Sad News: Legendary Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog passes away.

“I changed the whole concept of the way to play baseball because we couldn’t hit a home run and we could neutralize the power of the other team in our ball park,” said Herzog via the Post-Dispatch. “So I kind of just went with speed, which is the one thing in baseball you can use on both sides of the ball. You can use it on offense and defense.”

This style of play captured the hearts of St. Louis fans, as attendance boomed to previously unforeseen levels.

“The fact that I’m most proud of in St. Louis is that for seven years in a row, we broke our own attendance record,” Herzog said. “No one ever thought that we would surpass three million in attendance and we sold over three million tickets the last four years I was there. We were the first Midwestern team to have over three million in attendance. And in those days (in the National League), it was not tickets sold. It was turnstile count.”

Herzog’s career is a reminder that hitting home runs is not the only exciting brand of baseball. Using contact hitting, speed and intelligence to squeeze runs will always be a fun and effective way to play the game, too. Any modern team that uses that style is a descendant of “Whiteyball,” a tactic that will forever be immortalized.