The Cardinals Way Read online

  The Cardinals hardly begrudged Kissell for his selfless decision. Instead, they gave him a project—a raw converted pitcher out of Alba, Missouri, who the Cardinals hoped could make the transition to third base. His name was Ken Boyer, and if you’d gotten up early and made your way to Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg that spring, you’d have seen a small man with a booming voice showing Boyer every possible ground ball a third baseman needs to learn how to field.

  It worked out for both Boyer and the Cardinals. Six All-Star Games, five Gold Gloves, and the 1964 NL MVP of the World Champion Cardinals isn’t a bad return on a spring project.

  Not that Boyer enjoyed all that hard work at first, chafing at Kissell’s instruction at times, and complaining to his minor league teammate, a second baseman (and Kissell’s roommate) named Earl Weaver. Kissell benched Boyer.

  “And I told Weaver, ‘You tell him when he’s ready to take advice, then he’s ready to play,’” Kissell said in 1994.

  Thirteen years later, the Cardinals sent the reigning NL MVP to the Cardinals’ Winter Instructional League, to tell a new generation of young players what George Kissell had made possible.

  Boyer called the coaches together and pointed to Kissell. “I just want to say a word. You know this little guy here, I couldn’t stand him when I played for him. But he taught me, more than anyone else, the meaning of one word—respect. I just want to thank him.”

  Dear George: In the 1960s, I played in the Cardinal organization (1964–1968).… You were a roving coach (“ambassador!!!”) and I always thought we had a pretty good relationship.… As a college graduate, we talked about one of your children who, at the time as I recall, was either in medical school or trying for acceptance.… George, I have always remembered your professionalism and the extent of your knowledge.… It has taken me more than 30 years to write this letter, but I want you to know that you were an influence on me at a time when I was a bit cocky for someone with low average ability. I wish I would have been as smart at 21–25 years old as I am now.

  —LETTER TO GEORGE KISSELL FROM J. DALE MEIER, JUNE 20, 2000

  By 1967, Kissell had already been with the Cardinals for twenty-seven years. Red Schoendienst, the Hall of Fame second baseman who’d become manager of the Cardinals, wanted Kissell on his major league staff. Both were Rickey acquisitions; both were schooled by how Rickey had set up his minor league system.

  “You as a player are sitting there, and you as a player want to get out there and start playing,” Schoendienst told me as we sat and talked in an office off the Cardinals clubhouse in August 2014. Schoendienst, ninety-one at the time, is still at the ballpark constantly, coaching and passing on the collected wisdom of Rickey, Kissell, and so many others. He’s no mascot or honorary presence. He was still in the building, well after 1:00 A.M. following a World Series game back in October 2013. He was there early the next morning, too.

  “The thing was, you’d sit there for maybe an hour, and sit and talk,” Schoendienst explained, referring to the classrooms Rickey, a teacher by training and in temperament as well, incorporated into spring training as part of season preparation, and which remained after Rickey left for the Brooklyn Dodgers following the 1942 season, run by Kissell. “It sketched different things out—this guy, he’s gonna go first to third if the ball’s hit here. If you’re an outfielder, we’re teaching the left fielder, center fielder, right fielder, for when the ball’s hit to the left or right of you. Every day, in spring training, before you went out in those days, and still, when I was in the big leagues. You sat there and talked about what you were going to do that day. And the manager, and the coaches, we’re gonna practice rundowns, cutoffs, and then we’d go out and do it.”

  That meant Cardinals players were not merely put through the paces, but by the time they’d mastered these skills, they’d also know why. This approach, implemented by Kissell, Schoendienst, and others, came directly from Rickey.

  By the time Branch Rickey returned to St. Louis for his second stint with the Cardinals, he had this to say about Kissell in a November 8, 1962, report, after observing him: “This fellow, George Kissell, is doubtless a good manager and all that. But he is also a darn good employee. He looks after details. He is a ‘cleaner-upper.’ First man out, last man in. Impresses me as having a sense of responsibility for anything and everything; even to the insignificant things such as locating early and picking up later stray balls. I would hire him in any camp.”3

  And Kissell, the Rickey hire, certainly didn’t lack an understanding of the great baseball man who brought him to the Cardinals. Kissell wrote down his recollections of Rickey in 1994, on Cardinals stationery. I found this among his papers. It reads like a how-to guide on Kissell’s own approach to the game.

  Mr. Rickey had a very demanding presence.…

  1. He was very punctual and demanded it of others.

  2. He was a very persuasive speaker and had a remarkable vocabulary.

  3. He was extremely knowledgeable about every [with two underlines] phase of the game. He knew all positions equally well. He would challenge your method or play but would accept and use it when you could prove it superior to others.

  4. He was very observant + a stickler for details—from the way the athlete dressed on the field to how the hot dogs were made.

  5. He had a few mottos a ballplayer could live with: You reap what you sow. No athlete ever became great without practice, practice, practice. Luck doesn’t just happen. Luck is the result of hard work.

  He was probably the most astute baseball man of all time and I feel enriched for having known and worked with him.

  Rickey signed Schoendienst. Rickey signed Kissell. And the two men taught generations of Cardinals, players and coaches who are helping the Cardinals win to this day.

  Dear George: Thank You! It is a very belated thank you I can assure you. Thirty-seven (37) years ago almost to the day, I walked on to the Brunswick, Georgia baseball diamond. I had just graduated from college and felt sure I knew everything there was to know about baseball. I met a guy named Kissell, who told me that he had probably forgotten more about baseball than our college coaches knew. Boy, was I ever shocked to hear something like that. And in a very short time, I knew your statement was true in every way.… You are the most unselfish man in baseball that I ever met, and I know you have touched thousands of players in your career.… I also know that you had something to do with my being a part of the 1970 Cardinal team, and I also thank you for that. I know I was not a star, nor was my name a household word … however I was never so proud as I was during opening day in 1970 when I was warming up Bob Gibson. Those are memories I will carry with me forever.

  —LETTER FROM BART ZELLER, JUNE 14, 2000

  The qualities of a good third baseman are a good pair of hands, a strong arm, and quick reactions to all situations. He must also be able to charge either way and throw the ball to first base, off balance, with something on his throw.

  —FROM GEORGE KISSELL’S MANAGERS’ SYLLABUS, 1968

  In 1951, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former vice president Harry Truman held the Oval Office. In 1967, Lyndon Johnson did, and he’d shortly be challenged for it by Bobby Kennedy, who was seven years old when FDR was first elected.

  In 1951, Billboard’s Top 10 included “On Top of Old Smoky” by the Weavers and “Come on-a My House” by Rosemary Clooney, with “Too Young” from Nat King Cole on the top spot.

  In 1967, the Billboard’s Top 10 included “Light My Fire” by the Doors, “Windy” by the Association, and “To Sir with Love” by Lulu, who was three in 1951.

  In 1951, you’d have found George Kissell at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg, Florida, teaching a young Cardinal how to play third base.

  In 1967, you’d have found George Kissell at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg, Florida, teaching a young Cardinal how to play third base.

  This time, it was Mike Shannon, picked to be Boyer’s replacement at third base for the Cardinals. For those keeping score at h
ome, that’s the 1964 NL MVP getting replaced by a third baseman who homered for the 1967 World Series winners and finished seventh in the 1968 NL MVP voting for the 1968 NL pennant winners.

  “We would try to teach him everything that would happen in a ball game,” Schoendienst said of Shannon when we talked in August 2014. “I could handle the bat pretty good, could still handle it pretty good, and we’d put him in situations, you know—a man on first, man on second, nobody out. Bunting, playing third base. So George would toss ’em in, nice and easy, and I’d hit them to him. And then, George had more good ideas—hell, he wrote things out and had them in the book!”

  Schoendienst made it clear he subscribed to Kissell’s ideas. Like any good actor, and all the coaches in the Kissell tradition, the two men had long since internalized the book. So Shannon was hearing two voices, but one set of ideas about how to play the position.

  “He taught me how to play third base,” Shannon said of Kissell when we talked in the Busch Stadium television booth in August 2014. Shannon’s now been a Cardinal for fifty-five years, though, really, longer than that—as a high schooler, in St. Louis, Shannon played football with Stan Musial’s son and found himself often in the presence of the finest hitter in Cardinals history years before the two men were teammates. “He taught Joe Torre how to play third base. And that’s just two of us. Who knows how many there’ve been! And it goes on and on and on. And then you talk to the managers, and it’s the same thing. It’s unbelievable!”

  It didn’t take Shannon long to understand how important it would be for his career to listen to Kissell:

  “He commanded respect. You didn’t know who the heck this guy was, but you’d listen to him for five minutes, you’d go—‘Oh! This guy! I’m gonna pay attention to him.’

  “He did it very simply. The great teachers, they don’t need flowery words. They can come down to almost any level, they can go up to any level.

  “He gave me the fundamentals. If you don’t have legs on a table, you don’t have a table. George would explain that to you. Now after that, you had to work for it yourself. He’d show you how to do it. And then Red took over and hit me eight million ground balls.” Shannon chuckled at the memory of his sore legs. “And practically killed me. But George was the guy. He not only taught me how to play, he taught you how to live.”

  For a few years, Kissell taught lessons on those parallel tracks to the Cardinals in St. Louis, not the Cardinals in Johnson City or St. Petersburg or Modesto or Lewisburg. After twenty-seven years, Kissell had been promoted, brought on staff by his old friend and the manager of the Cardinals, Red Schoendienst.

  “He’s been in the boonies all his life,” Schoendienst recalled telling then Cardinals general manager Bing Devine. “And we’ve got to get him up here. So I called George—‘Oh, I don’t know if I could do that,’ he said. I said, ‘George, with all the inexperienced kids that you taught there, that know now, these guys got experience up here. It’s not as much teaching as doing the right thing. You talk it over with Ginny.’ … I wanted to get him out of there. Hell, how many years did he spend down there? I think he deserved it.”

  It was fascinating to hear Schoendienst talk about the minor leagues as something to grow from, to move on from, while for Kissell, the minor leagues served as his home, ultimately, for almost seventy years. The combined wisdom of two Cardinals greats—with a combined 140 years of service to the club—thus covered different ground at the same time. Schoendienst had made quick work of most of Branch Rickey’s minor league ladder in a single year.

  The two collaborated on strategy in 1967 and 1968. The Cardinals had two NL pennants and a World Series to show for it.

  “He wanted to be a big part of everything,” Schoendienst said. “Which was good. He’d be in my office. We’d go over the lineup. He looked over a lot of things, this and that. And in the game, he’d watch—he’d think a guy should be playing over to his right more—George was very alert, very astute in the game.”

  Kissell’s career had lasted nearly thirty years by then, and still had more than forty to go. You didn’t have to look hard to find Kissell’s impact on the game already, and not just in St. Louis.

  A young minor league manager in the Cardinals system got a job as third-base coach for the San Diego Padres. On October 8, 1969, he’d get the major league managing gig with the Cincinnati Reds. His name was Sparky Anderson. He learned how to manage from Kissell, once saying of him, “A man named George Kissell: The greatest single instructor I ever seen on fundamentals in my life. He could teach a snake to box.”4

  Anderson’s Reds, in his first season at the helm in 1970, won 102 games and the National League pennant. They won 99 games in 1973 to win the NL West, 98 games in 1974, then a pair of World Series titles in 1975 and 1976.

  Over in the American League, Kissell’s old roommate who then played under him in the Cardinals system, Earl Weaver, took over as Baltimore Orioles manager. His Orioles fared okay, too: they won 109 games and the AL pennant in 1969, 108 games and the World Series in 1970, 101 games and the AL pennant in 1971. His Orioles won 97 games and the AL East in both 1973 and 1974, and 90, 88, 97, and 90 games in four other close AL East races. Then, 102 in a 1979 AL pennant campaign, and 100 in a 1980 season that saw the Orioles finish second to the Yankees in the AL East and miss the play-offs, despite finishing with the second-best record in all of baseball that year. Another 94 wins in 1982, then 98 for the 1983 Orioles, who won another World Series.

  Then, in 1984, it was Anderson’s turn again: 104 wins and a World Series with the Detroit Tigers.

  From 1969 to 1984, while George Kissell was training Joe Torre—a manager who had some success himself—to take over at third base for Mike Shannon, just two of the Kissell disciples won nine pennants and four World Series titles. More significant still, between Weaver and Anderson, a Kissell disciple won at least 90 games every year between 1969 and 1984.

  Earl Weaver said Kissell, along with Paul Richards, had been his greatest influence.5 Anderson said this at his Hall of Fame induction in 2000:

  “A man named George Kissell. The greatest single instructor I ever seen on fundamentals in my life. Fiftysome years with the Cardinals. And Georgie … he was something special to me.”

  George was instrumental in my development as a professional baseball player. George was a great teacher of the game who taught me how to play every aspect of the game correctly and, above all, how to win the Cardinal way. George demanded—and never accepted—anything less than 100% effort from all his players. Most importantly, George instilled in each of us a strong sense of pride in being a Cardinal. Thanks to George, we were steeped in Cardinal tradition and understood what it meant to wear the Cardinal uniform.

  I still carry this proud tradition with me. I was never as comfortable in a New York Mets uniform.… Thanks for everything, George. You helped mold me into the player I became. I believe in time and space, and I was truly blessed to have had the benefit of your tutelage in the early stages of my career.

  —LETTER FROM KEITH HERNANDEZ, SEPTEMBER 29, 2002

  The Cardinals drafted Keith Hernandez in 1971. He went on to win 11 Gold Gloves at first base, the most of anyone at the position in the history of baseball. But Kissell didn’t just work with the future greats. Kissell had returned to the minor leagues once Red Schoendienst was replaced as manager by Vern Rapp. It was where he was most comfortable, most effective, and it allowed him to teach again.

  “He could’ve left twice with Sparky Anderson,” Kissell’s grandson Tommy Kidwell recalled as we talked in St. Petersburg in September 2014. “He could’ve gone to the Big Red Machine, he could’ve gone to Detroit, and he said thanks but no thanks.

  “He could’ve gone from the minor leagues to the big leagues a second time, and he didn’t want to. He wanted to stay with his family. His loyalty to the Cardinals—he was not a threat to anybody else’s job because he didn’t want anybody else’s job. He wanted to do what he was there to do, wh
ich was coach and help young guys. Even in his last days, when I was managing in rookie ball, his love was for rookie ball and the lower levels, more so than Double-A, Triple-A, where guys are less coachable, think they know it all, more set in their ways, and less likely to learn. So he was always better at the lower levels, where most guys, frankly, don’t want to be for a long time. They want to move up.”

  And in 1978, another of Kissell’s projects was an undrafted free agent who’d struggled to get playing time in college, a young infielder named Steve Turco, discovered at one of those tryout camps Branch Rickey created, and which had allowed the Cardinals, thirty-eight years before, to discover George Kissell.

  Turco had been drafted by the Indians out of high school, but elected to go to Florida State. However, he clashed with the coach there, who wanted to move the infielder to the mound. Finally, when he arrived in the Cardinals’ Instructional League, George Kissell was waiting for him.

  “When I think about the first time I ever saw George, I was down in St. Pete, hitting in the batting cage,” Turco told me in May 2014, as we sat and watched the extended spring-training Cardinals face the Mets on a back field in Jupiter, Florida. A sign honoring George Kissell was visible from the silver bleachers where we sat. “I happened to be taking batting practice, and George comes by. I don’t know who he is, and he says, ‘Hey, we need to go pick ’em up’—he’s telling us about picking up [stray baseballs in the cage]. He says, ‘You don’t pick ’em up, you don’t get to hit.’ I said to somebody, ‘Who is that?’ Someone said, ‘That’s George Kissell.’” Turco shrugged, as he had that day. “‘No,’ he said, ‘That’s the Man.’

  “After that, knowing who he was—I think what George saw in me was somebody who worked hard. When you’re somebody who put in the extra time, the extra effort, I think George appreciated that. And in my case—he was there for me in every way.”