JUPITER, Fla. • When passing peanuts to a fan at a long-gone St. Louis ballpark 100 years ago this summer, Bill DeWitt Jr.’s father, 14 at the time, took his family’s first step into baseball.

For the next several decades, William Orville DeWitt Sr. devoted and enriched a career in Major League Baseball, rising from vendor to general manager to owner. Then, some 60 years after that first peanut sale, he did something that left a lasting impression on his son.

He walked away.

The absence of baseball revealed the value of being a presence in it.

“I saw how much he missed it,” DeWitt Jr. said. “It was his life.”

On Monday, as owners of the Cardinals gather at Roger Dean Stadium for their annual meetings, the club will mark the 20th anniversary of the day that began one of the most successful eras in club history and meant the return of the DeWitt family to running a baseball team in St. Louis.

On March 21, 1996, Major League Baseball unanimously approved the purchase of the Cardinals by an ownership group led by Andrew Baur, Fred Hanser and DeWitt Jr. In the two decades since, the team has won two World Series championships, four National League pennants and more games (1,854) than any team other than the New York Yankees.

Those years have also seen the construction of Busch Stadium III, Ballpark Village and an expanded Hall of Fame and Museum. The ownership group has amplified the Cardinals brand and seen soaring revenues, agreeing to a $1.1-billion broadcast deal last summer less than 20 years after buying the team for $150 million.

Atop the growth, a steward for this civic icon has been chairman DeWitt Jr. — who sought a way back into baseball for his family. Since the purchase of the Cardinals, his influence has grown, reaching the office of the commissioner and the halls of Cooperstown. He serves on baseball’s executive council, as his father did, and is a board member at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, where his father also helped.

The DeWitts, majority owners of the team, have helped define the modern Cardinals, from the ballpark they call home to even the color of the Redbirds’ beaks. They also link the present to the past. DeWitt Jr. lent his batboy jersey to Eddie Gaedel, shook hands with Babe Ruth, and, when asked in 2011 by Adam Wainwright, gave the ace permission to pour champagne on his head.

DeWitt Jr., who has no intentions of retiring in the near future, called the Cardinals “a longterm commitment for us.”

It’s more than a life. It’s a legacy.

“He had a passion for the game,” said Bill DeWitt III, a third-generation baseball executive and president of the Cardinals. “He also had a passion for being involved in the game.”

“The DeWitts and their ownerships group are sort of the model of good management in baseball,” commissioner Rob Manfred told the Post-Dispatch. “They are fiscally successfully, successful on the field, they have a new stadium and they have shown a commitment to the community. There is a tradition there they have treasured. I think the DeWitts will go down as one of the great ownership groups in the history of baseball.”

SIMPLE WORDS, BIG IMPACT

By the time DeWitt arrived at the lawyers’ office that afternoon in March 1996, the deal had already been approved. High fives and millions had been exchanged. Hanser and Baur were there when the lawyer got the call, notifying them of the result of a vote by major-league owners. The lawyer hung up and, according to Rick Hummel’s article in the Post-Dispatch, turned to them and said six words.

“You guys own a baseball team.” It was a short sentence that ended a long search.

In the same year, 1967, the Cincinnati Reds officially hired Bill DeWitt Jr. and his father sold the team.

It was more than a decade before the elder DeWitt returned to an ownership role in baseball. At the same time, his son planned to do the same. While excelling in a private equity business, DeWitt kept his eye on baseball. He had stakes in the Reds and Texas Rangers, attempted to purchase the Reds in 1984, and in 1993 had an agreement to purchase the Baltimore Orioles before their owner slipped into bankruptcy court.

“When I got out of baseball the year after my father sold the team, I wanted to build up a nest egg to eventually get back in,” DeWitt recently said in his office at Roger Dean Stadium. “I was driven to that. That was a goal that I had. I really respected what my father was able to accomplish. He had the advantage of Branch Rickey as a mentor. I had the advantage of my father as a family member and living it and growing up with it every day.”

Bill DeWitt Sr. had come from north St. Louis, the son of a butcher, and took his first job at a ballpark to get the family extra income. In 1917, baseball visionary Rickey brought young DeWitt Sr. with him to the Cardinals, where Rickey would author the modern farm system. DeWitt Sr. had a role with the Cardinals’ first championship team, in 1926. In 1944 he was the executive of the year for building the Browns team that lost to the Cardinals in the World Series.

Five years later he and his brother, Charlie, bought the Browns.

He would go on to work for the New York Yankees, bringing a young Bill Jr. along to scout players. These days ignited Bill Jr.’s fondness for the game and understanding of how a team should be built. His own playing career, as a pitcher, had ended in high school when he suffered a separated shoulder in a basketball game. His career in baseball was just beginning.

“I really believe that when you think about Bill’s history, how he grew up in the game, he cares as much as about the game and industry of baseball as anyone I’ve ever met,” Cards general manager John Mozeliak said. “That’s a direct reflection of his father.”

Timeline: The DeWitt Family in baseball 1916 • William Orville DeWitt joins the Cardinals, first as a soda and popcorn vendor.

A DIFFERENT WORLD

The Cardinals’ in-house magazine back in 1996 published a cover story on its new owners, Baur, Hanser and DeWitt, all St. Louis natives. Inside that issue were details on baseball’s new-fangled interleague play, the addition of grass to Busch II and the big announcement that the Cardinals were going onto the World Wide Web. Fans could download a ticket-order form. They just had to fax it in. Fast-forward 20 years and tickets are purchased on smartphones; and at some point in April, Busch III should be wired for Wi-Fi.

Since 1996, the Cardinals have relocated their spring training to Jupiter, Fla., purchased several of their minor-league affiliates and rebooted the organization as a leader in baseball’s analytic movement. DeWitt wanted to create a better, stronger farm system and invested in draft picks and development to do so. That pipeline fueled the club’s current run of five consecutive postseason appearances, a first for the Cardinals.

It was just as his father learned from Rickey.

When the ownership group took over, DeWitt Jr. said the season revenue for the team was about $60 million, or about what the team will make from broadcast rights fees alone later this decade. He told then-president Mark Lamping that the goal was to reach $100 million. In 1999, Lamping presented DeWitt with a paperweight engraved with that year, their first $100-million revenue season.

The club now is in baseball’s top third for revenue, and Forbes, through its formulas, estimated the Cardinals’ value at more than $1 billion.

“What has happened has gone well beyond the most ambitious expectations,” said Lamping, who now is president of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars. “Bill, the other owners, understood the franchise’s history and thought if they could move if forward an inch that would be a success. They’ve built a lot more than that.”

The brand did take a bruising this past year. A Cardinals executive pleaded guilty to illegally accessing Houston’s database, a transgression that shocked and angered DeWitt.

At that same time, ownership for all pro sports teams in St. Louis became more prominent. As Stan Kroenke retreated from the city, uprooting his NFL franchise and blistering the town with his alleged reasons for moving to Los Angeles, the Cardinals and Blues publicly linked arms.

“They’re engaged,” St. Louis mayor Francis Slay said. “They’re one of the reasons why our city is known (around the world). It’s hard to put a value on that. But they do see sport as a civic venture. No city can claim to be a better baseball town, and that starts with ownership.”

From the day he and his friends closed on the Cardinals, DeWitt has a carved wooden statuette, about the size of an Oscar, of a bird on a bat. He admits to not being a memorabilia-saver, though his family has filled the team’s museum with items, including the Gaedel jersey. Bill DeWitt III recalls visits with his grandfather and the stories he’d tell, the photos of him with Mickey Mantle and other greats, some of which the family has kept.

‘FAMILY LEGACY' CONTINUES

Bill DeWitt Sr., who died in 1982, had a collection of press pins from World Series he attended that caught his grandson’s eye. Bill DeWitt III canvassed collectors and auctions to fill in the missing pieces. He saw the collection as an heirloom, something that tied the modern game and his father to his grandfather and could be passed down as a “neat family legacy thing.”

Goold: The time a St. Louis baseball team tried to move to LA Almost 75 years ago, owners of a local ballclub expected unanimous approval at league meetings for a relocation to riches on the coast. It didn't happen.

He completed it in the early 1990s.

A few years later his father called him with an opportunity. They could join an ownership group and buy the Cardinals from Anheuser-Busch. The family in the beer business was selling. The DeWitts had their chance to get back into baseball. Talk about a neat family legacy thing.

“My goal going into this was to try and maintain and enhance the great Cardinal history and tradition and to do everything possible to continue to build on it,” DeWitt Jr. said. “We’ve had a great run of success, but it’s a very challenging industry. Take your eye off the ball and you can find yourself playing catchup, and we want to do everything possible not to be in that position. This business is always looking to the future. We have great memories. But I’m now worried about what kids are coming up in three years that are going to maintain the high level the Cardinals expect.”

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