Bill DeWitt read Moneyball. DeWitt, a legacy businessman, saw the A’s model and decided to emulate it. But not the focus on free agents’ undervalued skill sets. It was the way the A’s built a competitive team on the foundation homegrown players, who were cheap due to the seniority-based salary structure in Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA).
DeWitt shrewdly recognized the value of the St. Louis Cardinals brand among the team’s fan base. The fans root for the birds on the bat—not individual players, no matter how much gratitude they show via standing ovations for former Cardinals. This point was likely driven home after Albert Pujols left for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and the team continued to pack in fans and generate good TV ratings while playing competitive baseball.
MLB clubs, like all professional sports franchises, are corporations out to make money. They are also measured by their competitiveness on the field. Thus, MLB clubs have two goals: Make money and be competitive. Sometimes these goals are at odds, but there is more often than not a synergy between them.
Fans like to watch competitive teams. This means that attendance and TV ratings are higher for good teams than bad. As are merchandise and concession sales. Good teams tend to generate more revenue than bad.
You know this. I know this. DeWitt knows this. But what I have been slow to recognize is the nuance to DeWitt’s philosophy toward the Cardinals’ competitiveness and making money.
In the years since Pujols’s departure in free agency, it’s become clear that the so-called Cardinal Way has evolved. Initially articulated as a philosophy to develop cheap, homegrown talent so the Cards could afford top-dollar free agents such as Pujols, the Cardinal Way has changed. Its focus is not on winning pennants or the World Series. The Cardinal Way has become focused on DeWallet.
Today, the Cardinal Way is best summed up as this: Hold down payroll costs while fielding a roster that is competitive enough to be in the playoff picture so that tickets get sold and TV ratings on the network of which the club has an ownership stake remain strong. If the team makes the postseason, all the better. More money. But playing in October is not the primary goal. Being just competitive enough to make money year in and year out is.
John Mozeliak and the front office have fielded teams to carry out DeWitt’s vision. From about 2009 on, the Cardinals have fielded teams that project to compete near the top of the division and be in the playoff hunt each year. The Cardinals consistently field rosters that project to win about 90 games, which places them annually in about the 85 to 95 win range.
If things break right, a division title. If things don’t, there’s enough depth to keep the bottom from falling out and to be in the postseason hunt till the last week of the season, especially with two wild-card berths to be had. Every once in a while, things will come up Cardinals and you’ll notch 100+ wins. No matter what, though, the Cardinals will generate dump trucks full of revenue. DeWallet will be satiated—so much as that’s possible.
The Cardinal Way, as it exists today, must be understood when viewing the 2019 trade deadline, which we’ll explore in more depth over the coming week. Mozeliak will shoulder the criticism. But Mozeliak is executing DeWitt’s vision, and rather well. That’s why the Cardinals will never go “all in,” no matter what the marketing, ownership, or front office tells us.
Being competitive enough to maximize revenue is The Cardinal Way. Division titles and postseason berths are secondary pursuits. With the crapshoot that is October, pennants and the World Series fall still further down the priority list.
The Cardinal Way is a perfectly understandable business model. Build your organization to maximize revenue in a projectable way while isolating the unpredictable so that it can only add to your stacks of money. But this approach can also drive fans thirsty for a return to October glory up the wall, and understandably so.
