When it comes to my allegiances within Major League Baseball, it’s no secret that I’m a Chicago Cubs fan. That’s never stopped me from respecting the ability of the St. Louis Cardinals to be a contender year after year. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I don’t loathe the Cardinals, I do. But one can loathe a team and respect their process at the same time. Such is my relationship with the Cardinals, and that’s why I bought The Cardinals Way: How One Team Embraced Tradition and Moneyball at the Same Time many moons ago and just got around to reading Howard Megdal’s book this year.
Unfortunately, and I say this as someone who had nothing but positive interactions with Megdal back in my Twitter days, I don’t think The Cardinals Way: How One Team Embraced Tradition and Moneyball at the Same Time is an honest look at how the Cardinals came about their success. Had Megdal wrestled honestly with Branch Rickey’s legacy and how he basically created a plantation system with the minor leagues, I’d be telling a different tale. Megdal’s kids’ glove treatment of Rickey, which even includes glossing over how, during his Brooklyn Dodgers days, Rickey pilfered from Negro Leagues teams and never bothered to pay them a dime for any of those players, sets the table for the tone of The Cardinals Way: How One Team Embraced Tradition and Moneyball at the Same Time.
There’s a feeling throughout Megdals’ work here that he is always looking for the positive and quickly scurrying away from anything negative. For instance, I’m willing to cut him some slack for, at the time of the book’s writing, not knowing Jeff Luhnow was an unrepentant cheater. However, based on Luhnow’s background, he was clearly someone who didn’t value the human side of baseball before and during his time with the Cardinals. Megdal goes out of his way to paint the opposite picture while rosily talking about Luhnow’s background as a hired gun for McKinsey & Company. I’m sorry, I know you’ll all say this is the communist in me coming out, but there’s not a single positive word that can be written about anyone’s work that’s done for McKinsey. Stuff like that left a bad taste in my mouth and mainly gave me the impression that Megdal refused to allow any negativity, and thus truth, into his book.
Stylistically, the biggest strike against The Cardinals Way: How One Team Embraced Tradition and Moneyball at the Same Time is the excessive detail that is present at times. I’m always down to get a better understanding of the process of a team like the Cardinals. However, I’m not down with reading multiple pages of a stream of consciousness scouting report from a Cardinals scout that ultimately did not matter and added absolutely nothing to the book. It’s unfortunate, too, because the scouting aspect of The Cardinals Way: How One Team Embraced Tradition and Moneyball at the Same Time was the strongest part of the book, but it ended with such a deflating whimper with the pre-draft room stuff.
I wanted to like The Cardinals Way: How One Team Embraced Tradition and Moneyball at the Same Time, but it’s simply not the book for me. It’s too positive where it needs to be truthful and too buried in the minutiae where it needs to be more succinct, and looking at the big picture. Megdal clearly loves the Cardinals, but his fandom gets in the way of his reporting in this one.
Lead image courtesy of Thomas Dunne Books
