Free The Cardinals Way by Howard Megdal Page A

dump salary expenses out of necessity. And teams could extend their valuable young players to keep them from free agency.
    â€œThe implications are, I can’t go get Jim Edmonds because they can’t sign him,” DeWitt said. “Player resources become much more valuable.”
    So the Cardinals found themselves, in 2003, with a payroll of $83.4 million, good for eighth-highest in baseball. 3
    But DeWitt recognized that $83.4 million wasn’t going to buy what it once did. And it wasn’t just that the Cardinals would have to spend more, though that would prove to be true. It’s that those players they once bought with their $83.4 million wouldn’t even be available.
    The Cardinals were winning. Everything looked great on the field. But their ability to compete with the New Yorks and the Bostons would disappear if they continued with their current plan, especially with the low picks that come with winning. And they’d fall behind even those who spent less but did a better job of producing young talent. To guard against this, DeWitt began encouraging offering arbitration to would-be free agents, in large part to collect draft picks if they signed elsewhere. Current Cardinal standout starter Lance Lynn, drafted with a compensation pick for losing Troy Percival after 2007, is a fine example of this strategy in action.
    Still, the Cardinals had a problem, though few other than Bill DeWitt Jr. realized it. Even within his own organization. Even in the eyes of his own team’s general manager.
    It was time for DeWitt to call for some help from the outside. He went with a guy who’d redesigned the way Lands’ End did business, played fantasy baseball, and had never before spent any time in professional baseball.

 
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    LUHNOW ENTERS
    He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
    â€” F RANCIS B ACON
    So I’m thinking, “What is Tony [La Russa] thinking? Here’s the PetStore.com marketing guy in with DeWitt.”
    â€” J EFF L UHNOW
    Jeff Luhnow had far more in common with you in the summer of 2003 than he did with the decision makers in Major League Baseball.
    You know that famous Billy Beane quote from Moneyball —“We’re not selling jeans here”? Luhnow had actually sold jeans. More specifically, he’d been hired by Lands’ End to improve how they sold jeans online.
    Luhnow was a business-consulting specialist. He’d done this work first for McKinsey, then struck out on his own for several years. He was three rounds of investment into the work at his newest start-up, Archetype Solutions, described by Luhnow as “mass customization of apparel for brands like Lands’ End” in August 2003 when an old colleague of his, Jay Kern, sent him an e-mail.
    â€œI forgot who his father-in-law was so I did a little bit of research and figured out it was Bill DeWitt Jr. because I knew him before he married into the family,” Luhnow told me as we sat in the visiting manager’s office at Citi Field in September 2014. “And I was perplexed as to why the owner of a baseball team would want to talk to me.… But it was, like, ‘Hey, Jeff. It’s Jay. How’s everything going with the business?’ Blah, blah, blah, you know. ‘By the way, my father-in-law, Bill DeWitt Jr., wants to talk to you.’ And I was, like, ‘Who is this?’ Like, took me one Google search to figure out who it was. And then I remember and I started going, ‘Yeah, Katie DeWitt and he married her, and her father ended up buying the team a few years later.’ And I’m, like, ‘Okay. This is a baseball guy.’”
    Luhnow, like so many of the most influential figures in baseball’s evolution over the past decade, had just read Moneyball .
    â€œMy ex-wife bought it for me. My birthday’s June eighth. The book had just come out. I was in the Bay Area so there