With the possible (and I reiterate “possible”) exception of Earl Weaver, no A-list manager in Major League Baseball history had a more clearly defined style associated with his team than Dorrel Norman Elvert “Whitey” Herzog, who died today at the age of 92. You can ask fans born well after his final game managed, which came nearly thirty-four years ago, and there are specific tactics associated with him–it even had its own name of “Whiteyball”–a free-wheeling style associated first and foremost with speed on the base paths. Although Herzog followed two brief managerial stints, one with the Texas Rangers and one with the then-California Angels with a successful run managing the Kansas City Royals, he is synonymous with the St. Louis Cardinals of the 1980s. Even for those of us who don’t remember a single game he ever managed, one cannot shake the memories of watching a VHS tape of “Heck of a Year” and watching the 1985 Cardinals run wild against the National League while a legally licensable instrumental version of Glenn Frey’s “The Heat is On” plays as its score.

And yet, the statistics do not actually bear out Whitey Herzog’s reputation as a maverick who wildly instructed his guys to run constantly. In his first season as a MLB manager, in 1973, his Rangers ranked a modest 11th of 24 MLB teams in stolen bases, and in his first full(-ish) season at the helm of the Cardinals, in 1981, the team that would soon be defined as historic speedsters finished outside of the top ten in the sport in steals. But the Cardinals were nevertheless successful, finishing with the best total record over the year in the National League East (though missing the postseason due to that season’s unusual first half/second half structure). His final Cardinals team, in 1989, did finish tied for fifth of 26 teams in steals, but if one were to exclude Vince Coleman, anomalous even by the standards of the Whiteyball era, they would have finished just 19th.

Thinking of Whitey Herzog as a byproduct of his environment rather than some sort of stolen bases ideologue arguably makes him a more interesting character. Herzog, a reserve player himself for eight seasons in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was hardly a speedster–in a career with 1,885 plate appearances, he stole just 13 bags, being caught 18 times. In terms of how other sports work, Whitey Herzog is the equivalent of a service academy football coach that deploys the triple option or the basketball coach at a fledgling mid-major that runs a heavily three-pointer focused offense. If the coach at the United States Naval Academy had access to the talent of an Alabama or Georgia, he probably would want to throw the ball, but without access to athletic scholarships, you run a system tailored to what you have. And in the mid-1980s, Whitey Herzog had access to the likes of Vince Coleman, Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee, Tom Herr, and Lonnie Smith. It wasn’t as though Whitey Herzog was pressing Jack Clark to steal bases.

Herzog was best known for his work as Cardinals manager, but he was also the team’s general manager. And when he made decisions, it wasn’t to fit a system–it was to improve the talent of the team, and he would tailor a system to best serve the team. The acquisition of the aforementioned Jack Clark put this on full display: outfielder David Green, a young and speedy player, fit the “Whiteyball” archetype like a glove, but the team needed a first baseman and could use some power. Jack Clark, on paper, is far more the embodiment of Moneyball than Whiteyball, a defensively-deficient bopper who excelled at getting on base. But again, Whitey Herzog was not an ideologue. He wanted to win.

Unlike the team’s previous legendary manager, Red Schoendienst, Whitey Herzog was not a star MLB player, nor was he a St. Louis Cardinal. Unlike the team’s next legendary manager, Tony LaRussa, who presented himself as a calm, occasionally cold law school graduate, Herzog felt like an everyman. Born and raised in New Athens, Illinois, a town firmly in St. Louis Cardinals territory, Herzog felt like what it would be like if your uncle was the manager of the Cardinals. His warmth extended in practice to his time as general manager. When star left fielder Lonnie Smith battled cocaine addiction, rather than acting with the punitive attitudes prevalent in the “Just Say No” era, Herzog himself took a proactive role in getting Smith in (successful) drug rehabilitation, and when Vince Coleman’s emergence made Lonnie Smith’s role in St. Louis redundant, he mournfully traded him to a position where he could succeed (in Kansas City, where he would win a World Series title) and bemoaned the lack of designated hitter in the National League, not exactly a popular stance at the time among traditional-leaning Cardinals fans but one which made sense viewed through the prism of his own personal relationships. When first baseman Keith Hernandez faced similar drug-related demons, Herzog traded him to the New York Mets; this could be argued as a move of self-interest, but by all accounts, it compelled Keith Hernandez to stop using cocaine as well.

I firmly believe that had Whitey Herzog inherited a team more akin to the Milwaukee Brewers team that he defeated in the 1982 World Series, a team built on raw power rather than speed, he would have adapted and succeeded about as well as he did in St. Louis. But when his team was situated to succeed on speed, Herzog took this strategy to its logical conclusion. And it never hurts to develop a team which is exciting and attractive in addition to being excellent. And Whitey Herzog did that.

It seems impossible that, with Herzog’s passing, Tony LaRussa is now the only living manager to have won a World Series with the Cardinals. Herzog was a fixture at Cardinals Opening Days and other team-related functions, and not unlike the other Cardinals luminaries who we have lost over the last half-decade or so–Red Schoendienst, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Bruce Sutter, probably plenty of others I am regretfully forgetting in this moment–he remained a part of the lives of St. Louis Cardinals fans even beyond the scope of his many professional accomplishments. Whitey Herzog felt like family.