The Cardinals Way

by Howard Megdal

  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 b
aseball-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.”

  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.1

  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.”