The Cardinals Way (6 page)

George, I came to the Cardinal organization because of you and that decision has become the wisest one I have ever made.

In my eyes you are the greatest Cardinal who ever put the birds on. You have helped me make my five years as a Cardinal the best years I've had in baseball.

I love you, George. Looking forward to seeing you.

Your adopted son,

Mark DeJohn

—L
ETTER
FROM
CURRENT
C
ARDINALS
MINOR
LEAGUE
FIELD
COORDINATOR
M
ARK
D
E
J
OHN
TO
G
EORGE
K
ISSELL
, J
ANUARY
25, 1991

Mabry is the hitting coach in St. Louis now. Since 2009, Turco has been managing the Gulf Coast League Cardinals. His tenure with the organization is now thirty-five years, or just over half the sixty-eight seasons Kissell gave the Cardinals. Turco's usually the first manager any Cardinal plays for. Kissell disciples Mike Shildt and Ron “Pop” Warner finished off Cardinals prospects at Double-A and Triple-A in 2014. DeJohn is everywhere, doing what Kissell did for so many decades. He entered his thirtieth season with the Cardinals in 2015.

“As I get older—and I don't want to compare myself to George—but as I get older, my perspective on things, to these kids, it changes,” Turco told me. “I have two sons, who are eighteen and seventeen, and I'm fifty-eight years old. I could be their grandfather. And they start to look at me, maybe, the way I looked at George, because of the age. And maybe, with the age, comes wisdom? But the wisdom that I have, in life and about the game, really came from George. The wisdom I can impart to them has come from experience with George, experience in the game, experience in life.”

Kissell, in his three seasons with the Cardinals from 1999 to 2001, took on a couple of projects that Tony La Russa didn't want. The first one was a twenty-eighth-round pick from Morris County College in New Jersey, the kind of hardworking overachiever that Kissell lived to help: Joe McEwing.

“My rookie year, he was on the bench with me,” McEwing told me at a St. Petersburg hotel in September 2014. The White Sox were in town to play the Rays, and McEwing, who'd heard about my book, volunteered to simply talk about George Kissell for hours late into a Friday night/Saturday morning.

“I'd had him in the minor leagues for years. So George was with me every single day. And he prepared me every single day. So basically, I learned to play second base from him in the big leagues. He wore me out, every single day. And that's who I would go to with questions. Was I in the right place? Should I have been here, should I have been there?”

As Kidwell explained, “Tony didn't like young guys.” So it fell to Kissell, nearing eighty, to connect with the twenty-six-year-old McEwing.

The two had formed the bond years before.

“When you first sign, you're new to everything,” McEwing told me. “When I signed, I went to instructional league. And so George walked in—you know, we play ten o'clock games 'cause it was so hot. So we were on the road, we were playing the Angels. And we had a terrible game, defensively. We get back, off the van, nobody went to the clubhouse. We went back on the field, took infield until it was perfect. Took a whole infield, and until it was perfect, nobody was getting off the field. And that's when you understand the importance of every single play that goes on in each game.”

But it wasn't as if Kissell stood there, book in hand, and read from his manual, crafted all those decades before on snowy Ithaca, New York, nights. Kidwell echoed McEwing's stories as the hours went by, pointing out that while McEwing heard them since he was twenty, Kidwell had been hearing them since he was six years old.

“George simplified,” McEwing said. “You didn't know what you were going through. When you did your routine, he did not let you know what you were going through. So you were just getting to every ground ball, but at the end he would let you know, you just fielded every ground ball you could possibly have at second base.”

A year later, McEwing had been traded to the Mets. Kissell took charge of improving the defense of Fernando Viña, the new Cardinals second baseman. He went on to win the 2001 Gold Glove. And he had a replica made for George Kissell.

McEwing looks like another direct Kissell product who will get a job managing at the big league level, though even now the Cardinals are hiring and training young managers such as Ollie Marmol, their State College Spikes skipper in 2014, promoted to Palm Beach in 2015, with the Kissell ideas in mind, and usually by those who were trained by Kissell himself. McEwing is the third-base coach for the Chicago White Sox. The Cardinals interviewed McEwing after 2011 to replace La Russa, before choosing Mike Matheny. Both the Diamondbacks and the Twins interviewed McEwing for their managerial openings after the 2014 season, and it seems more like when than if for McEwing to get that chance to manage.

He speaks fluent Kissell, and you better believe that's a language, one that has outlived Kissell himself, who died in 2008. It's hard not to feel that baseball was robbed of some more years with Kissell, who was in fine health when he died, the victim of injuries sustained in a car accident.

McEwing told me he not only thinks of Kissell every day, he thinks of what Kissell would do when he makes any decision on the baseball field, and many of them off it.

Turco's final words to me, as we left the playing field in Jupiter following a three-hour conversation: “Make sure you say nice things about George Kissell in that book of yours!”

“Luis Alicea—my last year playing was in the Red Sox organization,” McEwing recalled. “So I went to big league camp with the Red Sox [in 2007], [Dustin] Pedroia's rookie year. So I'm listening to Luis—I'm kind of a veteran at that time—I listen to Luis describing double-play depth with Pedroia. And I go, ‘I don't want to interrupt, but do you want me to finish this?' He goes, ‘What do you mean?' I go, ‘Do you want me to finish this speech?' He's, like, ‘You grew up under George. You know exactly what I'm gonna say.' I said, ‘You're right.'”

White Sox hitting coach Todd Steverson then joined us. He'd heard Kissell stories were being told and wanted to add his. He'd spent only a few years in the Cardinal organization, but he found that his exposure to Kissell allowed him to become the go-to guy on fundamentals for every staff he'd joined since, from Oakland to Detroit.

We all kept talking until after 2:00
A.M.
, and then I left, and Kidwell told me they kept on talking baseball, story after story, until the sun came up, remembering the past and applying it all to the present. They were the same conversations coaches and players have had all over this country, at every outpost found by Rickey and developed by Kissell and all who have come after him.

It's the book, sure, but it's the conversation that the book starts, the repetition that allows players and coaches to work from the text rather than being slaves to it. Or as Joe Torre says Kissell used to put it:

“Who wrote the book, Joe?”

“Who?”

“Nobody, Joe. Nobody wrote the book.”

Kissell did, though. And the ideas, the diagrams for where to go and what to do for nearly every conceivable baseball situation, the drills that coaches from other organizations have admired without knowing how they'd even file them in reports if they appropriated them, are not just in English.

It is the language of Branch Rickey. It is the language of George Kissell. And it's how the Cardinals talk to each other and have for nearly a hundred years.

 

3

BILL DEWITT JR.

Player development is essential to the success of a Major League ball club. It is probably the most vital ingredient in putting a team on the field.

—
B
ILL
D
E
W
ITT
J
R., 1965

In 1965, a twenty-three-year-old graduate student at Harvard Business School, Bill DeWitt Jr., submitted a paper to his Business Policy professor, Joseph L. Bower. In it, DeWitt detailed how a professional baseball team, the Cincinnati Reds, could improve overall business practices. Both the recommendations and the source are striking for their accuracy and provenance.

“Bill was quiet in class, so I was surprised when his paper for the ‘personal strategy' assignment was really strong,” Bower told me in a November 2014 e-mail when I asked him about the paper. “For purposes of the book, you can say I gave him a Distinction grade, although it may have only been a High Pass. I only remember that it was strong, and that I invited him to my office to talk about it.”

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.