The Cardinals Way (18 page)

But exactly how to integrate an organization operating within two silos—the products being developed for the major leagues in one, and the major league end point in another—well, it seemed intractable at the time.

“And I thought we had to have everybody in the organization on the same page,” DeWitt said of this time. “Because if you have outliers or certain views that ‘Oh, this is okay. But maybe it's not really what we should be doing'—it just isn't going to be effective. You devalue what you try to accomplish.”

No one, not even the principals, could predict how it would play out.

“No,” Mejdal said when I asked him if the ultimate resolution was simply a matter of time. “When I got there, I didn't know how the conflict was going to be resolved. I didn't know the director of player development or the GM of a defending World Series champion would be let go. I had no inclination or no idea that was going to happen, and frankly, my mental energies weren't really spent on that. It was improving the processes and what we did have responsibility for. Which was the draft.”

The Cardinals did, finally, slip a bit on the field, following their 2006 World Series title, with a 78-84 record in 2007, missing the play-offs. The Cardinals were only a game out as late as September 7, but that had far more to do with a mediocre NL Central than a quality team in St. Louis. The 2006 team also benefited from a weak NL Central, making the play-offs with an 83-78 record. According to DeWitt, that did make things a bit easier from an external view, and Mozeliak agreed, though he isn't sure the center would have held regardless.

“I do think results matter in terms of how people want to make decisions on personnel,” Mozeliak said. “But I sort of get a sense that it didn't matter at that point.”

Making the change then didn't insulate them from criticism, however. Far from it.

Here's national baseball writer Bill Madden, who is not what you'd call a friend to the statistical advances made by the game he writes about. It's comical to see how much he got wrong in retrospect, but Madden represents a rear guard in the baseball industry, both then and now, that was outwardly hostile to what Luhnow and others have done to grow the game.

The firing of respected Walt Jocketty as Cardinals GM last Tuesday by team chairman Bill DeWitt was just another example of the growing trend of meddling owners reducing the powers of the general manager and shifting the emphasis of baseball operations to statistical analysis.…

 … But it was a division DeWitt created when he promoted Jeff Luhnow, one of the new-wave stat practitioners, as head of both player development and scouting. Jocketty viewed that as a usurping of his powers—especially since Luhnow clearly had the chairman's ear—and let it be known to his friends and associates that he was not comfortable with the new arrangement.…

On the other hand, a big part of Jocketty's undoing with DeWitt was the failure of the Cardinals' farm system to develop any pitchers in a decade and only two frontline players, catcher Yadier Molina and outfielder Chris Duncan, in recent years.

It will be interesting to see who DeWitt hires as the new GM as he's already stated a preference for someone between the age of 30 and 40 with a player-development background and an understanding of a middle-market operation.

Translation: Someone to work alongside Luhnow and DeWitt. (Cardinal insiders say DeWitt could do a lot worse than assistant GM John Mozeliak, who has been installed as the interim GM.)

On the day Jocketty was fired, Cardinals president Mark Lamping declared, “The best job in baseball just opened.” It's doubtful if you'd find any other veteran baseball people who would share that opinion.
5

The Cardinals had reasons to move on from Jocketty. He realizes that now: “I think both of us could have done things differently. I think I could have done more in line with what they were trying to do, to work more in conjunction with what they were doing.”

The products of the Cardinals draft and player development system, under Luhnow, would soon become major leaguers, meaning that an integration in how the club valued them would be vital. You can't spend four years building a system for valuing players, and employ a general manager who doesn't share that view.

However, the organization felt plenty of sadness as well. Not only was Walt Jocketty a general manager for thirteen years, making plenty of friends along the way, but even those who understood the need for a change, even if Jocketty didn't at the time, wished it didn't have to end this way.

“All of that was leading up to the crescendo,” Mozeliak said of the change. “It was something that you could see building, and you could anticipate that this could go either direction. But if you were a betting man, you knew where it was headed.”

It was headed toward a Cardinals team run by John Mozeliak, who would try to heal a fractured Cardinals organization.

 

5

HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN

I get why the comparison between John Mozeliak and Franklin Delano Roosevelt will strike some of you as funny. I do. The ebullient Roosevelt, with his long cigarette holder and smile built for the editorial cartoon. The professorial Mozeliak, careful with his words and precise with seemingly every movement, as if with every press conference he were teaching a college course on building a baseball team.

Bear with me.

The Democratic Party of 1924 was a combination of old and new thinking, of factions north and south, wet and dry (on the question of Prohibition), progressive and conservative.

Accordingly, Al Smith, the governor of New York, drew plenty, but not sufficient, support to be nominated by the Democratic Party to run for president. The same was true of former secretary of the treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, and Oscar Underwood, senator from Alabama. Ultimately, the Democrats settled on John W. Davis, but he was placeholder, not party leader, and he got slaughtered that fall by Calvin Coolidge. There were real doubts about the future existence of the Democratic Party.

Despite all the fighting, everybody seemed excited about one man: Franklin Roosevelt, who gave the nominating speech for Smith, then succeeded him as governor of New York.

Fast-forward eight years. The country was in a different place. So were the Democrats. Roosevelt united the factions of the party so completely that he won the party's nomination for president on the fourth ballot, then won 472 electoral votes in a general-election destruction of Herbert Hoover.

Roosevelt was the winner, by acclimation, out of the ashes of a massive internal struggle.

So was Mozeliak. The Cardinals were every bit as splintered as those Democrats. Yet, in 2007, those across the philosophical spectrum in and around the Cardinals took a close look at things and decided John Mozeliak should be the next general manager. A man at the center of these struggles not only rose above them to lead the Cardinals, but he's led them to the greatest success in club history. The Cardinals reached the postseason four consecutive seasons from 2011 to 2014. That had never before happened in club history. While more play-off spots are to be had now (more teams, though, too), the Cardinals won at least one postseason series in each of their four play-off bids.

So life's been good in St. Louis under John Mozeliak, who believes the only reason he got the chance was because of his role as peacemaker within the turmoil.

“Well, I think if I wasn't acting in that way, I'm not general manager,” Mozeliak put it simply, in one of our October 2014 interviews.

Let's take a step back, though, and look at how Mozeliak got to that point.

He started with baseball young. His earliest memories are from Shea Stadium, sitting next to a man who viewed the game through an analytical lens.

“Well, it starts back with my grandfather on my mother's side,” Mozeliak told me. “His name was Thomas Walsh. I was actually born in New Jersey and spent my early years there. I was everywhere. But New Brunswick, Wayne. My father worked for IBM.

“Now again, I was a tiny little fellow. But anyway my grandfather was a big Mets fan. So subsequently, at an early age—probably as early as four—he started taking me to Mets games. And he was one of those guys who always wanted to sit on the third-base side, just right above the dugout. And he understood the game.”

For those of you keeping score at home, that means John Mozeliak's first experience with baseball was the 1973 Mets of Tug McGraw and “Ya Gotta Believe!” Many young boys and girls committed themselves to the game of baseball thanks to those Mets. The current Cardinals general manager is one of them. It's a reminder of what a winning team does to galvanize a fan base—one reason why Cardinals fans, who have experienced so many victories through generations, have such close ties to the team.

“And he watched almost through a set of lenses like myself now,” Mozeliak continued, remembering his grandfather. “I mean, he was very passionate about what it was. This was not really a social thing just to spend time with your grandkid. He cared.

“And so that was my first exposure to the game of that level, and then subsequently, through the years, it was something I also wanted to play and be a part of that way. But my first real taste of this was through my grandfather and his appreciation for the game. I think what he exposed me to and gave me access to was very unique. And I was very lucky for that.

“He would think about it more strategically. He wasn't going there just to cheer. He liked the nuances of the game of baseball. And as you can imagine, as a child, a lot of times you're going to a game and you're worried about are you getting cotton candy or a hot pretzel. I'm sitting with him and listening to him talk about counts. Whether he should be running, bunting.”

But in 1977, the Mets lost a pair of baseball icons, one present, one future. They traded Tom Seaver to the Reds, and John Mozeliak's family moved to Colorado. John was eight years old.

Mozeliak spent the remainder of his childhood without a major league team nearby. He followed the Braves and the Cubs, thanks to superstations, watched the Cardinals and other teams on the NBC
Game of the Week,
but his experience of the game of baseball mostly came through reading about it. The local paper. Box scores. Stats. He played through high school, but that wasn't going to be his entry point into the industry.

“Well, I do think I always have looked at it more from a managerial or management perspective than maybe a true player,” Mozeliak said. “I knew I was never going to be a true player, so it was something that for me was sort of easier to think about as far as team building or team organization and the nuances that went into that. That was what I was very curious about.”

As Mozeliak entered the workforce, an expansion team arrived in Colorado—the Rockies. Mozeliak got an entry-level job with Colorado. But the Rockies began play in 1993, a decade before
Moneyball
. So the idea that someone with a baseball background limited to high school on the field and field-level seats at Shea Stadium could make a career of it, well, it seemed fanciful.

“And there was a door opened,” Mozeliak said. “I entered it. I clearly didn't feel like this was a great career path for someone of my background. In other words, when you look at sort of senior management in major league teams at that time, playing background was something that was still an asset. But as I spent more time with the club, I started to realize, well, maybe there is something I could bring of value, but I didn't know if other people would see it that way.

“When I was with the Rockies, I felt like this is directionally not where I need to be. As in, someone in my early twenties and thinking at some point I want to get married. At some point I want to have a family, and having those types of goals, this business was not going to cater to it. But then, at that point, that's when Walt Jocketty was named the GM of the Cardinals.”

Jocketty had been in Colorado before going to the Cardinals in 1995. He offered Mozeliak an opportunity to join him in St. Louis, but Mozeliak wasn't sure he wanted to make the move.

“I did not have a close relationship with him in Colorado. And what I mean by that is, we weren't friends. He knew of me but we weren't interacting on a daily basis.

“But he knew some of the things I was working on for the Rockies and knew that some of those skills might apply to what he might need in St. Louis. So he offered me a position in the scouting department for the St. Louis Cardinals. And at that time, I was obviously excited about the opportunity, but I was also, like, ‘Is this going to be one of those things [where] I move to a city I have no familiarity with?' I had just recently gotten married. And would this be a true job with legs or is it going to be something where three years from now, I'm regretting this.”

So Mozeliak met with Jocketty. DeWitt was still a year away from even owning the Cardinals. Dan Kantrovitz was in high school. Cardinals pitcher Carlos Martínez was four years old.

But the case Mozeliak made to Jocketty was an interesting forerunner to the ultimate direction of the team.

“When I met with Walt, I said, ‘I would love to take this opportunity and do exactly what you need me to do from a computer perspective,'” Mozeliak, the son of an IBM man, told his would-be mentor. “At the time we were just trying to figure a way to capture information and build databases and that kind of stuff, and I was very energized to do that, but I asked him, ‘If I were to do this, will I get exposure to more baseball-operations decision making or exposure to understanding how that decision tree works?' And he agreed to do that, and so I had some confidence when I came here that this would be maybe a true career path now.

“But, it did work out,” Mozeliak concluded, in more than a bit of an understatement. “Midnineties, to the late nineties, I was getting to sit in meetings. I wasn't really a participant, but I was in meetings listening, watching, and learning.”