Free The Cardinals Way by Howard Megdal Page B

was a lot of talk about it on the radio. I got the book. Read it front to back. I was interested but that was about it.”
    This is not to say that reading Moneyball was the sum total of Luhnow’s interest or background in the sport. His interest dated back to his parents—especially his mother, Luhnow says—and a childhood following the Dodgers from Mexico, with trips to the Astrodome thrown in when he attended summer camp. Accordingly, he’d reached out to fellow Penn alum Peter O’Malley after graduating: “Is there room for any person who has an engineering and business degree? Are there any jobs in baseball that are interesting?”
    Luhnow never heard back. It didn’t stop him from doing the parallel work that so many of his generation did, these shadow front offices making their way ultimately into journalism, finance, law, and other high-profile nonbaseball industries—but always, as Bill DeWitt put it, “looking to get back.” Baseball in the blood.
    These were not people, though, who generally ever got the chance to make decisions for Major League Baseball teams. So instead, Luhnow sat in the bleachers at Wrigley Field.
    â€œWhen I was in business school at Kellogg, I took a class in management strategy, and I chose to study the Cubs,” Luhnow said. “So I did a whole paper on the Cubs, and when I did that, I did a lot of research into the industry, what the key success factors were to compete for a team like the Cubs. I was also spending many afternoons in the bleachers drinking Old Style beer and yelling at Sammy Sosa. So I learned a lot about the business side of baseball, as well as the fan experience. And I’ve been playing fantasy baseball for close to fifteen years and knew every player up and down every system. But I really had no intention or thought of venturing into baseball.”
    Luhnow in his career, instead, bounced from start-up to start-up, got them up and running, then moved on to the next challenge. So, three investment rounds into Archetype Solutions’ development was the ideal moment for him to take on something new, intellectually and emotionally.
    â€œI was pretty close with a lot of venture capitalists because we went through a lot of funding for both my companies, and I really thought my next step was going to be, they were going to insert me into one of their companies because VCs always need CEO types to run companies,” Luhnow said. “So I figured that would be my next step . My career was fine without baseball. Jay calls and I end up having my first call with [Bill]. Jay introduced us and was on the call and we really [connected]—it was supposed to be a forty-five-minute call. It wound up being about two hours. And it was really just a very pleasant conversation. I shared a lot of my thoughts and he asked a lot of questions, and at the end of that conversation he asked me to come to Cincinnati to see him.”
    â€œI was talking to my son-in-law about the type of person we needed,” DeWitt recalled in a May 2014 interview with me. “Because I thought we needed a fresh look. We were a pretty traditional team, doing things pretty traditional ways. And I wanted somebody fresh, to give an outsider’s perspective. And to do more research and analysis. And [Jay] said, ‘I’ve got the perfect guy. He’s a baseball fanatic. He’s a great analyst for McKinsey. And I know he would love a project like what you are proposing.”
    So Jeff flew to Cincinnati to give what turned out to be a life-defining presentation. In the middle of fantasy-baseball season, Luhnow told the owner of the most successful franchise in the National League how he’d change the way his ball club operated.
    â€œWe talked through all different elements of baseball and the club and where it was going,” Luhnow said. “And he gave me some background on who the characters were from the organization to the