Last year, St. Louis, Missouri, saw its beloved Cardinals open a new stadium, win the World Series, and unveil plans for a $650 million “Ballpark Village” that will change the face of the city’s downtown. Meet the father-son team behind one of baseball’s most popular (and successful) franchises.

From his office in the new Busch Stadium, St. Louis Cardinals Managing Partner and Chairman William O. DeWitt Jr. (MBA ’65) has a bird’s-eye view of the playing field where his team celebrated last fall’s World Series triumph over the Detroit Tigers. On October 27, Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright struck out Tigers third baseman Brandon Inge to end the game, giving the team a 4–2 win and its first World Series championship since 1982. “It was incredible,” says DeWitt of that history-making moment. “It was always a dream — but you’re not sure your dream will ever come true. This year it did.”

As is so often true in the game of baseball, the Cardinals tested their fans’ faith throughout the season. “The Cardinals didn’t just win their tenth World Series,” wrote Joe Strauss of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “They emerged from a disconsolate 83-win season, a 12–17 September, and a near-calamitous final two weeks to outdo the 85-win Minnesota Twins for translating the fewest regular-season victories into a championship.”

“One of the great aspects of this sport is its element of uncertainty,” says DeWitt. “A losing team still wins about 40 percent of the games it plays, while a winning team wins around 60 percent. That means the team with the worst record can play the one with the best and win all three games over a weekend series.”

DeWitt turns away from the field-facing window to the one on the opposite side of his office, which offers a panoramic view of ... an enormous, muddy hole. Site of the former Busch Stadium, demolished in November 2005, the six-block area in downtown St. Louis will be home to Ballpark Village, a mixed-use development that will include retail, residential, and office space.

“It’s our lake view,” jokes DeWitt’s eldest son, William III (MBA ’95), the Cardinals’ senior vice president of business development. “But we won’t have it for long.” He adds that an agreement in principle for the project was reached with the city just hours before the final out was recorded in the Cards’ World Series win.

DeWitt Jr., 65, learned the ins and outs of the game at the side of his father, Bill, who started selling peanuts for the Cardinals in 1916 and rose to vice president and treasurer in the 1930s. He went on to acquire a stake in the St. Louis Browns in 1948. After selling the Browns in 1951 (the franchise eventually became the Baltimore Orioles), Bill DeWitt worked for the New York Yankees and Detroit Tigers before the Cincinnati Reds hired him as general manager in 1961. His success convinced the estate of deceased Reds’ owner Powel Crosley Jr. to float DeWitt a loan for $3.5 million, which he used to buy the team in 1961.

It’s hard to imagine better circumstances for absorbing the many financial, legal, and political details that go into the successful management of a professional sports team, or a more comprehensive training ground for learning how to assess a player’s potential. DeWitt Jr. graduated from Yale University and HBS, but he had enrolled in Baseball U. many years earlier. At age six, as a batboy for the St. Louis Browns, he met Babe Ruth; when he was nine, Browns’ owner Bill Veeck attempted to boost game attendance by borrowing DeWitt’s uniform for Eddie Gaedel, a 3-foot, 7-inch circus performer added to the lineup as a pinch hitter. League officials changed the rules to prevent a repeat of the stunt — Gaedel walked on four pitches — but DeWitt’s uniform still hangs as an exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

Despite his deep love of the game, the elder DeWitt stresses the importance of maintaining a degree of emotional distance when it comes to evaluating, and negotiating for, players. “It would be easy to get too involved, but when you’re dealing with such large sums you have to be pretty businesslike in your judgments,” he says, noting that even a backup player generally earns an annual salary of $1 to $2 million. “The financial skills I learned at HBS have been extremely useful in that sense. You need to be able to evaluate how much to give a player relative to the franchise value and revenues.” (In addition to his duties as Cardinals’ chairman, DeWitt serves on the Major League Baseball Executive Council and the Ownership Committee, and holds a seat on the board of MLB Advanced Media.)

In 1995, when DeWitt Jr. and his investment partners purchased the Cardinals and related real estate from Anheuser-Busch for $150 million, they didn’t only buy a baseball team. Just as the Boston Red Sox enjoy (or endure) the attentions of fans across a wide swath of New England, the Cardinals are a focal point for many baseball aficionados in the Midwest. Every game of the 2006 season in the new Busch Stadium was a sellout; outside the stadium, a visitor could spend hours reading the names and messages of devotees who had their words inscribed on bricks that pave the sidewalk. “To our mom, Mary/She went to 54 Cardinal Openers/Love Bunny, Brookie, Jan, Ray, Eddy, Scotty” reads one. “That’s a winner!” can be found on more than a few, invoking a favorite phrase of Jack Buck, a longtime announcer for the Cardinals. When Buck died in 2002, thousands of fans filed past his closed casket, displayed at home plate in the old Busch Stadium.

“Growing up in St. Louis, I think I understand the connection of the team to the city and what an important cultural element the Cardinals are here,” says DeWitt Jr. “If we have a great player who is accepted in the community, we want to maintain that continuity. Part of what makes the Cardinals such a great franchise is the history around players like Bob Gibson, Stan Musial, Lou Brock, and Red Schoendienst.”

Times have changed since those days, of course, with player loyalty coming at an increasingly steep price. That can make it hard to hang on to star players, but DeWitt Jr. believes the Cardinals have had better luck than most, in part because they simply treat their players well. “Living in a place you like carries a certain nonmonetary value, and a lot of our players like living in St. Louis,” he adds. “We’ve also been fortunate to enjoy a culture of winning, and that gives us an advantage. No matter how much money a player makes, they all want to win.”

Nurturing that culture requires nonstop attention to detail. The Cardinals won the World Series on Friday and reveled in their victory parade that Sunday. But on Monday morning, management met bright and early to discuss the 2007 season. Four of the Cardinals’ five starting pitchers became free agents at the close of the last season, casting their return in doubt (as of this writing, only one, Mark Mulder, has been re-signed). That challenge aside, new players need to be signed in other positions, too.

Besides the mind-boggling task of balancing the breadth and depth of talent across a group of players (at the right price), there’s the fan’s experience to be considered. When asked about sightings of the Cardinals’ chairman polling visitors to the new stadium on one of the hottest afternoons of the summer, DeWitt Jr. smiles. “On occasion I’ll walk around and see how the fan experience is and if there are any issues with the park,” he says. “So far, the response has been great. The challenge was not so much the quality of the ballpark as it was the strong association the community had with our successes in the old Busch Stadium.”

Thanks to a round-the-clock construction schedule, the first game played in the new stadium was the season home opener on April 10, 2006. Eight months later, work continues apace on the finishing touches that will, as DeWitt III says, “put the cherry on top.” As an example, the DeWitts take a midmorning break to select the right shade of red paint for the concrete floors outside the luxury boxes. Back at his office, plans for new signage spill across the desk of the younger DeWitt, who joined the Cardinals in 1996 and oversaw construction of Roger Dean Stadium, a 7,000-seat spring training facility built when the Cardinals moved from St. Petersburg to Jupiter, Florida, in 1998.

That experience was an excellent proving ground for the level of detail and oversight involved in building the new Busch Stadium. In an era that has seen a number of sports facilities built with public funds, nearly 90 percent of the financing for the $458 million project came from the Cardinals. “Bill DeWitt Jr. and his partners have far exceeded the standard for private investment in a professional sports facility and have earned hearty praise for their spirit of partnership with and commitment to their host community,” wrote Smith College professor and sports economist Andrew Zimbalist in a Post-Dispatch opinion piece. Some of the funding was contributed in land and a long-term loan from St. Louis County; the State of Missouri threw in $48 million for infrastructure improvements around the new site. Critics counter that the Cardinals will no longer pay a 5 percent ticket tax, but the remaining tax of 7.6 percent still hovers above the average for most major league baseball teams.

DeWitt III, 38, is the Cardinals’ primary liaison on the Ballpark Village project, which is a fifty-fifty partnership with The Cordish Company, a Baltimore-based development firm. Various city and state boards still must approve some assistance for the village’s first phase, which will cost $387 million and include retail and entertainment venues, restaurants, a new Cardinals museum, 250 condominiums, and 100,000 square feet of office space. (The next two phases of the project would add office and residential towers.)

“This project will really take downtown to the next level,” says the younger DeWitt. The past ten years have already seen something of a renaissance in downtown St. Louis, with renovated lofts, restaurants, and boutiques filling the magnificent turn-of-the-century buildings along the main thoroughfare of Washington Avenue. An art history major and specialist in architecture at Yale, DeWitt III seems to relish the challenge of managing long-term, complex building projects. “It’s been fun and gratifying,” he remarks. “Any time you see something in bricks and mortar that you had some involvement in, it’s exciting.”

DeWitt III lives in St. Louis, while his father splits his residence between Cincinnati and St. Louis, spending considerable time in St. Louis during the baseball season. The two maintain close contact, checking in by phone on a daily basis. “I’ve given Bill autonomy in what he does, which enables me to focus on other areas of the business,” says DeWitt Jr. “I think we have a very good relationship.”

His son agrees, noting that there’s been much to learn from how his father manages his business relationships. “Dad is always able to find common ground on an issue, and he’s good at understanding what people want out of a transaction,” observes DeWitt. “He has a strong internal compass and a real sense of fairness.” In terms of his managerial style, “He’s not the bombastic, take-no-prisoners type of manager. Yet things get done because people can sense when something is important to him and that it should be a priority.”

If 2006 was a landmark year for the Cardinals, the DeWitts know as well as any fan that past success is no indicator of what the future holds. That element of uncertainty, however, can have an allure all its own. “Baseball appeals to my entrepreneurial spirit because each season is a new season,” says DeWitt Jr. “It’s not like a normal business where you can make certain forecasts and expect to hit plan. Lots of things can happen — good or bad.”

“There are so many games in a season, and a lot of clubs out there competing just as hard as you are,” agrees his son. “You have to love the game, not just live and die off of winning or losing. Ultimately, you have to be a fan.”

Post a Comment