When Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. hired Jeff Luhnow in 2003 to guide the club into the super numbers-crunching era and tap the well of data beneath baseball’s surface, there was one figure in the statistical gusher he didn’t ask to know.
The new, and at times radical, initiative did not have a fixed budget.
“There was none. What we needed is what we did,” DeWitt said Friday, recalling the early days when the Cardinals first logged into to the game’s sabermetric uprising. “Today every aspect of the game is under analytical scrutiny. On the field. Off the field.