The Cardinals Way Read Online Free

The Cardinals Way
Book: The Cardinals Way Read Online Free
Author: Howard Megdal
Pages:
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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.
    â€œI 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!
    â€œBut 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.
    â€œMy 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.

 
    2
    THE LANGUAGE OF GEORGE KISSELL
    He’s legendary in this organization. And I would say about thirty to fifty percent of other organizations know George Kissell. And the reason they know him is because of how many managers and coaches he’s sent to the big leagues.
    â€” M IKE S HANNON
    You meet George Kissell, and right away, in a day or two, you knew who he was.
    â€” R ED S CHOENDIENST
    If you didn’t know better, you’d think George Kissell was an entirely fictional creation, a stand-in for the values most treasured by the game of baseball. His record is too impossibly broad, his reach ridiculous to behold and incalculable in scope. He lived eighty-eight years and not only stayed on with the Cardinals for sixty-eight years—from his signing in 1940 to his death in 2008—but combined the length of his tenure with the kind of tangible results, and correlating respect, that few achieve in this game.
    For Kissell, it was a constant. You hear
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