The Cardinals Way Read online

  But while Luhnow participated in meetings through normal channels on Suppan, a pitcher the Cardinals ultimately signed, his direct link to DeWitt manifested itself that winter as well, in another key move the Cardinals made.

  “The other one was the Drew trade, because I was kind of involved on the sidelines on that almost,” Luhnow said. “Bill was asking me, ‘What’s your opinion on things?’ Separate to—not in front of Walt. It was almost like a double check.

  “So I do remember the first [Drew] trade proposal, looking back on Drew was [exciting] in my opinion—because Drew was a spectacular producer. Now, injury-prone and all of that, but I had this feeling like we’re giving up a lot. And Atlanta, we knew Atlanta was interested, but they really needed him. And so I remember telling Bill that I didn’t think we were getting enough back from that original proposal. So the deal didn’t happen. Whether or not Bill killed the deal or Walt also agreed, I don’t know, but that was my opinion. And at the winter meetings, I remember Bill calling me and saying, ‘What do you think we need to do to get in addition to’—’cause we were getting Ray King and Marquis—‘in addition to those to guys?’ I said, ‘Well, to be honest, well, I think we need a legitimate prospect on top of those two guys to make this deal fair.’

  “And so I went and researched a lot of prospects stuff. I read as much as I could. I read our own reports, but I read all the prospect reports … going onto blogs. Everything. And I really felt like [Adam] Wainwright was the guy. ’Cause he had fallen off a little bit. He’d been their number one prospect. Still is in the top five but had fallen off. Had a bad year. And I remember, that’s the guy I recommended to Walt.” Other members of the front office, including special assistant Bob Gebhard and DeWitt, pushed for Wainwright as well.

  Wainwright, ultimately, came to St. Louis in that deal. Four top-three Cy Young Award finishes later, he’s been one of the most important pitchers in Cardinals history.

  But there’s a lot more to unpack here than just the addition of a signature starting pitcher. As Luhnow put it, “I felt like, wow, this is unbelievable. A guy like me who was selling jeans six months ago—three months ago—is not only participating in this but potentially even having an impact in the major league trades. That’s crazy. This is fantasy come alive. This is every fantasy GM’s dream.”

  As for Jocketty, if he hadn’t realized before that the hiring of Jeff had fundamentally altered the front-office power structure, he certainly did now, with Luhnow weighing in on Walt’s major moves. And the effect on the Cardinals was nothing less than seismic.

  Mozeliak, the assistant general manager, quickly took a position as essentially a moderate figure within the front office, a role he’d occupy for almost five years.

  Ultimately, though he considered walking away once the factions grew so bitter, some advice he received helped him navigate how he thought about all the changes. He understood the necessity of altering the way the Cardinals evaluated talent—as he put it, “I always felt like the old world was just too subjective. Almost too random in the sense of, there has to be a way to make smarter decisions.”

  But that didn’t make it any easier to see longtime friends angry and afraid, and his mentor Jocketty undermined.

  “So Mark Lamping was our president at the time,” Mozeliak recalled. “He and I were driving down to Springfield to discuss the Double-A franchise, and so obviously it’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive. We’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about. And I’ve always looked at Mark as someone that I could get trusted advice from if I needed it. So we’re driving down and I’m venting to him about where we are from a baseball side of things—and bear in mind, we had just gone to the World Series in ’04, won 105 games.

  “So it was—within that time period between ’04 and ’05 and that off-season, but, I was, like, what is this? This is tough, man. People just don’t get along. It’s, if you’re seen going to lunch with Jeff, you’re an enemy. It was just a really awkward period.

  “And so the best advice I ever got, though, was from Mark. And he said, ‘Mo. In the end, you work for Bill and that’s where your loyalty has to go. And try not to worry about picking sides internally here. Just do your job, and if you do that, everything will be fine.’ So, I mean, I actually thought at one point of just leaving here. It was getting so tense and it was very stressful.”

  But though DeWitt understood the inherent risks in this overhaul, he didn’t plan to back away from the Luhnow revolution over some hurt feelings.

  “Well, I told the other people that this was not threatening to anybody,” DeWitt told me. “It was some independent work and it was a way for us to develop tools to help make the best decisions. And that’s the way it was positioned.

  “He certainly wasn’t universally accepted. That’s been pretty well documented. Anytime you make a change in an organization that’s different from the direction that it’s been headed—and especially one that had a lot of success—I mean, you’re going to get pushback. I did get pushback, but I wasn’t going to change because I knew in the end that it was something that had to be done.”

  So, with a 2004 draft to prepare for, and an international scouting department to build up from almost nothing, Luhnow received more than just the title DeWitt had decades before in Cincinnati.

  “I told Jeff, ‘Look, I’m going to give you resources. Whatever you need,’” DeWitt said. “So he hired some smart guys, and also from the outside. And they went about their business in doing that.”

  But the core group of statistical analysts that would ultimately power the recommendation and implementation of changes across the Cardinal universe didn’t yet exist in 2004. Instead, Luhnow began to move on two fronts, seeing success far more quickly on one than the other: preparation for the 2004 draft, and the overhaul of the team’s international scouting program.

  “I really treated baseball operations like a McKinsey engagement,” Luhnow said. “So I took each area and said, ‘Okay. I’m going to study what’s going on in the industry. I’m going to study what we’re doing internally. I’m going to interview people. I’m going to interview everybody from the guy that runs it to the people at the line level and figure out what we can do.’ Make recommendations across each area.

  “The first area that was really, really easy for me to do that well was the international area because St. Louis had basically completely gotten out of international. The Venezuela Academy had shut down. The Dominican Academy had finished playing in ’03 and then they no longer played after that, so that, kind of, shut down. I did a trip with [Mozeliak] in January to the Caribbean series in Santo Domingo. He showed me where the old academy was. I met people. I interviewed a lot of people. I called a lot of people.

  “And in my work I discovered a couple things. One is that not every club is successful [in Latin America]. But those that are come in at a significant advantage. And to not have a presence there is a disadvantage. The feeling was there was so much need for money to go into major league payroll as we were getting close to a ninety-, hundred-win team and the players were expensive, that anywhere you could shave that wasn’t as productive could contribute to that. So they shaved international. The whole budget for international was like less than a hundred thousand dollars. May have been less than fifty thousand dollars the year I got there. Included two part-time scouts, who were not signing players. It just was not a good situation.

  “So that was a pretty easy recommendation. And when I did come back with it, [I] presented it to Walt, presented it to Bill. There wasn’t anybody running international so they basically said, ‘Why don’t you take it? Because you speak Spanish. You’ve been there. You like it. You have a passion for it. So take it.’ So that was my first kind of real baseball responsibility besides being ‘stat guy.’”

  In this way, Luhnow took ownership of an area without coming into direct conflict with Walt Jocketty—after all, the budget was coming out of an additional expenditure from DeWitt, so no department lost anyth
ing. If the Cardinals found some additional players, great. If not, it wasn’t as if Luhnow would be in the way of what many in the front office viewed as the real business of running a baseball team.

  “We had an academy built in Dominican and we had no academy,” Luhnow said. “We start from scratch. I interviewed architects, we got an academy. In less than a year, all of a sudden we were operating one of the nicest academies in the Dominican on a shoestring budget. Well, then people were, like, ‘Oh, okay. That makes sense, right? I’m glad we have that now.’”

  Where it became more difficult to reconcile two dramatically different ways of operating was in the draft room. And the results weren’t pretty in that first draft, in the summer of 2004, after Luhnow signed on, or, as longtime Cardinals beat writer Derrick Goold described it to me, “the notorious 2004 draft.”

  “Oh, it was the ’04 draft,” DeWitt recalled. “That was a bad draft.”

  Worth noting here: it was DeWitt who brought up the 2004 draft, as he and I sat with Mozeliak in St. Louis a few hours before the 2014 draft began. The Cardinals, from DeWitt on down, never hesitated to discuss or even to broach the struggles they’ve endured, the mistakes they’ve made. If anything, it was getting them to talk about success that would prove more difficult throughout our scores of hours of interviews and time together.

  The 2004 draft, though, was not one of those successes.

  I would say that we had not fully developed and integrated what we were looking to do,” DeWitt explained. “And there was maybe a mind-set in the draft that we were leaning toward more developed players. College players, which wasn’t the intent, but since everyone really [didn’t understand that], I don’t think we were on the same page at that point. Would you agree with that?”

  Mozeliak responded, “Well, I ran the draft. So I remember quite well. But it was the inability to really integrate any proven commodity.”

  Understand that in any major league draft, the players selected come from two pools: high school players, those who have finished their senior year in high school; and college players, those who have finished their junior or senior year in school (or are an equivalent age). Luhnow had gathered significant data about college players but not high school players.

  “I got exposed a little bit to the ’04 draft, and then Mo allowed me to, basically, participate in the room,” Luhnow said. “I was in the back of the room. I was listening to scouts present. I was watching the whole process, and whenever it came to a college player, I had some data that I was able to help present.

  “I think that there were people in that room that felt like because I was hired and because I was there and because it was coming from Bill DeWitt, their interpretation of Moneyball meant drafting college players and not drafting any high school players, which is completely wrong. But that was the simplistic interpretation, and so I think scouts all pushed up their college players and pushed down their high school players, and I think as a result of that we ended up with all college players and it was a terrible draft.”

  Let’s put this in a bit of context: A big room at Busch Stadium is filled with scouts, the scouting director at the time in Mozeliak, General Manager Jocketty, owner DeWitt, and Luhnow. He’s not only a senior hire by the owner himself, at that time he’s also undertaken a comprehensive review of the scouting department, determining what is working, what needs to change.

  So some scouts moved college guys up in an effort to more closely hew to what they thought Luhnow wanted. Others wouldn’t change a thing despite what Luhnow presented.

  All the scouts were greeted with surprises on the big board a few times when they did nothing more than go use the restroom.

  “So you pick a magnet for a player and you have the scouts talk about him, and five scouts will talk about him, and I would give a comment about the player’s percentile,” Luhnow said. “This guy’s in the ninety-second percentile in terms of offense in [NCAA] Division I. And that really wouldn’t move the magnet. All it would do is—I mean, occasionally when the scouts would leave the room and it was just Mo, a smaller group [of us]—we would move a couple magnets based off of—‘Okay, well, this guy’s got really good performance and this guy’s got crappy performance, so let’s flip these guys.’ So there was some magnet flipping.”

  The process, as fragmented as it was, led to the Cardinals’ choosing Boston College righty Chris Lambert over a player they’d ranked similarly, high school pitcher Phil Hughes.

  “I think what the mistake that I made is when Mo asked—during the draft there were like six of us at the table and we were debating between Hughes and Lambert,” Luhnow said. “And we actually had Hughes ranked above him. I had not seen either player so I just read both the reports on him and I did vote for Lambert because I figured he’s probably a safer bet because he had survived three years of college and the reports were roughly equal. In retrospect, the right thing to do was go with the player that we liked the most because neither should have gotten a bump from their performance. And Hughes had a higher upside based on the scouting love.”

  Lambert won a total of one major league game, in 33 innings, none of them logged in a Cardinals uniform. The Cardinals traded him in 2007 for Mike Maroth, a middling pitcher better known for his work as a meteorologist, at the end of his (baseball, not weather-forecasting) career. Hughes won 16 games in 2014, the third time he’d reached that plateau in his career, and signed a long-term extension with the Minnesota Twins.

  The 2004 Cardinals draft produced, ultimately, four major leaguers, but none of them made a significant impact at that level. None of the four earned even one Win Above Replacement in their entire careers.

  But even that analysis requires hindsight unavailable to the Cardinals at the time. What’s remarkable is how Luhnow, Mozeliak, and DeWitt all told me they not only recognize the failures of the 2004 draft now, they all recognized it at the time.

  But DeWitt, unlike many owners in that situation, didn’t back away from the process he’d begun by hiring Luhnow the year before. He didn’t banish Mozeliak to the outer reaches of the organization or let him go after he oversaw the draft debacle.

  Mozeliak got a promotion, to assistant GM. Luhnow, who’d scouted informally in the lead-up to the 2004 draft, seeing some of the potential first-rounders, received another title: scouting director. And armed with that portfolio, along with his international responsibilities, he went about building out his team within the front office. No longer would he be going about making these changes alone.

  Bill DeWitt trusted process over the initial results and recognized that remaking an entire organization would take time. If the tradition-bound members of the Cardinals’ front office thought Jeff Luhnow had an atypical background, the brain trust he ultimately formed didn’t change anybody’s mind. The McKinsey executive hired a guy from NASA and Lockheed Martin, a guy from Brown and Lehman Brothers, and a cartoonist.

  I remember Paul DePodesta sent me an e-mail saying, “Keep at it.” Something like “NASA meets baseball.” That’s what we need.

  —SIG MEJDAL

  So a couple months later, I just went to New York and was there for a couple years as an investment banker. I’m glad I did that job because I realized that’s something I absolutely never would want to do.

  —DAN KANTROVITZ

  My initial involvement was highly unlikely and serendipitous—by first profession, I’m an artist.

  —MIKE WITTE

  If you attempted to create the ideal twenty-first-century front-office experience, training, and temperament for the rebuild of the St. Louis Cardinals, you’d probably end up with Dan Kantrovitz.

  First, the young boy needs to fall in love with the game. So a 1978 birthday to parents who were season-ticket holders at old Busch Stadium isn’t a bad place to start.

  “I was four years old,” Kantrovitz recalled in a September 2014 interview. “I went into the stadium club with my dad to look around. I’m not supposed to remember that, I know, but I
think I remember it, the ’82 Series. And every one, obviously, after that as well.

  “I grew up in St. Louis. I grew up in a little suburb about twenty minutes from downtown, and I grew up watching Tommy Herr and Ozzie [Smith] and Terry [Pendleton] manning the infield. My parents had season tickets. That’s what I remember most about my childhood. The AstroTurf, Whitey Herzog, and the Cardinals.”

  That tradition of baseball success in St. Louis first drew Kantrovitz to the game. Now, it’s too simplistic to ascribe front-office acumen to someone just because he saw Ozzie Smith backflips all summer long, and a few Octobers, from Section 166. John Mozeliak became perhaps the most successful general manager in Cardinals history, and he fell for the game at Shea Stadium in the 1970s, of all places.

  Still, it’s impossible to miss the continuity inherent in players that George Kissell helped develop maturing into major leaguers who fostered Dan Kantrovitz’s love of baseball.

  But the analytical skills that ultimately allowed Kantrovitz to move quickly to the top of the baseball profession wouldn’t manifest themselves in childhood—though Kantrovitz acknowledged his mother, Barbara, who works in commercial real estate, and his father, David, who worked in the insurance business, kept stats on him as early as age ten and, according to Kantrovitz, “were into the performance analysis back then. They’re both into this.”