The Wizard’s wisdom: In tough era for the Cardinals, Ozzie Smith shines on (2024)

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — History’s most acrobatic shortstop was airborne again. Belted in tight, suspended high above Cabo San Lucas, Ozzie Smith had hiked for two hours up a mountain, in sandals, to reach this precarious position. The things a grandfather will do.

Smith was keeping a promise to his eight-year-old granddaughter, Vada, on a family vacation recently. She’s a gymnast, naturally — sort of like he was, many years ago. Now Smith was at the mercy of a zipline, praying to a higher power up near the clouds.

“Your arms are behind you, so you’re going headfirst, and of course they’re always telling you to keep your feet up, don’t let your legs drop, all of that stress,” he said. “When I finally made it to the top of that mountain and they got me strapped in, I said, ‘Oh God, if you let me make it back this time, I’m not gonna do this again.’”

Smith made it back. He always does. He’s not the daredevil of old, darting nimbly across the turf at Busch Stadium, an Olympic floor-routine master in KangaROOS cleats. But at 69 years old, he’s still trim and spry — and eager to go wherever you need him.

“Ozzie has always had a really deep understanding of the importance of the history of the game, and an equally deep belief of the importance of keeping it alive for not only this generation, but for many more generations,” said Jane Forbes Clark, the chairman of the Hall of Fame’s board of directors.“He also brings to us a wonderful perspective of what the Hall of Fame means to a Hall of Fame member. They’re our most important asset, and to have somebody who understands how they feel and what they’re thinking about when it comes to the Hall of Fame is so important to us.”

Smith is one of six Hall of Famers who serve on the board, and he has been the Hall’s ambassador for education since his induction in 2002. He sponsors an annual diversity scholarship for the museum’s Frank and Peggy Steele internship program, conducts clinics for kids, and gave the keynote address last month when the Hall opened a new exhibit on the Black experience in baseball.

Earlier that day, when he spoke for this story, the setting was a postcard: a rocking chair on the veranda of the Otesaga Resort Hotel, with blue skies, gentle hills and a golf course framing Otsego Lake. This is Valhalla for baseball immortals, a sanctuary for Smith.

“The more I come and look around, you don’t want to miss it now,” he said. “You realize that somebody is probably not going to be here next year.”

His old manager, Whitey Herzog, had sat in the same spot during induction weekend last summer. Now Herzog is gone; he died on April 15 in St. Louis, a proud baseball town in a near-constant state of mourning lately.

The greatest Cardinal of all, Stan Musial, died in 2013. And in the last six years the franchise has lost a pantheon of others with deep ties to the birds on the bat: Red Schoendienst in 2018, Lou Brock and Bob Gibson in 2020, Bruce Sutter in 2022, Tim McCarver, Mike Shannon and Rick Hummel in 2023, Herzog in 2024.

Five of those men have Hall of Fame plaques, all with Cardinals caps. McCarver and Hummel have been honored in Cooperstown for their media careers, and Shannon spent 60 years with the team as a player and broadcaster.

“It’s not one of those things you ever thought about, and then one day you’re sitting there and you’re thinking of Cardinal Hall of Famers, because we were always one of the largest contingents,” Smith said, mentioning a group photograph he has at home. “To look at that picture now and realize half of those guys are gone — and we lost them so quickly. There was a long time between losing Stan and losing Red, and when the dominoes started to fall, they fell quick.”

There are still a dozen living Hall of Famers who played for or managed the Cardinals, and Albert Pujols will surely join them as soon as he is eligible, for the 2028 class. But the only others with “STL” on their caps, besides Smith, are more recent inductees: Scott Rolen, who played more games with the Phillies, and Ted Simmons, who caught for the opposing Brewers when Herzog, Smith and Sutter won the 1982 World Series.

“Ozzie is revered by the fan base in St. Louis,” said Hall of Famer Jim Kaat, a reliever on the 1982 champions. “The runs he could save and the plays he could make, his personality, the backflip he’d do every year — he just endeared himself to the fans. I know when we had the 40th reunion in 2022, any of those we’ve had, he gets one of the loudest ovations. The fans respect what he did on the field and how exciting he was to watch.”

As the grand old man of the National League’s Tiffany brand, Smith said he feels no added responsibility for carrying the weight of its history. He has long understood his obligation to professionalism, embodying it wherever he goes.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Ozzie stand in a line and sign for a thousand people, chat with every single one of them, never get irritated … and leave each and every one with the feeling that the greatest shortstop who ever lived was now their best buddy,” Herzog wrote in a 1999 memoir. “That’s magic for the game.”

Smith was born in Mobile, Ala., but moved at age six to Los Angeles, where he attended Locke High School with another future Hall of Famer, Eddie Murray. His home now is St. Louis, and he sometimes wonders if there’s any local resident he hasn’t met. They all feel bonded to him anyway, Smith said, and he is cognizant of meeting their expectations.

In that way, perhaps, Smith stood apart from some of the departed Cardinal greats.

“Let me say this: I think for a lot of those guys, it may have been a chore,” Smith said. “I don’t think they accepted it the way that I do. I look at people coming up to me, and we were all such a part of their lives that they feel that they know me personally. And if this is going to be the only chance that a person has to meet me, I want that to be a pleasant experience. I don’t want that person to say, ‘I met him, but he wasn’t what I thought. I don’t think he was as nice as I thought.’ Because that’s what people remember. You make this feel good for people.”

Smith tapped the left side of his chest, over his heart. Yet for all the goodwill he spreads, he is not a Pollyanna. If he hadn’t been a player, Smith once said, he would have been a teacher. With a keen sense of history, he does not shy from speaking frankly about the state of his team and his sport.

While the Cardinals finished May with 12 wins in their last 16 games, the team has fallen from its perch as a perennial power. Last season marked the first time St. Louis had finished in last place since 1990, while former Cardinals prospects like Zac Gallen, Adolis Garcia and Randy Arozarena all played in October.

Smith visits the Cardinals in spring training but is not closely involved in their operations. He sees the same problems the fans see. It is “very frustrating,” Smith said, when a brand synonymous with player development struggles to nurture its own prospects, only to see them thrive elsewhere.

“I think what happened was the minor-league system got mortgaged and they got caught up in ‘let’s win at all costs right now,’ and that’s something the Cardinals had always been able to avoid,” Smith said. “You’d add pieces slowly, don’t take them all and say, ‘Hey, let’s put it all in now.’

“And so you find yourself watching stars develop in other places. They don’t get the seasoning, and the teaching doesn’t get a chance to get rooted before they go off. And consequently you get these guys now, they become great players, but they become great players on different teams.”

Smith is also chagrined about some of baseball’s recent changes. While he likes the pitch clock, he said, “I do have a problem with everybody getting a trophy. Start with a guy on second base in extra innings? That’s not baseball. That’s not how the game is played. He didn’t earn his way there, he’s given that. For us baseball purists, that’s blasphemy.”

Somewhat surprisingly, Smith is also against the limits on infield positioning. Banning the shift, in theory, allows fielders to show off their range — and nobody had range like The Wizard. But, he said, the shift should have naturally phased itself out.

“You shouldn’t handcuff me (from) being able to play good defense against you because you can’t go the other way, and you’re trying to hit through the defense,” Smith said. “In our generation, (the hitters would) just wear ’em out and they’d go back.”

Smith made 15 All-Star teams and won 13 Gold Gloves, but his offensive profile would be an anomaly today: he averaged just 37 strikeouts a season (about once every five games) and homered only 29 times in more than 2,600 career games.

That short list of long balls includes an indelible shot: his “Go Crazy, Folks, Go Crazy!” blast to win Game 5 of the 1985 NL Championship Series against the Dodgers. Yet that moment ranks no higher than third, he said, in the comments he gets from fans.

First, Smith said, people want to know if he can still do backflips, as he would before opening day and World Series games in St. Louis. Actually, he hasn’t flipped since 2002 — impressive for someone then 47 years old, though he said “it wasn’t pretty.”

The second most popular topic: his appearance on “The Simpsons” in 1992, his last Gold Glove season. Smith vanished into the Springfield Mystery Spot and missed the big softball game.

“People ask me, ‘Are you still in the hole?’” Smith said, laughing. “I say, ‘I’m still down there. Hopefully they’ll do another version and they’ll pull me out.’”

Smith said he’s never sat and watched the full episode. Then again, the maestro of defensive highlights has never watched his own best plays, either. If they’re on a screen somewhere, Smith said, he won’t look away. But as a fielder, he always wanted to think like a relief pitcher: forget the last play, good or bad, because the next one is most important.

There are no more plays — not with a glove, anyway — but the game goes on. His job, as Smith sees it, was to grow the game by making people happy. And he can do that till the day he dies.

“The things that we do on the field, they transcend,” he said. “It carries over into life after baseball. One of the greatest things in the world for me is when people come up and say, ‘Hey, you were part of my youth. You created memories for me because I spent so many days at the ballpark with my grandfather and my grandmother and my family.’

“So that’s the real blessing. And that’s the only thing I can really do to carry on — just be around, keep myself around as long as I can, so when people do see me, it allows them to think about the good things that happened and the part that baseball played.”

(Top photo of Ozzie Smith in Cooperstown last month: Tyler Kepner/The Athletic)