St. Louis Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol values wins most. Development close behind
Oli Marmol isn’t cooking anything for Thanksgiving.
The manager of the St. Louis Cardinals lives near his in-laws and his wife’s parents and grandparents, he said, “absolutely do it up” for the holiday meal, so he doesn’t have to translate his mid-week cooking skills to a larger format. He just gets to show up and eat.
You can hardly blame him for appreciating the break.
Marmol is deep in preparations for his first season as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals. On the Monday morning preceding Thanksgiving, before a phone call with a reporter from his Florida home, he’s already spoken to President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak, general manager Michael Girsch, pitching coach Mike Maddux and pitching strategist Dusty Blake.
Oh, and he bumped his scheduled 10 a.m. interview up to 9:30. Things are moving quickly.
“You’re thinking for your entire staff, all the communication with the players, you’re thinking through leadership development for your minor league staff and managers down there,” Marmol said of his new workload.
“It’s a bigger view of, how do we influence everybody that’s coming in contact with our current players and future players?”
“Still,” he half laughed, “it’s nothing crazy, right?”
Crazy was last month, when a sudden change in the manager’s seat left Marmol plunged into an interview process from which it didn’t truly dawn on him that he might be on the precipice of the peak of his profession until Mozeliak called to offer him the job while he was on his backyard patio.
That was followed by the requisite media tour, though his two daughters — Riley is 4 years old and Kylie is 2 — haven’t yet picked up on the change in his status.
Not entirely, at least.
“The week where (his hiring) went down,” Marmol said, “I was in the kitchen and ... my youngest one starts yelling, ‘Daddy!’
“And I look up and she’s pointing to the TV, and the big one’s like, ‘why are you on TV so much right now?’”
The Marmol girls will likely figure out the difference this summer as their dad slides into the center of the frame, perhaps earlier than anyone expected he would arrive. After three seasons as bench coach, he’s now the youngest manager in the major leagues, but he credits the Cardinals’ development system for staff as well as players in making the transition nearly seamless.
“Thankfully, in the position that I was in previously, I was involved in a lot of the conversations that the manager was involved in,” Marmol explained. “They did a really good job of including me and showing me what that would look like one day so it’s not foreign.”
Those conversations now are largely about player acquisitions, but were also about staff supplements in the days and weeks after his hiring. New bench coach Skip Schumaker is someone Marmol has known dating back to Schumaker’s playing days in the Cardinals organization, but new assistant hitting coach Turner Ward is new to Marmol’s orbit.
Ward does have significant history with first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, and Marmol described being able to “tap into (Goldschmidt’s) insights” before their initial conversations.
“Players absolutely rave about how well he’s liked,” Marmol said. “His energy, positivity, just how relationally, how encouraging he is. That’s an element that we wanted to bring to the overall personality of the coaching staff.
“It’s no different than putting a team together. You look at, hey, we need another bat, or you need another this, or you didn’t put the pieces together that’s going to give you the best chance to win. And I look at the staff no differently.”
Marmol’s primary early challenge
The challenge for Marmol and his staff is attempting to squeeze a winter’s worth of instruction into a much tighter window than is typical. With a lockout looming at the conclusion of the collective bargaining agreement Dec. 1, coaches and staff are likely to face a prolonged period of being barred from contact with players.
That could leave a new manager in a precarious position in the run up to a defining season in the careers of many of his most important players.
“I think that’s the smart way to look at it is, if that does take place and we can’t have contact with a player then how do we make sure that we get what we need over to them prior to,” Marmol said. “Make sure that they’re clear on expectations and plan for improvements, and be able to answer any questions that they may have that they need more clarity on before the potential of that taking place.”
Thankful for opportunity
Given those circumstances, the messages moving out from his phone have finally begun to eclipse the messages coming in. Marmol said, at one point, he looked down after the announcement of his hiring to find 436 opened text messages. It was important to him to answer every one that came with congratulations, acknowledging the people who have helped to guide his path even in small ways.
It hasn’t left a ton of free time in his winter — he was unaware Taylor Swift had re-released Red but pledged to get caught up — but he couldn’t be more thankful for his opportunity, and spoke convincingly about what he felt would be an appropriate end before he’s even really had the chance to get started.
“End of the day, how you win is obviously important, but if you were to narrow it down to one word, yeah, it is ‘win,’” Marmol said of his primary objective.
The definition of leadership
“But it’s upholding a culture. It’s continuing to push guys up in that culture. It’s continuing to create a certain mindset and character that sustains winning, so that you can do it year in, year out,” Marmol added.
“If our processes are good,” he explained, “if we’re executing on truly developing our players and staff in a way that’s meaningful, then I should be able to comfortably walk away from this job knowing that from within, there’s someone that could take my position without skipping a beat. And that will allow me to know that I did my job well, not only in winning while I was in the chair, but developing those around me so that they can continue that tradition.
“If you walk away from this seat, or leadership position, and everything falls to the ground a year or two after you’re gone, I think that’s poor leadership. That just means you didn’t develop those underneath you well enough or equip them well enough to sustain the processes that were in place. To me that is the definition of leadership.”
