The Cardinals Way

by Howard Megdal

  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.

  Mozeliak recognized this reality of La Russa, too, and essentially avoided a confrontation there.

  “I had the front office piece that I was just trying to make sure everybody understood what they need to do and where we needed to go,” Mozeliak said. “And to get that defined and moving. And then, the other part of that was, now, how was I going to work with La Russa in this role? Because Tony knew me. It wasn’t like we were strangers. But he looked at me as someone that held a junior role, and certainly not an equal.

  “And now these roles were changing and he was going to have to work with me as we decided how to put this club together. And so I was just trying to walk very gently on that. I wasn’t trying to be bold or bullish in any manner. And I wasn’t trying to flex muscles to say, ‘Look, I’m now the boss.’ I was trying to get through this as peacefully and successfully as possible.

  “But I mean, Tony at that point had the ’06 championship under his belt, so that sort of solidified who he was. And in terms of roster construction or need, he was at a place where he could be vocal.”

  Instead of attacking La Russa, trying to weaken him, Mozeliak worked on strengthening his relationship with DeWitt.

  “Well, I think that’s where Bill and my relationship grew a lot,” Mozeliak said. “Because rather than me independently make decisions or push an agenda, I would talk to him a lot on, like, how do you handle this? Or, how would you go about doing that? And just, before I did anything, I would always tee it up with him and talk through things. And his relationship with Tony obviously goes back to when he purchased the club.

  “And nothing’s changed with Bill, right? He was the principal and remained the principal. And so that became, how Bill and I, our relationship, went from where we certainly knew each other and I would imagine had mutual respect, but where it grew to where we started to understand some of the intimacies of decision making and how we think about it.”

  Mozeliak’s strengthening his relationship with DeWitt made sense in a general way—DeWitt owns the club, after all—and in a specific way with La Russa. It also mattered with Luhnow, a subordinate now to Mozeliak, who still had a direct line to the owner. This was less threatening to Mozeliak than it was to Jocketty for any number of reasons—Luhnow and Mozeliak had a similar macro view of the Cardinals, Luhnow and Mozeliak didn’t clash personally the way Jocketty and Luhnow did. But to solidify the lines of power, Mozeliak needed to be the one making the final baseball decisions in conjunction with DeWitt, and that wasn’t how the Cardinals had been operating for years.

  “It was not something I overly fretted about or felt like I needed to change,” Mozeliak said. “I sort of thought about it more organically in the sense of, if I’m doing my job, if I’m being responsible to this organization and specifically to Bill, then he should be getting everything he needs from baseball operations from me. If not, there’s probably somewhere along the way I’m just falling a little short, and I would imagine if you talked to Bill, he will tell you that his interaction with Jeff after my hiring did—did go down, probably gradually to the point where it became almost more rare.

  “Frankly, I feel like it’s a confidence thing. I wasn’t so insecure where I was worried about what people are running to Bill with.”

  For Luhnow, the change in management meant he now had the support of the general manager. But remember, Jocketty had essentially ceded to Luhnow the territory he’d been covering anyway. So his ability to continue his projects didn’t change much.

  “To be honest, not a ton,” Luhnow said on how his work changed after Mozeliak took over. “Mo is very aware of everything that’s going on in player development and scouting internally. He knew the role of scouting directors very well. He knew player development. And international area—so really, I was just told to take as much off his plate as possible so that he could focus on being a GM, which has so many pressures that nobody really understands until they actually get a chance to do it.”

  Luhnow’s work continued apace with Mejdal, and with ad
ditional hires aligned with the new paradigm for the Cardinals. Michael Girsch, who’d been a Luhnow hire in the scouting department after striking up an e-mail friendship with Mozeliak, was promoted to director of baseball development in 2008—a department described by the Cardinals as “a group focused on supporting Baseball Operations via internet applications, analytical models and decision support tools.”2 Over the next six years, Girsch became as important to the integration of analytics into everything the Cardinals did as anyone else.

  “On the Girsch and Correa front, what they were able to do was take a square peg and make it round,” Mozeliak said in January 2015, who noted at the time that the lack of publicity about them limits the credit they deserve. “They really helped optimize what we were doing.”

  The three-man shop not only had many more than three men now. The resulting boom allowed Luhnow a freer hand to operate as someone who used the Baseball Development group he’d created like Mozeliak, or any other front office member—a client utilizing their information. It was a free-standing thing now. And eventually, incredibly, at least some of those within it would turn against Luhnow.

  On the international side of things, Matt Slater had the Cardinals involved with an ever-increasing number of intriguing players. So in 2008, as another nine eventual major leaguers were drafted by the Cardinals—including the criminally underrated Lance Lynn—guys such as catcher Audry Pérez, who reached the Cardinals in 2013, began filtering through the farm system in greater numbers as well.

  “We built an academy in Villa Mella,” Slater said. “It was a small academy that we started our operations at. And we were there for about four or five years. And we kind of built the international program at that point.”

  About two hours north of Villa Mella, that version of the international program found a young outfield prospect named Oscar Taveras. In December 2008, he signed with the Cardinals for $145,000. He was sixteen years old. By the start of the following decade, everyone who saw him came away believing he had a chance to be one of the best hitters in Cardinals history.

  Essentially, 2008 was a consolidation year. The draft protocol used the STOUT score, the single value for players, to a greater degree, but not as the fundamental ranking for amateur players.

  This actually worked to the team’s advantage at times, as in the case of Kevin Siegrist.

  “Well, with Kevin Siegrist, you look at that. I wanted the kid in the eighth round,” Gonzalez said. “I wanted—I had two hundred grand to give him, and I would have given it to him in a heartbeat.

  “And it depends on who’s up there, who’s pulling the magnets off the board,” Gonzalez said of how hard he needs to push for his guys. “Now, let me just say this. I don’t want to pump my reputation, but the proof after a while starts to come in the pudding. Dan had the luxury of knowing after a while. I would like to have sat in on a room with Chris Correa and Dan and Sig and some of these guys when they’re sitting back—and Girsch—and they’re back there chewing the fat with the computers blazing. [And see how often] when Charlie unloads and he says, ‘Damn it, this is a gut feel’—what are percentages of when he’s right?”

  Let’s put it this way: it happened often enough that Kantrovitz said to me in an e-mail, “I’ll hang my hat on Charlie’s senior sign every time.”

  So the Cardinals drafted Siegrist in the forty-first round, gave him $85,000, and sent him to the Gulf Coast League, then to Mark DeJohn and low-A Batavia in 2009. And then they waited. And waited.

  “So we drafted Siegrist, a draft-and-follow, we almost didn’t sign him,” Luhnow recalled in September 2014. “Charlie kept insisting that this left-hander, that changeup and that body, was eventually going to throw hard, and with that velocity, was going to be really good. And even several years into his development, still hadn’t hit any of those marks. [Charlie] just continued to have passion that this was going to come. And lo and behold, you look up last year, and there he is, pumping high nineties in the [2013] World Series.”

  Siegrist’s debut came on June 6, 2013, at Busch Stadium against the Diamondbacks. He struck out four of the six batters he faced over 1⅔ scoreless innings. Gonzalez got to see it in person—it was also draft night in 2013, and the Cardinals had just taken one of his players, Oscar Mercado, in the first round. Charlie walked out of the draft room, took in the view of the field, and saw Siegrist blowing away Arizona hitters—pitching to Tony Cruz, a catcher the Cardinals had drafted on Gonzalez’s recommendation.

  But all that was years away in 2008. The Cardinals won 86 games on the field—better than 2007, but still short of the play-offs.

  That year also saw the Cardinals lose one of their original three-man shop, in essence because Dan Kantrovitz took the ethos of the DeWitt rebuild—how to make a successful operation more successful—and applied it to his own life.

  Kantrovitz had helped create a computer system to streamline the team’s amateur scouting operations, Redbirdog. His position within the hierarchy, as a Mozeliak hire who worked directly with Luhnow, was secure.

  But Kantrovitz left the Cardinals in late 2008, and not for another job. Kantrovitz went back to school.

  “Well, my departure was not one where it was ‘I don’t like what we’re doing here. I’m going to go try something else,’” Kantrovitz recalled. “I—intended—thought that I would go back to the Cardinals after I finished my program.” This program was an effort to move beyond his ability to understand the vital role analytics played in the twenty-first-century game, and to become fluent in running the numbers himself, to be someone pushing the analytics even further. To be more Sig, even as he was learning how to be more Mo.

  “My curiosity was to learn what we were stumbling upon,” Kantrovitz said. “Which I did. And to really not just make some assumptions, but to really figure it out. And we were doing things really well, but that gets to what Sig was saying earlier. That [we were] doing things really well compared to what they were doing before, which wasn’t much at all, wasn’t hard to do. I wanted to make sure that what I was doing for the long run was sound. And I had such a curiosity [about how to do] that. I felt like I could handle the analytical rigor of what we were doing. And I wanted to train myself in that.”

  That’s not to say the decision was easy, professionally or personally. He and Brenna had a life together in St. Louis.

  “So, we were married and I remember telling her that I wanted to go to Harvard and get the master’s in statistics because these guys were doing groundbreaking stuff,” Kantrovitz recalled. “And she looked at me and said, ‘Wow, I know you well enough to think that you’re serious.’ And then on the other hand, hoped that maybe I wouldn’t get in or something.” Kantrovitz chuckled. “And I remember getting the envelope, and I said, ‘Well, let’s just wait to see if I get in.’ And then I was one of, like, four kids from the US that got in, and I couldn’t turn that down. I was working with a professor doing groundbreaking research in baseball already and who I had a relationship with.

  “I ended up flying home, I think, every weekend because she was working as a lawyer. There was no social life at that time and I was just—it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

  “The program was probably a little longer than twelve months because I had to do five months of math refreshers before I went. While I was still scouting, I was retaking all the levels of calculus and that sort of thing. And then when I was actually at Harvard, it was just for a school year. I mean, it’s a two-school-year thing, like an MBA. But, my wife would have probably not wanted me to come home if I stayed for two full school years.”

  Brenna welcomed Kantrovitz back, but not to St. Louis. The Cardinals had supported Kantrovitz’s decision to go back to school and had even considered tailoring the leave to a specific job for his return. Baseball history offered no precedent for that.

  “Baseball’s not that industry where you can get an education then guarantee their job when they come back,” Luhnow said. “We almost did that for Dan.
We almost structured a program to do that. But he really wasn’t—it’s very outside the normal way of doing things. So we figured we’d take our chances that he would go do that and he’d have a job. We would put him in somewhere when he came back. So I was really proud of him when he got that degree.”

  This was the St. Louis Cardinals, circa 2008: more like a twenty-first-century tech company than a tradition-bound baseball team, blue blood of the National League.

  “Imagine working at Google or Apple today and telling people that you’re going to take a year off and directly better yourself for what that job is,” Kantrovitz said. “People would be, like, ‘Wow. That’s amazing.’ That was the kind of culture we had then, that was what Jeff fostered. It wasn’t odd, is what I’m [saying]. It was more, like, ‘Yeah. Right on. Let’s get better at this.’”

  But if the Cardinals of 2008 weren’t the Cardinals of 2002, neither were they the only ones in the marketplace who’d figured out the importance of the work. Remember that whole Moneyball crew? The book about Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s, one that inspired such people as Mejdal, Kantrovitz, Correa, Girsch, and countless others to try to make a career in baseball? They were still around. And they needed someone to run their international department, the area they’d identified, as had the Cardinals, for some of the next advances in scouting. The A’s did what Luhnow had considered doing with Kantrovitz. They asked him to tailor his program to get him ready to come take over their international scouting department when he finished. That meant some changes to the analytics side of things, but also “you know, you need to go learn Spanish.”

  So that’s what Kantrovitz did—he says the Spanish was the hardest part, learning the language in intensive Spanish classes with undergraduates. But if Moneyball had given the Cardinals many of their best people and ideas, had convinced them to take back the explorer ideal and make it a fundamental part of the Cardinals’ identity once again, well, Beane and company extracted a price for serving as inspiration.