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But the first team he put together, in 1995, was not one designed to win any championships. It was designed as a placeholder.

The players’ strike, which began in August 1994, still was going on and the baseball owners, all except for Baltimore’s Peter Angelos, decided they would make do in spring training and even longer with replacement players — mostly minor leaguers or recently retired minor leaguers with the exception of a few 40-man roster players who crossed the line.

“It was very tough to get guys to cross over,� Jocketty recently said.

Jocketty, who had taken over for Dal Maxvill after the 1994 season was aborted, was tasked with putting together a Cardinals team. He entrusted player development director Mike Jorgensen to find most of the minor-league talent and Joe Torre, the manager he inherited, to manage it. Torre, once a strong member of the players’ association, was doing it with considerable ambivalence.

“It was a very difficult situation,� Jocketty said. “‘Jorgy’ knew more of the minor-league players anyway, but I asked him if he would kind of oversee that because I was concerned about being a first-year GM and getting involved in something like this and then getting (the big-league) players back and how they’d react to it.

“(Jorgensen) did a great job and it was a difficult time for him, too, because he was a former player and a former player rep. But this is something that was very important to August Busch (III). He made that point very clear to us at a meeting in spring training.�

Anheuser-Busch was in its final year of ownership of the Cardinals.

“We went with the plan, as best we could,� Jocketty said. “I don’t think we’d have been very good but at least we were able to field a team.�

Shikles’ story

One of the players Jocketty was instrumental in recruiting as a replacement was 30-year-old righthander Larry Shikles, who was signed by Jocketty to a minor-league contract with an invitation to big-league spring training camp when the latter was with Oakland. Shikles was a financial adviser at Smith Barney, at Eighth and Market streets, in the shadows of Busch Stadium II. He last had pitched in 1993, when he was with the A’s Tacoma Class AAA team. He didn’t pitch in 1994.

“Forced retirement,� he said of being released by Detroit in spring training.

“It wasn’t like I was shocked,� said the veteran of eight minor-league seasons with Boston and Oakland. “Baseball told me, ‘You had a good run and now it’s time to get on with life.’�

And then the call came and Shikles suddenly was in St. Petersburg, Florida. “One last little taste of baseball before I literally slammed the door on it,� he said.

He had a couple of big leaguers as potential financial clients, including Curt Schilling, and Shikkles checked with them before he signed on as a replacement player, so as not to offend them.

“I looked at it two ways,� he said. “One was to market myself. I was starting to build a business. And, secondly, I viewed it as a kind of fantasy camp—because I knew that when the strike ended, (I was) going to go back to St. Louis to get on with business and (my) normal life. It was a chance for me to go down to spring training one last time with no anxiety attached to it.

“It truly was a fantasy camp for me. That was when Stan Musial still was alive. Jack Buck, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock ... all the legends.�

One day, the Jefferson City, Missouri, native found himself at a lunch table with Musial and Buck.

“Let’s see ... multiple-choice question. Who doesn’t belong at that table?� mused Shikles.

He wound up driving Buck’s Lincoln Continental back to St. Louis before the start of the season, preparatory to a start he never made as the strike was settled three days before the season was to start.

Shikles had made his final spring start and was hoping to get back to St. Louis sooner so that he could be with his pregnant wife, Jeannine. Shikles was to oppose Philadelphia at Busch Stadium.

Jocketty sanctioned Shikles’ idea.

“It was then that you knew you were a replacement player and could be replaced easily,� Shikles said.

“The quality of those players was probably a Class A group, at best,� said Jocketty, now a consultant with the Cincinnati Reds and living in the Scottsdale, Arizona area.

Busch was so all-in, however, that he gave the potential replacement players a $5,000 bonus for signing and then would pay them $25,000 at the end of spring if they were still on the club preparing to go north. Most organizations were not nearly so generous.

Breaking hearts

The strike was over by the time the players had reached St. Louis but Busch fulfilled his pledge, although Jocketty said, “When we pulled the plug, it broke a lot of hearts, I’m sure.�

Shikles recalled arriving in Atlanta on a Saturday night, as he was driving through the rain, and got the news over the radio that his Cardinals career was over because the strike was over.

“I was a little bummed out. I have to be truthful,� Shikles said. “I thought how cool it would have been to work until about 4 o’clock at Smith Barney and have somebody ask me what I was going to do after work and I’d say, ‘I think I’ll go over to Busch Stadium and pitch for the Cardinals. You might want to turn on your TV tonight.’�

Shikles and his family sold about 500 tickets in anticipation of the start that never came.

Though it was just but a dream, Jocketty said, “August (Busch) was very serious about this and he wanted the players to know that. But it was a tough time and I know Joe wanted no part of it. He and the coaches had to do what they had to do because they knew it was important to August.�

Torre recently said he was sure Busch was going to fire him in the spring, especially after he found out that Torre had attended a players’ association meeting in Orlando. Jocketty saved Torre in March but couldn’t in June when club president Mark Lamping instructed Jocketty to pull the plug on Torre, with Jorgensen taking over as manager for the rest of the season.

Shikles certainly got more than he had expected. He was the subject of many interviews at Busch on the day before the season would have started. And he learned he, indeed, would receive the $25,000 as if the season was starting, atop his earlier bonus and another $7,500 in his pocket, the result of a belated Topps trading card payment stemming from a suit filed by some Triple-A players from a few seasons before.

“It was like I’d won the lottery,� he said. “Remember, I was a minor leaguer. We didn’t make any money. We literally were working for about a dollar an hour.

“But I was just blown away by what the Cardinals did,� said Shikles, who also received his No. 23 regular-season jersey that he would have worn. He said he club also offered him a Triple-A contract but he declined.

“They framed it like, ‘You can go to Louisville if you want to,’� he said. “I would have got lit up in Louisville. I think about that time every once in a while. It doesn’t seem like it should be that long ago. Somebody asked me if I could still pitch. I said I probably could throw batting practice to, like, 8-year-olds.�

Shikles, a partner now with former St. Louis U. basketball star Scott Highmark in the Mosaic Family Wealth company, was 70-68 in his minor league career. He recalls pitching against Pittsburgh’s Barry Bonds when the eventual career home-run record holder was in the Florida instructional league learning how to drag bunt.

“That was before the year we all know about,� Shikles said, “before he got Babe Ruthian type of power. I’ll go to my grave saying I faced Barry Bonds and I intimidated him so much that he bunted on me twice.�

Capsulizing the spring of 1995, Jocketty said, “I hope we never go back to that again. It was a bad time. I’m glad it’s only a memory. And a distant one.

“I had only been on the job for a few months,� Jocketty said. “It was incredible. I thought, ‘My first team. . . you’ve got to be kidding me. What have I gotten into here?

“But it all worked out. It was good.�