Walt Jocketty, who helped transform three franchises into winners as a top executive from the early 1980s to the mid-2010s, died on Saturday. The St. Louis Cardinals confirmed his death.
Jocketty, who was 74, had been hospitalized for months after undergoing surgery for a lung transplant.
“Walt was our first GM when we purchased the ball club, and he helped to lead our baseball operations through some of the franchise’s most successful and memorable years,” Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt Jr. said in a statement. “He will be sorely missed, but long remembered for his distinguished career in baseball.”
Jocketty directed the Oakland Athletics’ farm system in the 1980s, helping the team win three pennants and the 1989 World Series title. As the Cardinals’ general manager from 1994 to 2007, he built two more World Series teams and added another title in 2006. Then, as Cincinnati’s top baseball executive from 2008 to 2016, he led the Reds to the playoffs three times.
“He was thoughtful and process-oriented, didn’t do anything precipitously and had tremendous common and baseball sense,” said Sandy Alderson, the general manager for the A’s in the 1980s and ’90s, when Jocketty was his top lieutenant.
“He had great relationships with his scouts and advisers, tremendous respect for them, and an ability to synthesize information. But what I liked about Walt is there wasn’t much of an ego you could identify. He was a people person, and I think that’s why he had success.”
Jocketty created his first teams during his boyhood in Minnesota, where he avidly played the dice game APBA Baseball. A pitcher in high school and junior college, he entered the professional ranks as a job-seeker at the 1974 winter meetings in New Orleans, landing with a Chicago White Sox farm team in Des Moines.
In 1980, he found work as farm director for the A’s, hired over the phone by Charlie O. Finley, an absentee owner who was trying to sell the team. The A’s had a threadbare staff but Jocketty found an ally in Billy Martin, their irascible manager, who encouraged the new owners to retain Jocketty.
By the middle of the decade, Martin was gone but Jocketty’s system was thriving, producing three consecutive American League Rookies of the Year — Jose Canseco (1986), Mark McGwire (1987) and Walt Weiss (1988) — under Manager Tony La Russa as the A’s became the AL’s premier team.
Jocketty left for the Colorado Rockies in 1994 and joined St. Louis for the following season. There, he hired La Russa and eventually traded for McGwire, helping revitalize a franchise that had fallen from its 1980s heyday.
Former Reds manager Dusty Baker speaks with Walt Jocketty before Opening Day on March 31, 2011. (Joe Robbins / Getty Images)
After the 1999 season, Jocketty achieved a first for a GM: he traded for a pitcher and hitter who immediately responded with 20-win and 40-homer seasons. The pitcher, Darryl Kile, and hitter, Jim Edmonds, helped the Cardinals reach the 2000 National League Championship Series, the first of five NLCS berths from 2000 to 2006.
St. Louis became the model for a sustainable winner in a mid-sized market as Jocketty continued to fortify the roster. He traded for high-impact position players like Scott Rolen, Larry Walker and Edgar Renteria and signed top pitchers like Chris Carpenter, Jason Isringhausen and Jeff Suppan.
All would play for the Cardinals in the World Series as Jocketty earned wide acclaim across the sport. He was named MLB’s executive of the year in 2000 and 2004.
“You would have to look long and hard to find someone that doesn’t like and respect Walt — and there’s a difference,” La Russa said in 2010. “People like him because he’s a good man, but they respect him because he’s honest. The reason he makes deals is he isn’t hiding information. He gives value and he receives value, so both sides prosper and want to make another deal.”
In 2003, Jocketty swapped outfielder J.D. Drew to Atlanta for a Double-A pitcher, Adam Wainwright, who went on to earn 200 victories for the Cardinals. By then, though, DeWitt was concerned about the sustainability of a midmarket franchise relying mainly on high-priced veteran talent. He hired Jeff Luhnow — an analytics-savvy outsider with a business background — to run the Cardinals’ drafts in 2003, and fired Jocketty when they clashed four years later.
The Reds hired Jocketty as a special adviser in January 2008 and promoted him to GM three months later. The team had not reached the playoffs since 1995, the year Jocketty had entered the division and put the Cardinals on top of it.
“We needed to change the culture,” Jocketty said in 2010, before the Reds clinched the first of their two division titles in his tenure. “There was a culture here, I believe, that they never really thought about winning; they were never really serious about it. They talked about winning, but I don’t think there was really that fight or drive to be competitive and win.”
Under Jocketty, who moved into an advisory role in 2016, the Reds made aggressive signings in the international market (Aroldis Chapman) and the draft (Mike Leake), while trading for veteran position players with winning backgrounds like Edmonds, Orlando Cabrera, Ramon Hernandez, Jonny Gomes — and especially Rolen, who was nearing the end of a Hall of Fame career but embodied Jocketty’s sense of purpose.
“(When) he brought in Rolen, I remember being a younger guy at the time and not completely understanding, because you look at value and everything,” said Reds president of baseball operations Nick Krall, who called Jocketty a mentor. “And the day we made the acquisition, Rolen came into the clubhouse and it was immediate. I remember talking to Walt and saying, ‘I get it. I get the importance of what you wanted to bring in here.’”
Jocketty is survived by his wife, Susan, and their children, Ashley and Joey.
The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans contributed reporting.
(Photo of Walt Jocketty from 2010: Al Tielemans / Sports Illustrated via Getty Images)