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THE CARDINAL IDEA
Want to know what will happen tomorrow? Read yesterday’s paper.
—MIKE SHANNON
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.”1
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,2 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.3 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.4
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.5
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.6
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.”
Thus, the Cardinals acquired a controlling interest in a Class C team in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The youngest, rawest players with promise Rickey could find would be sent there, preparing them to play with the Cardinals. However, no player could be expected to jump from Class C to the majors. Accordingly, when Charlie Barrett brought word of a possible ownership stake to be had in the Houston franchise of the Texas League, the steps that would become commonplace for all began to fall into place for the Cardinals.
There to implement it all was Rickey’s farm director, DeWitt Sr. Or as DeWitt Sr. himself put it in a 1980 interview: “I think I knew more about Branch Rickey in the twenty years I was associated with him. I used to sleep at his house at night. I lunched there. I ate dinner at his house. And so I knew him better than anybody during that twenty-year period.”7
Does the Rickey/DeWitt farm system, in retrospect, seem obvious, the only proper way to develop talent? Perhaps. But no one can claim it was inevitable. No less a man than John McGraw dismissed the idea of a farm system, and the New York Giants didn’t begin to build one until after he died in 1934.8 That echoed the feelings of many throughout the major leagues. The Yankees didn’t speak to Commissioner Landis about doing so until 1928 and didn’t buy their first farm team until 1931, in Newark, New Jersey.
Nor were many minor league teams happy about this new idea, either. As John B. Sheridan wrote in his February 5, 1920, column in The Sporting News, “Managers of minor league baseball want players. Grievously. Must have them. Are turning heaven and earth to get them. Players are hard to find. When a minor league manager does light upon a likely lad he offers him a contract. The lordly lad pushes the minor league contract aside with a wide wave of his hand and says:
“‘I am very sorry, but Charley Barrett has offered me a contract with the St. Louis Nationals, which you are probably aware is a major league club, even if it is in a lowly position.…’
“Barrett’s specialty is signing untried, fledgling, amateur, semi-professional, any sort of platers to the St. Louis National League club contracts at figures which will permit of the players being sent to the minor leagues for development. Barrett goes about the country picking up boys at from $125 to $200 a month.”
The Cardinals won the World Series, finally, in 1926. That first crop of astonishing young stars, developed through the nascent farm system, included Jim Bottomley, George Toporcer, Lester Bell, Chick Hafey, Taylor Douthit, Ray Blades, Wattie Holm, Heine Mueller, Tommy Thevenow, Flint Rehm, and Eddie Dyer.
For those keeping score at home, that’s a pair of Hall of Famers in Bottomley and Hafey, a 20-game winner for those world champions in Rehm, two-thirds of the championship outfield in Douthit and Blades, and a number of other key contributors who powered the Cardinals for much of the decade.
And once the time came for the Cardinals to build that farm system, finding enough other minor league teams to go along with it still might have proved impossible if not for Rickey’s vast network of contacts and personal relationships, and the ability of people such as Charlie Barrett to scout and Bill DeWitt Sr. to carry out that vision.
As he did so, DeWitt Sr., at the strong urging of Rickey, finished his education.
“I have a picture of my father and his brother with Branch Rickey,” DeWitt Jr. told me. “It says, ‘To William, a great friend.’ The fact that he said ‘to William.’ I read someplace that he called everybody by their formal name. I mean—I wonder if, when he was eighteen, he called him William—he must’ve!
“But Charlie Barrett called him Orville, which was his middle name. So he was the young guy around the office, relied on to contribute, do a lot of stuff.”
Then DeWitt Sr. went to college. Rickey sent him.
“My college work I did all at night, and I worked for the Cardinals in the daytime,” DeWitt Sr. said.9
Then Rickey sent him to law school. DeWitt passed the bar. Eventually, he became treasurer for the Cardinals, working under Rickey.
Remarkably, the farm system Rickey, DeWitt, and Barrett put together is largely the one the Cardinals use even now. A man Rickey himself hired, George Kissell, spent many of the subsequent decades formulating its consistent approach to training players.
But the people who engineered it, and the animating principles behind player procurement that went with them, had another job to do before the Cardinals’ restoration we see today. They had to go build out the rest of baseball. Bill DeWitt Sr., to the Browns (who won the AL pennant in 1944), the Yankees, the Tigers, then Cincinnati Reds, with the foundation that became the Big Red Machine. Larry MacPhail, then Rickey, to the Brooklyn Dodgers, who won NL pennants in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1956.
All the while, a young man from upstate New York put together the animating principles, not to mention the hard work and personal relationships, that came to define the Cardinals minor league experience for scores of Hall of Famers, All-Stars, and those who never even made the big leagues.
Copyright © 2016 by Howard Megdal
