The Cardinals Way Read online

  DeWitt Jr.’s paper probably earned more of a hearing from the upper tiers of Cincinnati Reds management than other academic exercises of the time, since a Bill DeWitt Sr., the sole owner, also served as the team’s president and general manager. By then, the Branch Rickey diaspora was everywhere, in what would be the last year of Rickey’s life.

  Rickey had returned to the Cardinals in an advisory role. DeWitt Sr. ran the Reds. Warren Giles, who’d been president of two top-level Cardinals farm teams under Rickey, rose to the presidency of the National League. Lee MacPhail, son of Larry (who’d gotten his first executive job in baseball under Rickey), was building the Orioles for three decades of success.

  But no one, even those who’d worked in the Cardinals organization, could claim as direct an intellectual line of success from Rickey than that young graduate student.

  DeWitt Sr. had worked for Rickey for two decades, indebted to Rickey for his first job in baseball beyond that of peanut vendor, for much of his formal education, and for his intellectual framework for the game of baseball. Bill DeWitt Jr. grew up, then, with “baseball in his blood,” as the current Cardinals general manager, John Mozeliak, put it about DeWitt in an October 2014 interview.

  DeWitt Jr. was born in St. Louis on August 31, 1941. When he was three years old, the Cardinals DeWitt Sr. helped build with Rickey faced off in the World Series against the Browns—the Browns’ only pennant—DeWitt Sr. built after leaving the Cardinals.

  Just prior to DeWitt’s tenth birthday, the Browns of DeWitt Sr. and Bill Veeck needed a tiny uniform, stat. Veeck had hired Eddie Gaedel, a little person standing just three feet seven inches, and the Browns hadn’t, understandably, planned for such a player.

  “I had an official Browns uniform that was issued, sized to fit me,” DeWitt Jr. told me back in August 2013, as we chatted in his office at Busch Stadium. “It’s not like today, when you have different uniforms for different days. You’d get ’em at the beginning of the year, and at the end of the year, you’d give them to minor league clubs. My father [had] sold [the Browns] to Bill Veeck, but was still active in the operations.

  “It was 1951. So I was nine. And my uniform was actually a little big on him, as a nine-year-old,” DeWitt recalled, laughing. “So I still have it, with the 1/8 on the back.” After spending time on display in Cooperstown, DeWitt/Gaedel’s uniform is now in the Cardinals Hall of Fame, which opened in 2014.

  This was the childhood of Bill DeWitt Jr.

  “I remember the stories about him,” DeWitt Jr. said of Rickey over lunch in New York in September 2014. “The stories about him, and the Cardinal office.” DeWitt pointed out that at the time Rickey became president of the Cardinals, a person working directly under him was DeWitt Sr.

  By the 1950s, the Browns had been sold again and moved to Baltimore. DeWitt Sr. took a post with the Yankees under George Weiss. In Weiss, the Yankees had a man who’d been hired in 1932 to try to replicate what Rickey and DeWitt created with the farm system. Weiss had been farm director for the team, then took over as general manager in 1947 when Larry MacPhail was let go.

  But DeWitt was told by Yankees owners Dan Topping and Del Webb that Weiss would be retiring soon, at which point DeWitt would become general manager. So DeWitt signed on as an assistant to Weiss, which gave the younger DeWitt a chance to learn the game at a granular level.

  “We still lived in St. Louis, since my sisters and I still were in school,” DeWitt Jr. told me of that time. “We’d stay in a hotel here in New York. And my mother would come up during the week, we’d be here [in New York] all summer. So that lasted a couple of years. I used to travel with my father when he was with the Yankees. As the assistant GM, he used to go scouting all over the place. I would go with him. He used to give me the stopwatch, to clock runners from home to first. I got to meet a lot of scouts, and high school and college coaches.”

  This is where the other thread of the Cardinals’ succeeding today can be found, in events six decades before. DeWitts on the road, sharing stories of what to look for. The younger DeWitt, holding the stopwatch. George Kissell is teaching Ken Boyer how to play third base in St. Petersburg, and Bill DeWitt Sr. is teaching Bill Jr. how to properly judge which players Kissell ought to train.

  “As a kid growing up, my first recollection is with the Browns. And I just grew up in that world. My father was running the Browns, and he and his brother owned the team. Again, that was a small operation. But I got the sense, as I got to be a little bit older, how he operated, and Rickey’s was the model that he used. It was an area I always thought in my mind I would follow. I always wanted to get back.”

  While DeWitt Sr.’s somewhat nomadic existence as a baseball executive followed—Weiss did not retire, so DeWitt moved on to Detroit as president/GM, then to Cincinnati—DeWitt Jr. graduated with a degree in economics from Yale, then got his MBA from Harvard in 1965.

  He doesn’t remember what grade he earned on the paper, but the document is a largely accurate portrait of where the game of baseball would go in the next fifty years. DeWitt cites the increase in television revenue as a driving factor in changing the economics of the game—his paper includes a citation of a New York Times story from February 14, 1965, with the adorable subhead “A $23.3 million bonanza,” referring to the total radio and television revenue collected by all the MLB teams in 1965.

  DeWitt cites the “recent trend in Baseball legislation toward the equalization, among clubs, of the ability to secure playing talent.” (You can argue the last hundred years of MLB history is primarily about the struggle to combat the money of the New York Yankees.) He predicts further expansion, a greater emphasis on international sources for players, even interleague play, which DeWitt describes as “a certainty in the near-future.”

  Significantly, DeWitt speaks to the oncoming Moneyball evolution still decades away (though, really, a return to the kind of reliance on statistics practiced by Branch Rickey) in player development. “Broad coverage will become relatively less important (since everyone will have it) and judgement on ballplayers and on standardized reports will become increasingly important,” DeWitt wrote. A balanced approach between scouting and statistical analysis? Yes, the template for the success of the Cardinals today could be found in a Harvard Business School paper fifty years ago.

  But the greatest area of emphasis for DeWitt came from an innovation that he believed held the key to a team’s future success: the amateur draft.

  “Another requisite … is the development of a system by which the abilities of players and the needs of the organization can be integrated into a preference rankings of ballplayers for the purpose of selection at the free-agent draft. Concomitant with this requirement is the need to ‘feel out’ players considered, i.e. do they want to play baseball, how much money will they need to sign, etc.”

  In his recommendations, he put cost certainty, along with making sure there was value to be gleaned from every pick, in the starkest possible terms:

  “All free agents who are Major League prospects should be contacted, before the draft, with a determination made of the amount needed to sign them. Those wanting more than they are worth, in terms of their potential and the budget of the farm director, should be put at the bottom of the list. Those wanting what they are worth, or less, should comprise, basically, the draft list.” DeWitt’s new system called for plotting all minor league prospects on a graph measuring level and age, with an accounting for team needs in various positions, with the completed draft list rating player potential—Exceptional, Good, Average, and Below Average—as a guide for where a player should begin his professional career.

  This may seem fairly straightforward, but plenty of teams, even now, fall in love with individual players and ultimately pay too much for them or don’t do the proper legwork to know how much a player they draft will cost. So putting these best practices to paper not fifty years after the draft began, but the very year it was created, is both significantly forward-thinking and an astonishi
ng foreshadowing of the kind of changes DeWitt’s Cardinals would make after hiring Jeff Luhnow in 2003.

  Another way DeWitt’s 1965 paper parallels the St. Louis changes four decades later comes in his primary financial recommendation. He noted that Jim McLaughlin, the Cincinnati farm director, was directed to trim $270,430 from his operating budget for 1964 from 1963’s. Since that budget—for both player procurement and player development—had been just over $800,000, that was a 33 percent cut. DeWitt took exception to this decision:

  “In one area, however, there appears to be a conflict between two of the [team’s] stated goals. This is the area of player development. The conflict arises between profits now and winning later. While the Reds have attempted to continue to sign and develop good ballplayers, bonuses have been cut, Minor League teams have been cut (from five to four, lowest in Baseball), Rookie League participation has been eliminated, and scouting has been curtailed. These cost saving measures must have an effect on both the quality of players signed and the development of those in the organization.”

  DeWitt Jr. graduated from Harvard Business School in 1965. His father, in his final year overseeing the Reds, managed the draft with significant success. Top pick Bernie Carbo finished a twelve-year career with an OPS+ of 126, though his most famous home run, a 3-run shot in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, actually came against the Reds. The second pick played somewhat well in Cincinnati, too: catcher Johnny Bench. And sixth-round-pick Hal McRae hit 191 home runs over a nineteen-year career with the Reds and primarily the Royals.

  DeWitt had every intention of making a career of baseball. The Reds, with the elder DeWitt in ownership and the younger one in the front office, were well positioned to inherit the Rickey approach. The Reds even hired DeWitt Jr. officially in January 1967, in a role similar in description to the position Jeff Luhnow received from DeWitt and the Cardinals in 2003.

  In a memo to new Reds owner Francis Dale outlining his responsibilities at that time, DeWitt’s first task is “to work very closely with the farm department with which I have a very good relationship. I will assist in the preparation for (and will attend) the Free Agent Draft sessions, the analysis of free agents through scouting and interviewing, the further development of our scouting and managerial staff, and the handling of our minor league affiliated clubs and players.”1

  The memo provided a wide-ranging set of areas, from team finances to overseeing radio/TV coverage, even handling player accident insurance. The memo describes DeWitt’s title as “treasurer,” a title his father once held under Rickey, though like DeWitt Sr.’s job “this certainly does not fully define the broad scope of my job.” DeWitt Jr. was to report “directly to the General manager.”

  But just as with a few slightly different outcomes in the 1910s this book could easily have been about the Browns, the same is true of the Reds in the 1960s. It was not to be, though the seeds planted by DeWitt Sr. played a major part in a Reds team that won four National League pennants and two World Series trophies from 1970 to 1976.

  As DeWitt Jr. put it to me, the new general manager “had his own ideas.” Bill DeWitt Jr. in 1967 didn’t get the chance to be Bill DeWitt Sr. in 1926, or Jeff Luhnow in 2003.

  Instead, nearly three decades followed, with a decent consolation prize: Bill DeWitt Jr. went out and became extremely successful in the investment business with the firm Reynolds, DeWitt and Co., which he formed with Mercer Reynolds. The firm specialized in private equity investments in multiple industries, including oil and gas exploration, waste management, Coca-Cola Bottling, Arby’s Restaurants, and property and casualty insurance. The firm is most well-known for investing with George W. Bush in oil and gas exploration in the 1980s.

  But for baseball, it meant that when Bill DeWitt Jr. finally got himself a baseball team to run, he wouldn’t be forced to pinch pennies the way his father and uncle had needed to with the perpetually underfunded Browns back in the 1940s, or with the Reds in the 1960s, cutting their farm-system expenditures in an effort to retire debt.

  Yet even a man as well connected as Bill DeWitt Jr. had some trouble getting that majority stake in a major league team.

  “I was interested, and pursued, back in the early eighties,” DeWitt recalled. “Back when Marge Schott bought the team.” Take a moment and let that sink in, Reds fans: Bill DeWitt Jr. could have been the owner of your team instead of Marge Schott. “But she was already a partner. So she had first call.”

  Those efforts continued, each time bringing DeWitt Jr. closer to, yet short of, owning a major league team.

  “I lived in Cincinnati,” DeWitt Jr. said. “I reached out to the Reds—ended up buying a small stake, sort-of-undisclosed partnership in the Reds—around the early eighties. But I’d gotten close to George Bush because we’d been partners in the oil business. So when [the Rangers] became available, and I found out about it, I called him. We’d sold our oil and gas business, he was working on his father’s campaign.” That would be George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign to be president of the United States.

  “And when we were in the oil and gas business, he and I used to travel around, getting investors. So he and I would go to ball games—he was a huge baseball fan. And we always said, someday maybe we’ll own a team. So when I found out about the Rangers, I called him. And we worked together on the Rangers acquisition.”

  But DeWitt’s role with the Rangers was more financial than executive, and so by 1993 he took an opportunity to finally become a majority owner of a major league team. And thus, the book you are reading today is all about that team he purchased … the Baltimore Orioles?

  “I had a contract with Eli Jacobs to buy the Orioles,” DeWitt said. “Then he went personally bankrupt. The creditors didn’t honor the contract. It went into bankruptcy court. It’s really an interesting story.”

  But not a story that ends with DeWitt at the helm of the team. Instead, the Orioles got Peter Angelos, who paid $173 million.2 DeWitt had a minority stake in that team, too, part of the spoils for solving the bidding for the Orioles by four different entities, including eventual Miami Marlins owner Jeff Loria. But shortly thereafter, DeWitt recognized that, as a minority owner, he wouldn’t have the baseball role in Baltimore he still sought. I asked him whether he’d come to worry he’d never get the opportunity to fulfill the work he’d originally sought nearly three decades earlier.

  “At that point, I was still in the Rangers deal,” DeWitt said. “I would weigh in on things from time to time. Not active, but enjoyed it. I was in the private equity business. But I always wanted to get back, in a control-ownership role. I was in the game one way or another from the early eighties, straight through. And I stayed in touch with all the people I knew throughout the game. Had the Oriole deal gone through, I would have moved to Baltimore and actively run the team. But it motivated me to get back on a full-time operating basis.”

  Not that DeWitt thought it would be the Cardinals. For as appropriate a fit as it all seems in retrospect—the strands of Rickey’s original plan, Kissell and DeWitt Jr., brought back together within the organization where the ideas of statistical revolution and player development originally thrived together for a quarter of a century—DeWitt never thought the club would be available.

  The man who hired Rickey, Sam Breadon, sold the club in 1947. Six years later, Anheuser-Busch (A-B) purchased the team from Fred Saigh, who’d been pressured to sell due to a minor inconvenience of federal tax-evasion charges.

  And for more than four decades after that, few owners were more synonymous with the team they owned than Busch (as in, the Stadiums) and the St. Louis Cardinals.

  “The interesting thing about Baltimore was, it was the old Browns,” DeWitt said, raising the connection to the franchise his father and uncle had run five decades before. “So it was intriguing. They had a new ballpark.” DeWitt laughed at the notion that he’d have moved the Orioles back to St. Louis, but the lineage wasn’t far from his mind.

  “I’m lucky that the Baltimore
deal didn’t work out. Because the Cardinals turned out to be a much better fit. [DeWitt’s wife] Kathy and I grew up there, my father’s history, everything I knew about the city. But I really didn’t think the Cardinals would ever be for sale. It had just been part of that corporate structure forever.”

  Once again, DeWitt’s personal network helped him facilitate a transaction. He got a call from Fred Hanser, an old friend and classmate, who had heard secondhand that the team might be for sale. He called Sandy Warner, a good friend, who was on the board of A-B, to find out if it was true. Warner suggested DeWitt contact longtime A-B executive Jerry Ritter, whom DeWitt also knew well because Ritter and DeWitt each owned a house in the same development down in Florida, just outside Vero Beach.

  “We negotiated a lot of the deal, down there,” DeWitt said.

  By the end of the 1995 season, DeWitt could see his quest was nearly over, though the announcement came in January 1996.

  “It was quite a thrill,” DeWitt said. “I remember, we hadn’t quite reached an agreement on the last day of the season, back in ’95. I went to the game, and I remember walking around the outfield. You know, just sort of getting a feel for the opportunity, what it would be like. And I’d gone to games over the years, when I came to town.”

  This, however, was very different from attending the game as a fan. The DeWitts had themselves a major league team again.

  “Well, Bill the Third had gotten out of Harvard Business School in ’95, which was really when we were negotiating the deal,” DeWitt Jr. said. “And he was working in private equity. And we had talked—that if this deal went through, it would be a great opportunity for him to get involved in the business. He was a great age, and he’d obviously been a huge fan growing up, so it was an ideal situation for him. And for me, to have him continue on.”