The Cardinals Way by Howard Megdal

survived under this manager. You must have a really thick skin. You must have a really great way of getting along with people that I don’t have.’ Because I’m not sure that’s the study that drove him from the firm, but he ended up leaving the firm shortly after that.
    â€œI think he felt that if I could survive under her that I could probably survive the rough-and-tumble baseball world. He anticipated some negative reaction to someone like me coming in. He communicated to Bill that this guy, one of his strengths is that he’s got a thick skin and he’s not going to be easily pushed aside by some of the traditional baseball guys.”
    Understand this: over the past decade, baseball has come a long way on the idea that those who didn’t play the game can eventually run it. When Luhnow was hired, the use of statistical analysis by the A’s was an anomaly. Now, clubs that don’t rely on such analysis are very much the anomaly. Clubs without an analytics department don’t exist. Theo Epstein, don’t forget, was a widely mocked hire back in 2002. That he was a breakthrough in any number of ways for the sport didn’t gain widespread acceptance until he broke a little eighty-six-year-old streak in Boston.
    But even today, someone with Jeff Luhnow’s background, brought in with a relatively senior title (vice president of baseball development) and an expansive portfolio, would be looked upon suspiciously by many people within a major league organization.
    And this wasn’t just a major league organization. This was the St. Louis Cardinals. And while there were a few around who’d internalized what George Kissell stood for—the constant innovation that he’d learned from Branch Rickey, the consistent adding to and changing of his manual first scripted decades ago during a snowy Ithaca winter—for many others, the Cardinals were this static, successful thing.
    â€œWhen you think about the timing—okay?—’03 was not a great year for us,” Mozeliak told me in a January 2015 interview. “Wasn’t awful, but wasn’t great … and Walt at the time was probably considered one of the top five general managers in the game. And then subsequently, Bill brings in Jeff, and I think Walt had a hard time with that because it wasn’t his decision to bring him in. It wasn’t necessarily his type of person to be around from a personality standpoint. And now fast-forward from October of ’03 to now, say, July of ’04, guess what? The St. Louis Cardinals are a pretty damn good baseball team all of sudden. Right? And so I think, in Walt’s case, he was, like, ‘We knew what we’re doing.’ We subsequently win 105 games. We go on to the World Series. And I think he felt, like, ‘Jeez, maybe we weren’t that bad off.’”
    And some guy from McKinsey was going to come along and ruin it.
    â€œBut if you think of it from Jeff’s perspective, that he was brought in by the owner, you know? The owner,” Mejdal, who joined Luhnow with the Cardinals in 2005, told me in an October 2014 interview. “At a time the team was winning. There weren’t many people with his background in baseball at that time. I can say that the resentment of the portrayal of scouts in Moneyball was quite fresh in people’s minds. And Jeff was brought into a system that wasn’t particularly interested in having him in that system.… I think that’s a description of what ground rules were like when he came in.”
    Or as Mozeliak put it, “I don’t think Walt trusted him, and I don’t think Walt liked him. And from that standpoint, that was where it began.”
    Precisely how huge an advantage the Cardinals had just given themselves came into focus early on, in a meeting with the analytics team.
    â€œWhen we first did the retrospective study, I could see the improvement to realize with