Cardinals, Royals celebrate indelible mark Herzog left on two cities and baseball

For at least three generations of St. Louis Cardinals fans, following the team has meant discussing the ins and outs of strategy, player movement, deployment of baserunners.

Some of the joy of baseball is in dissecting it, and in this market, for better or worse, for several decades running, that level of granularity has been at the heart of fandom.

For manager Oli Marmol, that dates back to the tenure of Whitey Herzog, and his love for digging deep on the game every night.

“You talk about just changing…the way people think about the game,” Marmol said Wednesday from his Busch Stadium office, “how even the city asks questions about game strategy comes from a lot of the ways he kind of held his postgame review and how he thought of things.

“When you leave that type of stamp on a city, you’ve done it well.”

The Cardinals and Kansas City Royals came together before Wednesday’s second game to honor the life and legacy of Herzog, the New Athens native who died in April at age 92. It was with first the Royals and then the Cardinals that he forged the reputation and success which would see him inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. It was his indelible style off the field and his irascible personality off of it that elevated him to larger than life status.

Marmol, who took over as manager in the fall of 2021, had limited opportunities to have expanded discussions with Herzog in the years since as his health declined. Over a decade and a half in the organization, though, Marmol came to fully appreciate the sort of imprint that can take a manager from the dugout to the outfield mural of retired numbers as well as to Cooperstown.

“He was still very sharp in what he was watching,” Marmol said of Herzog in his final years. “Just loved talking players more than anything. Not so much strategy as much as just what he liked about certain guys, what he didn’t, what he thought certain guys should be doing, that type of thing. It was always kind of fun to just chop it up with him that way.”

Asked if he would share the identity of a few players who Herzog appreciated, Marmol quipped, “I can give you guys he didn’t.”

He did not, but no one who knew or even observed Herzog’s style would be much surprised that he was very willing to share that list.

Herzog’s three children, Debra, David and Jim, were scheduled to be in attendance for Wednesday’s night’s celebration, joining Cardinals Hall of Famers Chris Carpenter, Jason Isringhausen, Ted Simmons and Ozzie Smith.

Cardinals coach and Hall of Famer Willie McGee, in attendance in the regular course of his coaching duties, has spoken about Herzog only in a limited context since his death. Herzog was the general manager who brought McGee to the Cardinals as well as the manager who guided him through his first eight full seasons, and the emotions around his loss have remained difficult.

Even at 92 years old, the impact that Herzog had throughout the organization was clearly visible on the field. That carries in part through McGee, who was shaped by The White Rat in countless ways and is now responsible for a great deal of outfield defense and baserunning play.

His appearance to wave from the stands on opening day, just a week before his death, drew the sort of roar from the crowd that served as a meaningful goodbye from fans who loved him dearly, even if they didn’t know at the time that it would be their last chance to appreciate him in person.

For Herzog to have his number retired and to be enshrined in the Hall of Fame is, of course, an opportunity to achieve baseball immortality. It’s the sort of notoriety only reserved for the game’s quintessential figures, and in both Kansas City and St. Louis, it’s difficult to assemble a list of people whose fingerprints are more visible on the modern game, despite its disconnection from how it was played in the 1980s.

That he could have that sort of impact on his hometown team, less than 50 miles from the small Illinois village where he was born, raised and lived his adult life, is almost a fairy tale, so unlikely as to almost not be worth imagining.

For Herzog and his family, that was reality. And Wednesday night at Busch Stadium, two teams whose fates were undeniably intertwined with his had the opportunity to come together and celebrate the man and what he meant, as well as the power he brought to the game.

Even in the midst of a competitive season, in the middle of a doubleheader, with two teams fighting for every win that might determine their seasons, there is time to stop and celebrate that power. That, more than anything, is proof of the impact he has, in the present tense.