The Cardinals Way (19 page)

In the fall of 1998, Mozeliak became Jocketty's scouting director. And Mozeliak realized that baseball wasn't just a diversion from whatever career path he'd ultimately take to support a family. It stood a good chance of being his career. The following July, his first child, Ally, was born.

“We knew that my career trajectory was now pointed in the right direction and for where we were in our lives,” Mozeliak recalled of the discussions with his wife, Julie. “I mean, we now have entered our thirties, the year [Ally] was born. If you would do this job and fail, obviously, it could go away. But…”

What Mozeliak left unsaid is that he didn't fail—he became indispensable to Jocketty's operation, plugged in at various levels over the next few seasons. Key to what the Cardinals were doing, and personally important to Jocketty, too.

“My relationship with him grew to where we were very close,” Mozeliak said. “As you can imagine, as a scouting director you get to know him. Did that for two years and I was named director of baseball ops, which sort of gave me the view of every department. And then subsequently did that for a couple of years and then was named assistant GM.”

Jocketty acknowledged that he was grooming Mozeliak for a future role as a general manager somewhere, which is clear given the kind of experience he gave Mozeliak throughout his tenure.

“What I feel like my skills were getting tested or honed for was negotiating,” Mozeliak recalled. “Understanding how to do contracts and get players signed. So at that point, Walt was giving me a lot of exposure to all the zero to threes, which are like pre-arb, which then got me doing a lot of the major league contracts.

“So I was getting a spoonful of helping on all of that. But when you ask about what enables me to do what I do today, I think it's far different. I think it's more about having understanding how to manage. And when I say that, I'm not talking about baseball, I'm talking about people.”

This is the part of the job few people seem to understand and is precisely where Mozeliak excelled. The proof came before he even got the job, when he managed to combine both sides of a bitter dispute on Team Mozeliak.

John Mozeliak is in an inherently political job. It is his job to lead, to coerce, to convince. This is what a general manager does. This is what John Mozeliak does exceptionally well. It's made him an excellent GM, and it's the reason he could stay at the center of the Cardinals storm through much of the last decade and make friends from all sides.

“Mo's an expert politician,” one Cardinals observer said. “I mean, he's navigated numerous land mines throughout his career and come out on the right end of it because he's very adept at doing that and very intelligent. He's usually a step ahead.

“When it came to where the direction was headed, I think he recognized that. And then he also recognizes how he can keep taking it in that direction. And I try to pick up on some of that political adeptness, when you're dealing with scouts or trying to take your constituency in a direction to make a decision. And Mo is really, really good at that. And I think it's something that he tries to impress upon all of us.”

So in the fall of 2007, Mozeliak's constituency was, essentially, everybody within the Cardinals' organization, most of all Bill DeWitt. But while DeWitt named him interim general manager immediately—Mozeliak recalled getting the call from Walt that he'd been let go around 11:00
A.M.
on October 3 and being given the temporary job in Bill's office by noon—Mozeliak needed to prove he was broadly acceptable, to Jeff Luhnow and the analytics team, which had grown well beyond the three-man shop, to the old guard that remained in player development and scouting, who wondered what would happen to them without Jocketty to support them. Mozeliak had a manager under him, Tony La Russa, who was a power center unto himself. And he had competition—DeWitt intended to, and did, interview a number of candidates for the job, guys who eventually got shots of their own: Rick Hahn, who'd encouraged Mejdal years earlier and went on to get the GM job with the White Sox. Chris Antonetti, eventually named GM of the Cleveland Indians. They were the kind of candidates who had analytic firepower.

One person who wasn't a candidate, to the surprise of many, was Jeff Luhnow.

“Jeff was a potential GM candidate,” DeWitt said. “But really, at that point, he didn't have the major league experience. He didn't have the experience of signing players and all that. He just wasn't quite far enough along. But I think a lot of the media thought that Jeff was going to be the GM. That wasn't in my mind. I talked to Jeff about it, and he was happy with the process and didn't really lobby for the job. What he really loved was the buy-in of the whole organization of what he was trying to accomplish at the player procurement and development level.”

Luhnow echoed these sentiments when I asked if he'd made any attempt to get the promotion to general manager:

“No. I had a very frank discussion with Bill, and he didn't think I was ready. I didn't think I was ready. I didn't want it. I had so much in front of me. I was managing this player pipeline that to me it would have been irresponsible to leave that, sort of, as it was still being raised. And the results still hadn't gotten to the point where I felt like we could say that we had been successful. And that was my sole goal. I was hoping that we would hire a GM that would facilitate that now and repeat, and that was my own guidance to Bill on the process.”

Hence, Hahn. Hence, Antonetti. Several others were interviewed as well.

“I had a number of candidates I'd talked to, but I needed an interim GM. Mo was the logical choice as assistant GM to become interim GM,” DeWitt said. “Then I said, ‘Look. You've got a lot of turmoil here. I'm doing this search.' He was a candidate, but not necessarily a leading candidate.

“We need the organization to be led by someone who agrees with what I'm trying to accomplish here. And he said, ‘I understand that.' Even as an assistant GM, it was hard for him. Because he would understand Jeff's work, but then had to try to get buy-in throughout the organization, which was difficult.”

So there was Mozeliak with less than a month to prove he was the guy.

It helped that nearly everybody, across a spectrum where there'd been massive disagreements on big and small things—from the makeup of and input on which players to draft to how to properly thank someone for helping in the purchase of a truck—all advocated for Mozeliak.

Notice that even Bill Madden, in a column that otherwise rivals Ed Wood's friend the Amazing Criswell for lack of foresight, talked up Mozeliak as a possibility.

So did a far more impressive reader of the present and the future from that time, Bernie Miklasz of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
:

If DeWitt and team President Mark Lamping seek to go outside the organization to hire a new general manager, they'll find plenty of promising candidates. But in assistant GM John Mozeliak, the Cardinals have a perfectly fine candidate, in house. He's a smart baseball man, with good people skills, and has demonstrated an easy rapport with player agents. He also can function smoothly with Jeff Luhnow, the VP of player development. It's important to heal the organizational divide, and Mozeliak can do that.
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One reason for the confidence of Miklasz, and ultimately DeWitt himself, was that both Luhnow and Jocketty saw Mozeliak as the right choice.

“First of all, Mo had been with the organization a long time and he had been involved in every element of it,” Luhnow said. “And when he was given the opportunity to be interim GM, he treated it as if he were the permanent GM. He organized everything. He got everybody mobilized and really did a nice job. And I think that's ultimately why Bill removed the
interim
and hired him as the GM. And so he had—he had the wrong view if he [had been] behaving as if he wouldn't be there for a long time when he's continued that to this day.”

Ultimately, he had Luhnow's support because Luhnow recognized that Mozeliak, despite his personal connection to Jocketty, was an intellectual ally.

“He was there from the beginning,” Luhnow said of Mozeliak. “He saw the resistance. He started to recognize the output that was starting to come, and I think he recognized the need to do it and, quite frankly, I think inside of him there was something that he would have wanted way back when but it was difficult to do some of this stuff.

“And it would have been difficult for him to advocate for any sort of substantive change in that environment without the support of Bill DeWitt and at the level he was at. So I think there was part of him that felt a kinship to what was happening and rooting for that. You know, rooting for the change to be successful.”

Consider that for a moment. Mozeliak, hired and mentored by Jocketty, managed to make Luhnow feel that Mozeliak was an intellectual stakeholder in the movement that had pushed Jocketty out. This happened in an environment where, as Vuch put it, it seemed as if one side would give you a dirty look if you were caught talking with the other side.

That sense of Mozeliak as ally was reflected throughout the expanding analytics department, not just a three-man shop any longer.

“I remember it was this big surprise to me,” Mejdal said of Jocketty's firing. “I mean, Mo had a ton of experience and was quite capable and was more than open to analytics. So I thought that—yeah, Mo is the one who's ready for the position at this time.

“All we ever want is someone with an open mind who's willing to question convention and look to what has taken place and realize [what is possible] to guide them. And Mo was open and curious to this from the beginning. He was always very kind to me. He had more interest in this than anybody that was in the front office, other than Jeff and Dan, of course, when I came. And Vuch. Vuch was great with it, too.”

Yet, at the meeting with Bill DeWitt to learn of his dismissal, Walt Jocketty recommended one man to take his place:

“I had recommended Mo. I told them when I was leaving that I thought Mo was ready to take on the position. I know they interviewed a few other people, but they ultimately decided on Mo.”

Though he wasn't yet ready to understand why he'd been let go, Jocketty said he recognizes now that Mozeliak could unite the organization in a way he hadn't.

“Well, you'd probably have to ask him that,” Jocketty said of Mozeliak's ability to heal the organization's rifts. “But he probably saw the difficulties I was going through. And he was able to make some adjustments. We talked about some of the things we had to do differently, and he made those adjustments.”

Or as Luhnow put it, “Well, I think everybody felt good about Mo being there because he had been with the organization long enough to appreciate and have relationships with all the people that had been there, but also had been witnessing and assisting the transformation Bill and I began. So it was an ideal bridge between the two ideologies with the role. I think that's strong here. And there was quite the sigh of relief throughout the organization that we were not going to have to deal with somebody new. This guy understands the Cardinal history, tradition, and that he appreciates the things that are evolving.”

DeWitt saw it, too:

“But what he did was, he met with Jeff a lot. Convinced him that he agreed with the approach. And went around to the other people of the organization and said this is the direction we're headed. You better get on the train or you're going to get off the train. And he made it pretty clear that he was all-in on what we were trying to accomplish.

“And Mo was computer literate and he was of an age with the young guys in the business at that time. You know, he got it. He understood what we were trying to do and he agreed with it.

“He didn't put a big sales job on me to be the GM. He knew I was out looking at those individuals with other teams who clearly were what we wanted to have—the data-driven decision-making process.”

What's fascinating is that leading the club in this direction—twenty-eight days after Jocketty was let go, Mozeliak got the full-time gig—didn't include some Hollywood moment with Mozeliak, say, taking the mound at Busch Stadium and delivering an inspired speech. Few could pinpoint precisely how Mozeliak had earned the confidence of people throughout the organization, which likely speaks to how he really did it—through building relationships over years, rather than with a particular moment.

“I thought about the things that I liked about how I was being treated or growing,” Mozeliak said about how he treated people once getting the GM job. “I really [tried to incorporate] those observations of having employees that truly enjoy being at work. When I became general manager, we had gotten away from it. We needed to get back to it. And have to have an environment in the office that people want to be a part of and want to come to work.”

That didn't mean Mozeliak ran away from making changes, however.

“The important part was clarity and communication of what the front office was going to look like,” Mozeliak said. “Because it was certainly going to be different than what a lot of people had become accustomed to knowing.

“Walt was the boss. And I was his right-hand man. I did a lot of the day-to-day duties. I just wanted to create very defined roles for everyone. And also at that time, a little bit of cross-pollination for everyone as well.”

But while Mozeliak began to arrange the talent around him according to ability and optimizing performance—something that had taken a backseat to ideology under Jocketty—he had another potentially thorny issue to navigate: his relationship with Cardinals manager Tony La Russa. As Jocketty put it, “Tony was going to run his club the way he was going to run it. He wasn't necessarily going to play who he was told to play.” The unhappy tenure of Colby Rasmus in St. Louis, for one, confirms this.