the player. The makeup forms that come out. The medical. So they’re putting that all in and analyzing those numbers. So we really believe in the intuitive nature of this business. We believe that you need to have data-based decisions, while keeping in mind that these players are not decks of cards. They’re also human beings that have emotions. And so what the scout brings to the table and what the data brings to the table is all churned together in our final evaluation of a player.”

  Slater’s path to the Cardinals came via the Dodgers, and prior to that the Brewers, who hired him right out of Marquette. Slater had gotten into law school, but turned down the chance to go, preferring instead to go work for Sal Bando’s Brewers for $18,000 a year.

  But McCourt’s tenure in Los Angeles meant a number of front-office members there got demoted or left, and the concept of law school came up again. The Cardinals, though, took a different approach to Slater’s interest in the law degree. They saw it as an opportunity to get smarter.

  “I found a law school in LA that allowed me to go part-time and was still an ABA-accredited—a really good school, Southwestern Law School. And so, I started then. And right when I started, Mo called me and said, ‘Hey, we know what’s going on with the Dodgers. We want you to come over here.’ And I said, ‘I would love to work with you, Mo.’ We had known each other coming up through the ranks, as both being assistant directors in scouting and so forth.

  “And so I took the job with Mo as special assistant to the GM and told Mo, ‘But I’m doing the law school thing.’ And he said, ‘That’s fine. You can stay out in California and do that part-time and do this.’ So I did law school part-time. I was full-time special assistant to the GM, flying all over the place. Flying to St. Louis once a month or so or once every two months. And Mo let me do it that way. The people at Southwestern were very accommodating in that they would move finals, they would move deadlines, that I had.

  “But I was very attentive. I’d stay on top of things. Stay in touch with professors and so forth. And after four years, I finally got through it and got my law degree. That was at the end of December of 2010 that that occurred. And then three weeks later, my family and I moved to St. Louis.”

  If that story sounds familiar, it’s because Branch Rickey did the exact same thing for Bill DeWitt Sr.

  “Tony La Russa knew I was doing it,” Slater said. “Very few people knew I was doing it. Mo did for sure, of course. But I didn’t want to make it look like, in the industry, that I wasn’t focused on my job. But the support that Mo gave me in allowing me to do it was critical, I would say, in getting it done.

  “And it makes me a tremendously better executive today having that background. With the contracts we deal with. The negotiations. Just the way I think is completely different. And it was a challenge. My wife feels like I lost something when I finished law school because I loved the challenge of it.”

  So while the team continued to win on the field—105 wins and a National League pennant in 2004, 100 wins and a trip to the NLCS in 2005, a World Series title in 2006—they were still operating on parallel, often contradictory tracks. Walt Jocketty was building the major league team in a certain way. The minor leagues were increasingly populated with Jeff Luhnow figures, whether players or coaches. Tony La Russa and Dave Duncan operated under different principles as the manager and pitching coach in St. Louis than, say, Brent Strom and Dyar Miller did as pitching coaches in the minor leagues.

  Multiple people told me that the decision by DeWitt to let Manno go was essentially an attempt to bring peace within the front office without forcing Jocketty out.

  “I told Walt, ‘I know you’re not happy about Jeff taking over from Bruce [Manno], but if you put me in this role, I don’t want to be viewed as being disloyal to you if I do everything in my power to help our farm system [and by extension, Jeff] be successful,” Vuch recalled in December 2014 e-mail.

  So realistically, DeWitt was going to need to pick one path or the other.

  “Walt wasn’t really sold on the data,” DeWitt said, using data as shorthand for what Luhnow was creating.

  Exactly how awkward this could be was exhibited by an experience Brent Strom had, in Jupiter during the spring of 2007, involving Wainwright. Luhnow had suggested years before that the Cardinals acquire Wainwright, now Luhnow had a pitching coach who believed the way Wainwright threw could be improved upon.

  “I made a mistake one day of—and I got pulled to the carpet on it—we’re out on field four and the Cardinals had a concession stand with a big picture of Adam Wainwright on it,” Strom recalled. “And I made a comment to my staff. I said, ‘That’s the way you should not throw.’ I mean, he had a front side here. Had wavering foot plant. The elbow was in a bad position. I was just doing it as an educational [exercise]. Word got back to Mozeliak. And I got called on the carpet for it. Because he had just won nineteen games.” Strom paused. “But then again, he also had Tommy John the next year.”

  I think both of us could have done things differently. I think I could have done more in line with what they were trying to do, to work more in conjunction with what they were doing.

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��WALT JOCKETTY

  Imagine you are Walt Jocketty as 2007 dawned.

  Your tenure as general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals began in 1995. Your Cardinals went to the NLCS in 1996, then began a streak of success from 2000 to 2006 that included six play-off appearances, two National League pennants, and a World Series championship in just seven years.

  This is the kind of success that leads to contract extensions, if not employment for life.

  Yet you began the 2007 season fundamentally out of step with your own organization.

  Jocketty’s thirteenth season as general manager of the Cardinals would be his last. As Jocketty pointed out to me, the scouting director and the head of player development—Luhnow—reported directly to the owner.

  “That was definitely a concern,” Jocketty said. “That’s not usually how clubs operate.”

  Things had changed within the team’s farm system. No longer did the players Luhnow’s crew drafted have to worry they’d be buried or released, playing for Manno’s farm system. Luhnow oversaw both.

  But the desire to properly value baseball players extended well beyond the draft. To have a general manager who wasn’t, as DeWitt put it, “sold on the data” created all kinds of limitations on use for this new information.

  Then again, it’s hard to imagine Jocketty felt particularly limited—he was the general manager for the defending World Series champions, who’d also won 100 games in both 2004 and 2005.

  A general manager needs to act quickly in a hypercompetitive marketplace to make sure the value his team puts on a player results in the team’s paying appropriately in contract or trade for the player. If the person in charge of those transactions isn’t sure about the value, or there’s internal discussion, another team can swoop in and get that player instead.

  “So then, Jeff’s work was—I won’t say complete, but we felt pretty good about where we were in terms of valuing players,” DeWitt said. “And knowing the value of a walk versus a home run. And what a player’s contribution to the team was from a statistical standpoint. Obviously, a lot of other factors as well. And that helped us decide what a player was worth financially. If we were making a deal, were we getting value back for what value we were giving up? That type of thing.”

  But the working relationship between Luhnow and Jocketty—well, as DeWitt put it, “it got filtered somewhat through me.” Jocketty described the analytics as “confined to scouting and player development” at this point.

  “It wasn’t as enjoyable as it was the first few years,” Jocketty put it about his job, though unlike Mozeliak in 2005, Jocketty said he didn’t consider leaving even at this point. “Because that’s why I wanted to try and make it work if I could. But it was a very uncomfortable situation.”

  As for the drafts, Jeff Luhnow would have fifty-seven players, according to his own count, which he keeps in a file on his phone, make it to the major leagues through 2014. He expects the total, when all is said and done, will be around sixty-five.

  But his first, Chris Pérez, didn’t reach the major leagues until 2008. (Pérez was a Charlie Gonzalez find.) So the vital changes Luhnow had put into place for the Cardinals hadn’t begun to show themselves on the very field where Jocketty’s Cardinals had been winning for years.

  The 2007 Cardinals draft, with Luhnow in charge of both drafting and player development, but with tensions at perhaps their highest, yielded thirteen major league players. For comparison, the Yankees got eight; the Cubs, six; the Mets, five. The Cardinals also drafted Oliver Marmol, a shortstop out of College of Charleston, in the sixth round. He ended up on the George Kissell track, the Steve Turco track. Remember? You don’t just groom players. You groom coaches and managers.

  Still, one member of the analytics team said that Luhnow didn’t always follow the recommendations of the system, which still combined scouting with analytics, instead giving the scouts in the room some wins along the way. By then, the system—STOUT—produced a single number, with draft magnets organized around the room in order of preference. So when Luhnow reached down to take a scouting favorite ahead of the system’s preferences, the room knew it.

  This is where the management took over from the data-driven Luhnow, pumping the brakes on the changeover as he went along. Luhnow, like Jocketty, was working to keep the organization together, though from an opposite direction.

  But exactly how to integrate an organization operating within two silos—the products being developed for the major leagues in one, and the major league end point in another—well, it seemed intractable at the time.

  “And I thought we had to have everybody in the organization on the same page,” DeWitt said of this time. “Because if you have outliers or certain views that ‘Oh, this is okay. But maybe it’s not really what we should be doing’—it just isn’t going to be effective. You devalue what you try to accomplish.”

  No one, not even the principals, could predict how it would play out.

  “No,” Mejdal said when I asked him if the ultimate resolution was simply a matter of time. “When I got there, I didn’t know how the conflict was going to be resolved. I didn’t know the director of player development or the GM of a defending World Series champion would be let go. I had no inclination or no idea that was going to happen, and frankly, my mental energies weren’t really spent on that. It was improving the processes and what we did have responsibility for. Which was the draft.”

  The Cardinals did, finally, slip a bit on the field, following their 2006 World Series title, with a 78-84 record in 2007, missing the play-offs. The Cardinals were only a game out as late as September 7, but that had far more to do with a mediocre NL Central than a quality team in St. Louis. The 2006 team also benefited from a weak NL Central, making the play-offs with an 83-78 record. According to DeWitt, that did make things a bit easier from an external view, and Mozeliak agreed, though he isn’t sure the center would have held regardless.

  “I do think results matter in terms of how people want to make decisions on personnel,” Mozeliak said. “But I sort of get a sense that it didn’t matter at that point.”

  Making the change then didn’t insulate them from criticism, however. Far from it.

  Here’s national baseball writer Bill Madden, who is not what you’d call a friend to the statistical advances made by the game he writes about. It’s comical to see how much he got wrong in retrospect, but Madden represents a rear guard in the baseball industry, both then and now, that was outwardly hostile to what Luhnow and others have done to grow the game.

  The firing of respected Walt Jocketty as Cardinals GM last Tuesday by team chairman Bill DeWitt was just another example of the growing trend of meddling owners reducing the powers of the general manager and shifting the emphasis of baseball operations to statistical analysis.…

  … But it was a division DeWitt created when he promoted Jeff Luhnow, one of the new-wave stat practitioners, as head of both player development and scouting. Jocketty viewed that as a usurping of his powers—especially since Luhnow clearly had the chairman’s ear—and let it be known to his friends and associates that he was not comfortable with the new arrangement.…

  On the other hand, a big part of Jocketty’s undoing with DeWitt was the failure of the Cardinals’ farm system to develop any pitchers in a decade and only two frontline players, catcher Yadier Molina and outfielder Chris Duncan, in recent years.

  It will be interesting to see who DeWitt hires as the new GM as he’s already stated a preference for someone between the age of 30 and 40 with a player-development background and an understanding of a middle-market operation.

  Translation: Someone to work alongside Luhnow and DeWitt. (Cardinal insiders say DeWitt could do a lot worse than assistant GM John Mozeliak, who has been installed as the interim GM.)

  On the day Jocketty was fired, Cardinals president Mark Lamping declared, “The best job in baseball just opened.” It’s doubtful if you’d find any other veteran baseball people who would share that op
inion.5

  The Cardinals had reasons to move on from Jocketty. He realizes that now: “I think both of us could have done things differently. I think I could have done more in line with what they were trying to do, to work more in conjunction with what they were doing.”

  The products of the Cardinals draft and player development system, under Luhnow, would soon become major leaguers, meaning that an integration in how the club valued them would be vital. You can’t spend four years building a system for valuing players, and employ a general manager who doesn’t share that view.

  However, the organization felt plenty of sadness as well. Not only was Walt Jocketty a general manager for thirteen years, making plenty of friends along the way, but even those who understood the need for a change, even if Jocketty didn’t at the time, wished it didn’t have to end this way.

  “All of that was leading up to the crescendo,” Mozeliak said of the change. “It was something that you could see building, and you could anticipate that this could go either direction. But if you were a betting man, you knew where it was headed.”

  It was headed toward a Cardinals team run by John Mozeliak, who would try to heal a fractured Cardinals organization.

  5

  HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN

  I get why the comparison between John Mozeliak and Franklin Delano Roosevelt will strike some of you as funny. I do. The ebullient Roosevelt, with his long cigarette holder and smile built for the editorial cartoon. The professorial Mozeliak, careful with his words and precise with seemingly every movement, as if with every press conference he were teaching a college course on building a baseball team.