ST. LOUIS -- Less than 11 months ago as another October passed without him or the team he was hired to help spark, Dexter Fowler sat at his home in Summerlin, Nevada, awaiting the arrival of guests from St. Louis, his left foot in a boot and his career in a fog.
Due to injury, the switch-hitter missed the final month of the worst season of his career and the Cardinals, for the third consecutive autumn, failed to reach the postseason. Fowler would later admit to having symptoms of depression throughout the 2018 summer, and the offseason arrived with some uncertainty -- of his role, of his fit with the Cardinals, and, for the team, of his future. John Mozeliak, president of baseball operations, and Manager Mike Shildt flew to the Las Vegas area to meet with Fowler and have a conversation that gave all parties clarity.
And left Fowler with something even more valuable -- confidence.
"They came out and we had a conversation, and it wasn't an easy conversation," Fowler said Sunday after the Cardinals clinched the National League Central, ski goggles propped on his forehead and ready in case of a sudden champagne downpour. "But we got some things off our chests. Both sides. Any time these guys have confidence in me, that's enough. That's worth the world. And the rest was history."
History, revisited.
Coming out of his World Series championship turn with the Cubs in 2016, Fowler signed with the Cardinals to be their leadoff hitter and center fielder. Through twists, turns, a fractured foot, struggles atop the order, and finally a .180 batting average in 2018, he's done a complete 360 -- back at leadoff for the Cardinals and possibly seeing time in center this postseason. In the Cardinals' clincher Sunday against his friends and former teammates on the Cubs, Fowler scored two of the Cardinals' first four runs and drove home two of them. He reached base four times and homered in the game that sent the Cardinals into today's National League division series at Atlanta, his hometown. After a season anchored by career lows across the page, Fowler spent 2019 returning to career norms with a .346 on-base percentage and a .754 OPS and career highs with 19 home runs and 67 RBI.
In the postgame celebration Sunday, Fowler repeated the same description for the place a winding, rolling road had now taken him: "Familiar."
"He completely rejuvenated his career this year," starter and fellow Georgian Adam Wainwright said. "He's an on-base guy. The guy just gets on base. He walks. He takes good at-bats. And he's got that sneaky power from both sides of the plate he can put on you whenever he needs to. He was one of our spark plugs down the stretch. We would not be standing here without Dexter."
For most of the first half this season, the Cardinals groped for some production from the top two spots in the order. Too often, newcomer Paul Goldschmidt, an annual MVP candidate who finished this season with 97 RBI, came up second or third with no one on base. The Cardinals had the least-productive leadoff spot in the majors for the opening months of the season, and a role in the order defined by on-base percentage was producing a batting average less than .200.
Fowler did not plug the leak of production when given a chance to bat leadoff in May. Over the course of five days the veteran went zero-for-19 with nine strikeouts. The only times he reached base in those 22 plate appearances was when he had a bruise to prove it. Getting hit by a pitch three times gave him a .136 OBP.
After the All-Star break, however, Fowler began to ascend the lineup. On July 21, he started in the No. 2 spot. The Cardinals went 38-23 in his next 61 games. Two weeks later when he moved to leadoff, he started a stretch of 49 games with a .358 OBP and 30 runs scored. The Cardinals went 31-18 and began to assert themselves as contenders. As General Manager Michael Girsch said, "The fact that he ended up back in the leadoff spot just as we took off as a team -- not that our offense became unstoppable -- but he was in the spot he wanted, that we signed him to play and that was more than a coincidence."
In the leadoff spot, Fowler hit only .211 and had a .335 OBP, but what he did from it with a .358 OBP in the second half was raise the spot from the dregs of baseball to the National League average.
He also gave the Cardinals two players in the first inning who ranked in the top seven of pitches per plate appearance. Goldschmidt saw 4.23, Fowler 4.21. Fowler and No. 2 hitters -- Kolten Wong and, recently, Tommy Edman -- became essential to getting Goldschmidt pitches in September. With runners on, opponents couldn't slip pitches around him to face someone else.
"You saw what that can do (Sunday) with a leadoff walk and then the home run," said Goldschmidt, who drove home Fowler for the first run of the Cardinals' 9-0 win. "When he gets on base, whoever the leadoff hitter is, and it's been Dex, it makes everyone else's job so easy. That's how you can have team baseball. Guys in front of you get on, it makes my job easier, (Marcell Ozuna's) job easier. It makes Yadi (Molina) or (Matt Carpenter) have a chance or whoever is coming up next. We can string at-bats."
Toward the end of 2018, Fowler, unable to play because of the fractured foot, joined the team for a visit to Atlanta and a series in his backyard. He described his role back then as Texter in Chief. He would watch most games from home, his foot propped up, and dash off notes to his teammates. "Try to be a little coach," he explained at the time. At the same time he insisted he had a "fit with this team," and went only so far as to say he had to find a way to overcome what he felt was holding him back.
He called it "mental health."
At his home in December, he elaborated to the Post-Dispatch and described feelings of isolation and uncertainty and how he couldn't find the smile that decorated so many of his baseball cards. Asked if he lost a lifelong love of the game, he paused, for five seconds. He shook his head and explained how he "lost loving what is around the game."
"I'm pleased, but I am not surprised," Shildt said in his office Sunday. "A lot of respect for the fact that he dealt with some physical and emotional challenges that come at all of us. It's hard to do that on a big stage and where you're getting evaluated in front of a lot of people. I have an immense amount of respect for anybody who is willing to go through something and come out on the other side and tackle it and face it and that's exactly what he did. The word 'validation' about earning what we did, Dex definitely represented that."
A few weeks after talking with Shildt and Mozeliak, Fowler hosted a party for Cardinals front office executives and some players who were in Vegas for baseball's Winter Meetings. He put on a karaoke show. He showed off the simulated hitting machine he had at home. And as a group, way back in December, they toasted, Fowler and Girsch recalled.
To his return.
And, to their return to October.
"We've got to get back," Fowler said. "I think the bigger the game, the calmer I am. I'm excited for the chance to lead this team where we want to go."
Sports on 10/03/2019