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The past 5 years Mo has been using the Band Aid approach to roster building to stay ‘competitive’ – and we can all see what that has lead to.
Building and maintaining a sustainable core of young to ‘ in their prime’ players like the Astros and the Orioles have done seems to require a franchise to bottom out for about 3 seasons.
(Sure, if you are Yankees or the Dodgers you can generally just buy proven players and eat the bad contracts.)
For me, as much as I would hate to stack 2-3 more crappy seasons on top of the last 2 we’ve just suffered through, maybe it’s that time.
The Astros have appeared in 7 straight ALCS and have two titles in that time period.
Is it worth it to you and, more importantly, do we think the Cardinals will do it and share the vision with fan base instead of treating us like mushrooms (keep us in the dark and feed us s*** )?
Yes, they should do it!
In 2025 play & pitch the kids to see what we have and don’t have.No, they won’t do it. They’ll sign Jamie Moyer & Justin Turner and pronounce the offseason a success!
Good post.
Obviously the Cardinals should do some kind of soft rebuild by transitioning to younger players with a veteran or two sprinkled in and try to restock the farm system. A self proclaimed build from within organization can’t be successful if their first rounders are repeatedly busts and their few big dollar players are also underperformers. It just won’t work.
The bigger question to me is do you want the architects of this current mess to oversee the soft rebuild? That doesn’t seem like a good idea to me but BDW loves his stability.
It is time to get younger and more athletic. I also think we need to look at the field management and player development staff to see if anything can be done to upgrade. It seems we have greatly regressed in our on field management and staff. The question is, are there better personnel available at the rate this ownership group would pay?
The consistency is really the big bug a boo here on all levels of our system from the big club down to low A.Playing the kids from a farm system that is held in low regards by some of the experts isn’t going to change the on field results. Most of these guys you want to try aren’t going to pan out here and besides we have this sector of the fan base who loves to blame management when a player doesn’t produce here. Bringing em up young seems to be a rallying cry to ruin a player. They’ll certainly be younger next year with Kittridge, Pham, Goldy, Lynn, Gibson and Carpenter off the roster. So you’ll get your wish there.
You’ll get the near same results next year on offense unless you get a bat especially if you have Siani and Pages playing major roles with this team. They really need a guy like Luis Robert and a RHB for the minf/bench bat. They need a couple bats but payroll/Bally’s restrictions which the ownership has already thrown out there at the deadline will continue into next season. They’ll have to get creative.
Field management isn’t going anywhere besides maybe a martyr for the offensive struggles. I can agree maybe some tweaks to the backfield evaluation of players and talent in the draft may be needed.
I like the band aid approach personally. We got extremely lucky with our last true rebuild, in the late 90s, hitting the jackpot on just about every trade (Edmonds, McGwire, Rolen, Renteria, Kile, Vina) and 3 big draft picks – Ankiel, Drew, and Pujols.
That’s not very common, especially now.
GScott hit the nail on the head though:
A self proclaimed build from within organization can’t be successful if their first rounders are repeatedly busts and their few big dollar players are also underperformers. It just won’t work.The front office has to make better choices.
For me the band-aid approach started with Ozuna. With what players we’ve traded away since, the pipeline would have produced much stronger. Real strong.
Pass, on tearing it down. We must be smarter. We must let “legacy” take care of itsself, rather than manipulate it, by pre-paying for red jacket appearances. Those after-career like contracts to Yadi, Wainwright, and likely Goldy, are tough on a budget. Especially when your lead PR line is “we’re broke”.
We must attack the salary structure like a new owner/GM would, and we won’t. The competitiveness of a new front office and owner is what is needed. Hoping to “get lucky” is not a strategy, but it clearly defines the current org.
Another thing is that they’ve lost 7 high draft picks due to Gray, Contreras, Goldschmidt, Holland, Fowler, and the scandal ~ since 2017, receiving just 2 for our own free agents, Burleson for Ozuna, and Baker for Lynn.
Before that, we got 8 and gave up none:
Carlson for Lackey, Hudson for Heyward, Flaherty for Beltran, Kaminsky for Lohse, Wacha and Piscotty for Pujols, Wisdom for Dotel, Bean for Jackson.The way I see it, whenever the team has been reactionary, it has made poor decisions. Fans are reactionary. Every time we lose a game, we think something needs to immediately change. The front office cannot be like us. Yet, they are human too and they’ve fallen into that trap. Here’s my list in recent years in no particular order:
Ozuna
Sudden incessant need to go all in on drafting or signing middle of the order hitters.
Holland
Liberatore
Complete reversal to incessant need suddenly go all in on pitchers.
O’Neill (the trade away part)
Carlson
Possibly their obsession around signing internal folks to manage each time there’s an opening.
Falling for the hype and promoting Walker too quickly.And now, to some degree late this season deciding to go for it despite the position we are in. That meant not getting peak return for Helsley and a decent return for a guy like Kittredge. All because they signed Lynn and Carpenter at the beginning of the season and they feel they owe it to those guys to go all in because of their passion – especially with Lynn.
All of these were reactionary moves where they thought they desperately needed one thing and then overvalued it and undervalued what they had to give up to get it. They thought like a fan in these moments. And they should know better.
I’ll start by saying that the front office as led by Mozeliak has done a pretty good job overall, given the constraints that the ownership group has put on it. They went from the tail end of the glory years of the early oughts and built a fairly sustainable, consistently good team in a smaller market through drafting and developing well, and making shrewd decisions in the trade and free agent markets. It worked, especially in the first half of Mo’s tenure. It’s not a stretch to say that circa 2013-14 the Cardinals were the envy of the major leagues, with recent success begetting future dominance (or so it seemed). They had hitting, pitching, defense and more in reserve than just about anyone else in the big leagues. This should have helped them become a World Series winner a time or two in the mid to late 2010s.
The reality that occurred was that other teams (especially the big market behemoths like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Red Sox) caught on and adjusted to the analytical way of doing business, while remaining capable of papering over their mistakes with dollars. Others like the Cubs, Astros, and Braves, who are in similar salary brackets to the Cardinals, tanked and found success through high draft picks and hitting on international talent. Combine that with (I think) the Cardinals front office losing a step and a string of bad luck starting with late 2014 and you’ve got the recipe for where we are now.
So, would I support a true tank? I’m not sure. I think tanking is a scourge on the sport and I think teams should be penalized for not trying at all. But I would support moving on from a number of older contracts and players to reset things while a new front office takes the helm and guides us to the next set of glory years. That would mean cashing in some chips like Helsley, Nootbaar, Arenado, maybe Gray or Contreras, that would anger fans. Yet I think the team wouldn’t likely be that much worse in the standings, and it would give some room for the young talent to breathe so we can see if they are longer term pieces. Let me see Walker, Burleson, Baker, Gorman, Koperniak, Saggese, etc have bigger roles for a year and maybe we will get the “career year” from them rather than watching them tear it up for another team. Use the money saved to build a better base of solid FA and trade acquisitions and we could be back in business sooner than later, say 2026ish.
So long as the system cannot produce starting pitchers and impact bats we are not going to be successful. Even if the development system gets fixed right now, it will take years to establish a productive pipeline with players popping out the end.
Hoping some complimentary types and super UTs have career years isn’t going to do it. Hoping Mo can pull off some roster shuffle razzle dazzle isn’t going to do it. Hiring late career guys and kicking salary down the road is certainly not going to do it. BDW isn’t going to buy the whole rotation and the whole middle of the order and load all that up with young studs. It just won’t happen. It is going to have to come up through the system and that is going to take time. The time line doesn’t even begin until it gets fixed and as of now it is not getting fixed.
I’ve only experienced two championship droughts. The first lasted for 15 years and the second lasted appreciably longer at 24 years. I’ve been conditioned to not expect any quick fixes.
They have to be better at assessing gaps in the roster and addressing them via free agency.
They have to be better at drafting – particularly in the first and second rounds.
They have to be better at player development – up and down the organization.
They have to stop trading outfielders with multiple years of control for pitchers on expiring deals.
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