The Cardinals Way (2 page)

The results have been extraordinary, and the methods seemingly obvious, as with all great decisions in retrospect. Analytics helped the Cardinals take a leap forward as a baseball team. And that the Cardinals, in particular, incorporated statistical analysis helped analytics become the industry standard.

Incorporating analytics, through the hiring of Luhnow starting in September 2003, allowed the team to revamp the way they acquired players, particularly through the draft. Luhnow took a microscope to everything the Cardinals did, and from the draft to the study of their pitchers' mechanics, plenty of prototypical analytical practices became part of the Cardinals Way.

Interestingly, however, almost nothing changed about either the Kissell-inspired on-field practices or with the perhaps more significant ways Kissell preached for coaches and managers to emotionally connect with players.

As DeWitt put it, though, in our first interview in August 2013, “There were great people who were here when we got here. And so the Cardinals had that tradition of development that we were able to build on. But if you don't have the talent, all the development in the world won't get you good players.”

DeWitt didn't purchase the Cardinals until 1996. But the foundation he described dates back a hundred years. Incredibly, the intellectual and personal through-line from the very start of major league teams entering the player-development business to the present-day Cardinals is clear, more practical than symbolic, and essentially guaranteed the flip side of DeWitt's point.

Once the Cardinals figured out how to input more talent into their system, a hundred-year tradition, complete with established practices dating back to Branch Rickey and Bill DeWitt, Sr., and refined by George Kissell, supercharged the results. An incredible tradition merged with a group of great baseball minds to maximize what baseball's new collective-bargaining agreements eventually forced other teams to try to emulate.

The St. Louis Cardinals, ahead of the curve on the very existence of the farm system that transformed twentieth-century baseball, have once again ridden a combination of foresight and attention to detail at every level to represent a particular moment in baseball history here in the twenty-first century.

False starts occurred along the way—a skeptical group within the organization itself, the ill-fated 2004 draft, among others. Realistically, what is astonishing about the St. Louis Cardinals over the past decade isn't their sometimes-contentious path to their current state. Finding baseball executives to argue strategy, or scouts to disagree over a particular player, might be the easiest task on earth. And it appears that the rancor that led to the hacking of Luhnow's new team's database came from personal, not philosophical differences—Chris Correa, for instance, was a Luhnow hire with full analytical buy-in.

The marvel is how completely the Cardinals of today are both the manifestation of a vision Branch Rickey had a hundred years ago, and how much of the team's current business model both fits what Rickey envisioned and is practiced by direct acolytes of Rickey himself.

There is no Cardinals Way without George Kissell, signed by Branch Rickey. There is no Cardinals Way without Red Schoendienst, signed by Branch Rickey.

There's no analytic revamp of the Cardinals without Bill DeWitt Jr., raised in and around baseball by Bill DeWitt Sr., whom Rickey hired at age thirteen and worked with for decades. There's no analytics revamp of the Cardinals without Luhnow, hired by DeWitt less than a month after they first met. And bringing in Luhnow, and the analytics team he assembled, wasn't some rejection of Cardinals tradition—the very concept of an analytics department dates back to Rickey, who hired Travis Hoke,
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baseball's first team-employed statistician, in 1914 to chart every game “with base and out efficiency” in mind.

The hiring of Luhnow was characterized by some in the organization and many outsiders as a new direction for the Cardinals, a break with tradition. Really, it was nothing more than a restoration of a key component of Branch Rickey's tradition, dating back a hundred years. And the key to the Cardinals sustaining that success in the years to come will depend on maintaining that level of innovation, even as that talent finds homes all around the league.

It also represented something vital for the industry itself, in the post-
Moneyball
world. The extent to which that book created sides, a supposed war of ideas, is frequently cited by both those with primarily analytics background and the scouts. So for the Cardinals to incorporate both worldviews into a highly successful franchise—perhaps the most successful of the twenty-first century to date—signaled to everybody that not only would integrating the two approaches be possible, it would be the wisest possible course.

Accordingly, the St. Louis Cardinals, circa the 2010s, will mean something significant to baseball fans now and forever, just as the Oriole Way did under Paul Richards and Earl Weaver, or the Big Red Machine conjures up the best Cincinnati Reds teams of the 1970s, or the $100,000 Infield is Philadelphia A's baseball approximately a hundred years ago.

Here's how it happened—from Rickey and DeWitt to DeWitt and Mozeliak. Here's how it happened, from George Kissell's insight and training to Jeff Luhnow's, Sig Mejdal's and Michael Girsch's revolution to Dan Kantrovitz and Gary LaRocque's implementation. And here's how it works in practice, as seen through the eyes of players and coaches, scouts and analytics experts, operating the Cardinals Way at all levels of the farm system right now.

Mike Matheny may object, but he's only forty-five, and he's only been present for a small part of the history of the determining factors in the success of the St. Louis Cardinals. Even Branch Rickey himself was once fired as manager of the Cardinals, and if anything, it ultimately enhanced his building of the organization. The Cardinals Way is almost a hundred years old, both the deep connection with young players and reliance on new data, and it doesn't appear to be going anywhere.

So there's pride, but no belief from the Cardinals that this is somehow the best or only way to do things. The implicit idea that would come with such an attitude, that twenty-nine other teams ought to follow the Cardinals' example, wouldn't even make sense, though many will try, and the Astros, in particular, will be a fascinating test case of many of the ideas that once drove the Cardinals' success, with so many of those who drove the Cardinals' innovative engine now in Houston with, as Luhnow put it to me in August 2015, “a clean sheet of paper.” Meanwhile, this Cardinals Way is a product of a hundred years of serendipity, a number of innovative baseball men creating a tradition that predates any efforts to duplicate it, and a group in place now who have the ability to both maximize and build on what the St. Louis Cardinals began a century ago.

 

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THE CARDINAL IDEA

Want to know what will happen tomorrow? Read yesterday's paper.

—
M
IKE
S
HANNON

I love
Baseball Prospectus
. But I couldn't help noticing this paragraph by Russell Carleton, in his March 4, 2014, column on the Cardinals:

“Before we create too much of a mythology surrounding
The Cardinal Way,
let's be realistic for a minute. The Cardinals did not invent player development. They do not have a monopoly on smart guys who are good at molding young bats and young arms. They did not invent the idea of making sure that there was a coherent philosophy running through the player development system. Lots of teams make it a point to ensure that from the Sally League to the National League, the expectations that pitchers have are as uniform as they can be. It sets up a nice uniformity and eases the transitions that players might face as they move up in the minors. For all we know, they may not be the first team to write an internal book—or a series of memos which, if someone had bothered to collect them into a three-ring binder, would look like a book.”
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Let me stop you right there, Russell. The Cardinals did, in fact, invent player development. They did invent the idea of making sure a coherent philosophy ran through the player-development system.

And they were the first team to write an internal book, too—but we'll get to George Kissell soon enough.

First, we need to talk about Branch Rickey, inventor of the farm system. Rickey was many things: an Ohio schoolboy. A catcher good enough to play in the major leagues, before an arm injury ended his career. An academic and a teacher, repeatedly offered jobs outside the confines of the game that ultimately employed him for six decades. The bringer of integration to Major League Baseball, and of Jackie Robinson to millions of people who will never forget seeing him play.

But Rickey spent twenty-five years of his life, from 1917 to 1942, with the St. Louis Cardinals. And the foundation for how the Cardinals, and ultimately, every major league team acquired and developed talent came from Rickey himself.

It is easy to assert, with benefit of hindsight, that the farm system was an eventuality, a claim that still allows Rickey to claim credit for getting there first. But both opinion at the time of Rickey's great innovation, and even the example of other leagues to this day, argue against this limited view.

The idea of a farm club predates Rickey. John T. Brush, owner of the Cincinnati Red Stockings,
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also owned the Indianapolis Hoosiers of the Western League and shifted players between the teams. But pushback from other minor league teams limited this practice until the second decade of the twentieth century.

Around this time, Rickey was coaching baseball at the University of Michigan. And he was hired by Robert Lee Hedges, owner of the St. Louis … Browns.

It's startling to consider just how much fate could have shifted in St. Louis baseball if any number of things had happened slightly differently, or earlier, or later. This book could easily have been about the most successful franchise in baseball history—the Browns. Hedges believed in Rickey's idea of a farm system and hired Rickey originally in 1913, for $7,500, to create that farm system.
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Hedges also hired Charlie Barrett, who went on to become one of Rickey's most successful scouts with the Cardinals.

During his time with the Browns, Rickey, in need of an administrative assistant, hired a thirteen-year-old peanut vendor at Sportsman's Park to be his new assistant: Bill DeWitt Sr.

The Browns, not the Cardinals, owned Sportsman's Park. The Browns drew bigger crowds than the Cardinals. The Cardinals were the money losers in town. Even after the Cardinals were sold by the Robison family, the debt the new ownership took on (the deal with the Robison family essentially mortgaged the Cardinals, with payments constantly due) meant constantly trying to meet debt obligations while maintaining, if not building, the team.

The Cardinals even opened up shares of the team to fans, hoping for a cash infusion. It was referred to publicly as “The Cardinal Idea.” Incredible as it may seem, given the fan support the Cardinals enjoy today, response was tepid at best. No St. Louis child born since 1902 has reached age twenty-five without seeing a World Series championship parade in his town. But in 1917, the year Rickey started with the Cardinals, the oldest children that astonishing stat covers were only fifteen years old.

Hedges became a casualty of the settlement with the Federal League, a third major league built to challenge that NL and AL circuits. As part of the settlement, Hedges sold the Browns to Phil Ball, owner of the St. Louis Federal League team, a man temperamentally unsuited, and not particularly inclined, to work with Rickey. As for Rickey's farm system? “I don't want anything to do with it!” Ball reportedly said.
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So when an opportunity opened up with the Cardinals, under their new ownership group, to join their front office as president, Rickey made the move. DeWitt and Barrett soon followed, along with other scouts, who helped populate those first Cardinal farm system teams. That wouldn't have happened for the Cardinals had Rickey remained with the Browns.

Those early years were hardly representative of what the Cardinals would become. Rickey would bring expensive rugs that belonged to his wife's family into team offices in Sportsman's Park for the day to make the team look more respectable during meetings with the owners of potential minor league affiliates.
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But two circumstances changed for the Cardinals at the tail end of the 1910s. Sam Breadon, who'd had a small stake in the team, decided to get more involved, eventually buying enough to become president of the team, fully funding the expansion of Rickey's farm system for the Cardinals, while simultaneously retiring the last of the debt due to the Robison family. In exchange, Rickey willingly gave up his title of president to Breadon.

And the second thing: Breadon, now in charge, decided to give Branch Rickey an entirely free hand to run baseball operations.
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Now the farm system would become the true “Cardinal Idea.”

The system, born in part of necessity, would quickly expand as was necessary. Bill DeWitt, Sr., ultimately, became the first “farm director” in Major League Baseball history.

“He was very close to Branch Rickey,” Bill DeWitt Jr. recalled, in my September 2014 interview with him, about his father. “He used to travel with him. When they had all these farm teams, they would go visit them and sort out what was going on—check on the players. There were so few people in the front office, like eight to ten people. They really didn't have a farm director, but he was the de facto farm director.”

Rickey, and the Cardinals scouts, such as Charlie Barrett, had been scouring the high minors for players for the last few years of the 1910s. But their eye for talent had become so respected, other owners, armed with the knowledge that Rickey wanted these players and nothing else, would swoop in and outbid the relatively penniless Cardinals for them. Rickey, fed up with this happening, wired Barrett in Texas, “Pack up and come home—we'll develop our own players.”