The Cardinals Way

by Howard Megdal

  For Turco, that meant on-field things, but it meant other things, too—how to carry yourself, little details as seemingly insignificant as wearing socks in the clubhouse. Talking the game for hours. But it all began with endless repetition on the field.

  “I remember that first spring training,” Turco said. “We’d have to take a bus, and they’d drop us off across the street from the hotel, a busy road. I had trouble even walking across, my leg was so sore, after we were done for the day. Bucket after bucket of ground balls. Things we don’t necessarily do as much anymore because we’re sensitive to things—the arm care of players. But back then, though, it was bucket after bucket. And George liked the work. Not only the time he put in with us, but the appreciation we had for him doing it for us. It was one of those things where I was indoctrinated quickly into George’s style.

  “The things I am in the game today, I owe to George.”

  Turco held his own in 1979, putting up a respectable .254/.326/.303 line, playing shortstop for the Gastonia Cardinals of the Western Carolinas League. He also took the opportunity to go to the league’s All-Star Game, mostly to sit and watch with Kissell.

  “I’ll never forget, the first year I was playing, we played 138 games in 140 days. We only had two days off, and one of our two days was the league All-Star Game. The game was being played in Gastonia, which was our home field, and George was there. So I went to the game—I was the only player there who wasn’t playing in the game.

  “So I sat there with George, and he said, ‘Look out there.’”

  Everyone I ever spoke to who knew Kissell immediately slipped into an impression of Kissell when quoting him. It’s generally agreed that John Mabry, the St. Louis hitting coach, is the best of the Kissell imitators, but they are omnipresent around Kissell stories. Anyway … “‘Look out there. See that shortstop?’ I said, ‘I see him.’ ‘What can he do that you can’t? He can’t run with you. He can’t throw with you. He may have better hands, but you can hit like he can. So what can he do that you can’t do?’ Well, it turned out, it was Ryne Sandberg. He only went on to be a Hall of Famer. But especially if he thought you had some ability, he pushed you.”

  That continued into the 1980s, Kissell’s fifth decade with the Cardinals. Ask Terry Pendleton about the year he came to camp overweight. Kissell said nothing, but had him come in early, stay late, hit him about ten thousand ground balls. You didn’t say no to Kissell. The pounds melted away in the Al Lang Field sunlight. Pendleton went on to win three Gold Gloves at third base, the 1991 NL MVP, played in five different World Series.

  Kissell-trained Cardinals helped St. Louis win National League pennants in 1982, in 1985, in 1987. And those who went to other organizations didn’t forget Kissell’s help, either.

  I could not be in the big leagues if it weren’t for Mr. Kissell.

  —ANDY VAN SLYKE6

  Dear George,

  Here’s a letter to let you know I’m alive and kicking in San Diego. Things are looking up for me now, and I’m about to turn the corner.

  I wanted to write and tell you how much your tutelage and instruction meant to me. While everybody else is busting their tails to learn them, the fundamentals are coming second nature to me. It is mainly because of your time and effort that I am ahead of the game there. I used to dread your chalkboard sessions in instructional league, but now I see they were of great necessity.…

  Say hi to your wife, and good fishing!

  Gratefully,

  Terry K

  —LETTER FROM TERRY KENNEDY TO GEORGE KISSELL, 1980. KENNEDY WENT ON TO MAKE THE ALL-STAR TEAM FOR THE PADRES IN 1981, THEN ANOTHER THREE TIMES. HE WAS THE STARTING CATCHER FOR TWO NATIONAL LEAGUE PENNANT WINNERS: THE 1984 PADRES AND THE 1989 GIANTS.

  Jim Leyland took the Pirates to three straight NL East titles in 1990 to 1992. He also had a spring ritual: en route to camp, he’d stop in St. Petersburg and have himself a fishing trip/study session with George Kissell.

  As Kissell taught John Mabry to play third base, another project, another decade, another Boyer stand-in doing the same things in the same way more than forty years later, one of Kissell’s other third basemen, Joe Torre, managed the Cardinals, then the Yankees. He had a bit of success in New York: World Series titles in 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, and a string of postseason appearances unbroken from 1996 to 2007.

  The only other manager to win a World Series during that 1996–2000 Torre run? Kissell’s fishing partner, Leyland, with the 1997 Marlins.

  Meanwhile, Turco’s career did not take off the way Sandberg’s did. He reached Double-A, but found himself playing in St. Petersburg, in the Florida State League, for several years. Finally, the Cardinals released him in 1984, and he made up his mind to go play overseas, accepting a chance to play in Italy.

  George Kissell had other plans for him.

  “I knew it would be a nice way to go and see Europe,” Turco told me. “Particularly Italy. I’d stay there for a year. They played twice a week, they had two practices, you’d sightsee three days a week.

  “Anyway, I had it all set, and [then Cardinals minor league manager] Jim Riggleman calls me. And he said, ‘Listen, they called, and I told them you can do whatever their needs are. But before you make that decision to go, why don’t you give [then Cardinals director of player development] Lee Thomas a call?”

  The Kissell plan for Turco had been set in motion.

  “I’d played with Lee Thomas’s son, Darren Thomas, and he said, ‘Listen, why don’t you give Lee a call?’ This is all the same day, I get three phone calls.

  “And finally, it was George. And George says, ‘Give Lee a call,’” with Turco slipping into a Kissell impression.

  “And I knew that George was instrumental in my getting that job. Because this is what he did. You talk about continuity—what George always believed was that you don’t always groom players. You groom coaches and managers.”

  Turco has been with the Cardinals ever since. He managed Glens Falls, then the Cardinals’ short-season Appalachian League team in Johnson City, Tennessee.

  Kissell kept right on coaching. It was amusing, in retrospect, to read all the letters and articles that talked about his imminent retirement. The reporter from the St. Petersburg Times, back in 1996, sounded pretty sure that would be Kissell’s final year. Virginia told that reporter Kissell, then seventy-seven, had been threatening to retire every year since he was sixty-three. The Hernandez letter from earlier in the chapter is in conjunction with a free trip the Cardinals gave to Kissell in 2002, to be used once he retired. (Tommy Kidwell confirmed that Kissell never went on the trip.) Kissell kept on working right until the end.

  This is not to say that he and Virginia were separated all those years. Every season, Kissell would get into his car and travel the country, making stops wherever Cardinals minor leaguers played. And Ginny was right alongside him.

  “To my lovely wife,” Kissell inscribed a picture of himself. “The success I’ve achieved in life and in this game has been entirely through your patience, inspiration and love.” They estimated they’d make about two hundred stops every summer.

  Kissell never missed a day of mass, either. The lifelong Catholic made a promise back in 1964 to God that should his son, Richard, get admitted to medical school, he’d go to mass every morning for the rest of his life.

  For Sunday day games, he used to have the socks and other baseball accoutrements on under his church clothes. It was for efficiency, his grandson says, but it represented more than that.

  No one around baseball who knew him doubted the importance of his family to him. Bobby Valentine heard how amused Ginny was by his stunt, after an ejection, of returning to the dugout in a Groucho Marx disguise. He sent her a signed photo of himself in disguise, inscribed, “Have a laugh on me.”

  Kissell got the call back to the major leagues in 1999, when Tony La Russa asked him to return and be his additional coach.

  The 2000 Cardinals won 95 games and advanced to the NLCS. The
2001 Cardinals won another 93 games. La Russa credited Kissell for much of his own managerial thinking piloting the 2006 Cardinals and then the 2011 Cardinals to World Series wins.

  The way that he taught engaged and involved players. George had a love for the game, a love for the people who play the game, a love for teaching the game, a love for understanding the game, and relaying that and teaching that to people—every day. There were instances every day. Personally, the way he rooted for me to succeed, more than I rooted for myself sometimes. Understanding that he gave, no matter what, his time, and that, to me, is more important than anything, ever, that somebody would care for you that much that they would take their time, and teach you what they knew.

  —CARDINALS HITTING COACH JOHN MABRY, IN AUGUST 2013 INTERVIEW

  Hitter grasps bat in both hands balanced by choking bat.

  1. Takes ball in right hand. Tosses it up and hits and runs, swinging down on ball. Repeats 15 swings. (Does it slowly.)

  2. 2 hands on bat—roommate/coach soft tosses 20 pitches and hitter hits and runs swinging down on ball. Repeat 20 times.

  3. Hitter on floor or ground with left arm at 1 o’clock (5 pound weight).

  —GEORGE KISSELL DRILL FOR SWITCH-HITTERS, AS RECORDED ON VIRGINIA KISSELL PERSONALIZED STATIONERY, LIKELY BY VIRGINIA

  Dear George,

  As I look forward to spring training and the upcoming year in Louisville, I didn’t want another season to start without thanking you for everything you have done for me.

  I know my assignment to Louisville would have never happened without you. I can’t begin to tell you how much I fully appreciate being in your presence and I fully appreciate the personal interest you have taken in me.

  Your knowledge of the game of baseball, that you passed along to me, is absolutely priceless. In fact, your knowledge of the game, along with your enthusiasm, dedication and loyalty certainly go unmatched by anybody in baseball.

  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

  —LETTER FROM CURRENT CARDINALS MINOR LEAGUE FIELD COORDINATOR MARK DEJOHN TO GEORGE KISSELL, JANUARY 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 organizat
ion, 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.

  —BILL DEWITT JR., 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.”