This story was excerpted from John Denton’s Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
While this season has unfolded as the toughest in recent memory for the Cardinals, one of the team's proudest sons -- Marlins manager Skip Schumaker -- is doing plenty of winning and having the time of his life while implementing “The Cardinal Way” in South Florida.
Schumaker, 43, has Miami off to its second-best start in franchise history, but he will tell anyone there’s a heavy splash of Cardinals karma in every decision he makes and how he handles situations. A player with the Cardinals from 2005-12, a World Series winner in 2011 and a bench coach with the Redbirds last season when the franchise stormed back to win the NL Central, Schumaker isn’t afraid to admit where his strong understanding about the tenets of winning stems.
“I mean, almost everything I know I learned from the St. Louis Cardinals in some capacity from the coaches, the players or even the front office,” said Schumaker, who surrounded himself on his coaching staff with former Cardinals John Mabry and Jon Jay. “It was a very special time over there.”
Prepared, confident and decisive, Schumaker has brought some swagger and conviction to the pitching-rich and offensively gritty Marlins. Look no further than Miami’s improvement in one-run games -- an MLB-worst 24-40 in 2022 to an MLB-best 21-5 in 2023 -- as the spot where Schumaker has had impact. That success has come as little surprise to members of the Cardinals, who often saw Schumaker run hitters' and pitchers' meetings in St. Louis, pick up on tells from other teams and feed confidence into players.
“I love that dude and he’s a really good friend,” Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said of his 2022 bench coach. “He’s someone I trusted a ton. He’s going to do a phenomenal job at [managing] for as long as he wants to do it.”
Phenomenal would be a great way to describe a Marlins team that won 50 of its first 87 games for the first time since the 1997 World Series champion Marlins started 51-36 under Jim Leyland. Schumaker’s Marlins have done that despite having an unsightly 1-9 record against the steamrolling Braves. Against everyone else in baseball, including three straight wins over the Cards, Miami is not only 50-28, but the club has a whopping plus-47 run differential.
Schumaker credits the Cardinals for preparing him for his first shot at being a manager. Working under Marmol, Schumaker said, prepared him for all the things that a manager must have a pulse on throughout a 162-game season.
“I’ll say a few years ago when I interviewed to be a manager with different organizations, I wasn’t ready yet, looking back on it,” said Schumaker, who is already a leading candidate to win the National League’s Manager of the Year Award. “I thought I was until I was the bench coach for [the Padres and Cardinals]. Then, I realized, ‘OK, I might be ready now.’ …
"Watching what the Cardinals do with their system and blending it at this level, it gave me some insight into what I wanted to do here [with the Marlins].”
Speaking of the Cardinals' season, Schumaker said: “I think everybody’s a little surprised at the start, but there’s a lot of games left, and those guys have been there before, and they know what winning looks like.”