The Cardinals Way Read Online Free Page A

it in Hall of Fame speeches from some of the greats who played this game, and you hear it in letters written to Kissell by long-forgotten minor leaguers who crossed Kissell’s path, briefly, decades ago.
    The reason this matters to the Cardinals—the Cardinals of Lou Brock and Bob Gibson, of Willie McGee and Terry Pendleton, of Jim Edmonds and Scott Rolen, right through to the Cardinals of Michael Wacha and Matt Carpenter—is that so many of those people are still teaching the game the way George Kissell taught it to them in the organization. A man steeped in Rickey’s lessons—signed by Rickey himself—directly mentored many of the managers in the Cardinals system here in 2015. Such continuity should be impossible for purely chronological reasons.
    It isn’t, because of George Kissell. Growing up on a farm in Evans Mills, New York, Kissell did not have a baseball-mad father. At first, his father didn’t want to take him to a baseball tryout camp—there were chores to do. But a rainy night prior to the Cardinals’ scheduled tryout camp—another Branch Rickey invention—meant no hay could be baled that day. So the two of them headed to the camp in Rochester. The drive is more than two and a half hours today—you can imagine how long it took back in 1940, before the existence of I-81, in a 1936 Ford.
    Kissell wore number 385 on his back and fielded five balls at shortstop. 1 He showed the Cardinals enough that they signed him to a contract. A Rickey scout asked Kissell how much money he’d spent to get to the tryout. Kissell added the hotel room, meals, gas, and told the scout: $19.80. The scout handed him a twenty and said, “You got a twenty-cent bonus.”
    To place the start of Kissell’s career within the framework of Cardinals history, here’s what 1940 meant. It meant Kissell was a Cardinal before Stan Musial had collected the first of his 3,630 major league hits. It meant Kissell was a Cardinal for most of Terry Moore’s tenure in center field and overlapped the careers of Pepper Martin and Joe Medwick. Johnny Mize led the team before World War II and would play for more than another decade in the major leagues. Dizzy Dean was still active with the Cubs and had been traded only two years earlier.
    All of the players in the preceding paragraph had been signed and developed by the Cardinals. So clearly, by the time Kissell arrived on the scene, the system had already figured out a way to provide the Cardinals with a steady stream of elite talent.
    As he began immersing himself in this environment, Kissell was doing something else: he was writing it down. In the summer of 1941, rookie third baseman George Kissell traveled to Hamilton, Ontario, to play for the Cardinals’ Pony League affiliate there. He hit .350 as Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 straight and Ted Williams cleared the .400 mark. Then Kissell returned to Ithaca College, where he was an undergraduate, and continued working toward his degree.
    He earned it, a baseball-playing member of the class of 1942. His senior thesis, sadly lost to history, was nothing less than a road map for his journey to come: a manual on how to play, and properly instruct, young baseball players.
    Might Kissell have been one of those players? We’ll never know. World War II intervened, and Kissell spent most of the next four years out in Guadalcanal. He returned stateside in 1946, and then the Cardinals did something with the born teacher: they made him a player-manager, at the age of twenty-six.
    So Kissell kept on playing, hitting .281, then .289, with the Lawrence Millionaires, the Lowell Orphans, and then back down the ladder as Kissell the player took a backseat to Kissell the manager, Kissell the molder of young men, in Hamilton, Ontario. He earned his master’s degree from Ithaca College. In 1950, the Winston-Salem Cardinals in Class B won 106 games with Kissell managing. This was hardly a team stacked