Book Review: ‘The Cardinals Way’ Digs Deep Into Club’s Success

“The Cardinals Way”

By Howard Megdal

Thomas Dunne Books, $26.99

It’s baseball book season, which means the Baseball America offices are inundated with the newest wave of baseball books. It’s a great problem to have—sorting through dozens of books and figuring out which are worth reading and which should be ignored.

Baseball is a sport that breeds books, both good and bad. But if you love your baseball books, before long you become pretty discriminating for reasons of survival. Enough good baseball books arrive every spring that there’s too little time to waste reading bad baseball books.

In my mind, the standards for a good baseball book are relatively simple.

Obviously it has to be an enjoyable read in some form or fashion. Enjoyment can come from a variety of different measures. It can be because it’s well-written. It can be because it is so innovative and new that the novelty of the book brings joy. It can be because it’s a rare book that actually changes the viewpoint of the game. In the best scenarios, like Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball,” it checks all the boxes.

But just as importantly, a quality baseball book needs to leave something that sticks in the reader’s brain. It needs to offer illumination on its subject. This is easier or tougher to do depending on the subject matter. David Maraniss’ “Clemente” had a lower bar to clear in his biography of the Pirates’ great than any biographer of Ted Williams or Mickey Mantle. So many authors have already documented Williams and Mantle’s careers, while Clemente’s equally fascinating life had been much-less covered, giving Maraniss an excellent opening.

At this point, a baseball reader could be buried six feet deep under a massive pile of books on the 1950s Dodgers and the 1950s Yankees. Many are eminently forgettable because they add little to a significant fan’s knowledge of the teams. But an outstanding researcher/writer such as Jane Leavy can still find ways to make a well-covered subject such as Mickey Mantle or Sandy Koufax come alive with all kinds of new insights.

That preamble is a long-winded way of saying that Howard Megdal’s “The Cardinals Way” (Thomas Dunne Books, $26.99) easily meets the standards of a good—or even great—baseball book. It is an enjoyable read because it does an excellent job of explaining the Cardinals’ viewpoint on developing a successful baseball team, tying together the origins of long-time coach George Kissell, owner Bill DeWitt, general manager John Mozeliak and many others into a common thread that is the team’s organizing ethos.

But even more importantly, “The Cardinals Way” burrows into your brain long after you put it down. Megdal does an excellent job of talking to almost everyone who was involved in helping the Cardinals continue as the most consistently dominant team in the National League in the 21st century.

Megdal looks big picture to explain the front office controversies that eventually saw Walt Jocketty leave and Mozeliak and Jeff Luhnow ascend. But he also goes granular to examine the impact of area scouts and tracks careers of Cardinals’ minor league coaches and minor leaguers.

The book is well-researched and has plenty of insights that only come from extended conversations with many of the Cardinals’ top decision-makers.

If there is a criticism of the book it is Megdal’s insecurity about documenting those conversations. Nearly every interview and every quote explains in detail that the person told Megdal, making it clear that Megdal got this information in a real-live interview with the person. Instead of “Jeff Luhnow said,” it’s “Luhnow told me as we sat in the visiting manager’s office at Citi Field in September 2014.”

In a book that is clearly well-researched, this device rarely adds something and often gets in the way of the quotes. Megdal clearly deeply lived this subject for quite a while; the quotes in the book are logically assumed to be ones he gathered himself unless otherwise mentioned.

But that minor hiccup is a very mild distraction in an excellent book. The timing of “The Cardinals Way” is a little damaged by what was a very rough year for St. Louis in 2015. For many baseball fans, the Cardinals way seems a little less pristine the year after scouting director Chris Correa pled guilty to hacking into the Astros’ proprietary databases. It’s a significant black eye for the organization, but it does nothing to diminish one of the most significant baseball books of the year.

Whether you are a Cardinals’ fan or just someone interested in how winning baseball teams are built, “The Cardinals Way” is one of the must-read baseball books of 2016.