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blingboy
Rationalizations could be made for each of them. Just like people are doing with Garcia. But he was in our organization from day one and we saw him all day every day. We had vastly more opportunity to gage his skills, advancement, competitiveness and makeup than anybody else. The argument that 29 other orgs that had a fraction of our look passed misses the point and amounts to a lame smoke screen. A comparable argument can rebuff whatever excuses and free passes people want to make about the FO/org’s incompetence. Spending some money this winter is a band-aid that will fall off soon enough.
Why do you think that the Garcia that was in our organization is the same one that Texas has playing right now? Players’ skills and development aren’t static.
They aren’t the same. Development is not static. Especially so with young players and i imagine doubly so with young players immersed in a foreign culture. It’s about evaluating a moving target. Much of it is about intangibles that cannot be meaningfully quantified. It’s more than entering numbers and seeing which set the computer likes best. It is obvious the Cardinals suck at it. Gross over reliance on what cannot tell you what you need to know.
One of the most favorite agenda items that gets woven into pretty much every discussion is the evil presented by numbers. The reality is that there is no evidence that analytics was a part of the decision to let Garcia go. In fact, based on his usage in the majors, it could be more likely that the coaching staff soured on him. But all of this is baseless speculation, beating an old subject from almost four years ago (December 2019) into a bloody pulp…
I for one am happy to see that Garcia has improved in the four years since he was last on the field for the Cardinals.
It’s hard to rationally argue against speculation and conjecture, which is why it isn’t allowed in a court of law. But here on the internet, it certainly becomes a regular feature!
Maybe the Cardinals should have guessed that in 3 years Garcia would dramatically improve upon his unsustainable strikeout rate. Maybe the computers said that he wouldn’t. Maybe his coaches said that he wouldn’t. Maybe the St. Louis Manager just didn’t want to play him so he never got a chance. Maybe Garcia stole someone’s watch and the team got a bad vibe about him. Maybe Garcia made some inappropriate comments to some exec’s wife. Maybe Texas had the secret sauce to turn Garcia around. Maybe Garcia found motivation in getting DFA’s twice and just got a lot better on his own while out of baseball during the Covid year. Maybe it took a full season of everyday play in 2021 of Garcia partly failing and partly succeeding to start to really turn him around. Maybe that was really 2 full seasons in 2021 and 2022.
Maybe the Cardinals felt like they had a dearth of outfielders and they didn’t value one of them as highly as the others.
Only that last statement is probably true, although we don’t know the specific reasoning. The rest are just speculation. The only real facts here is that Garcia was not a good player in his last year with the Cardinals, that he still had time to grow and mature, but that the Cardinals decided to go a different direction when they had a roster crunch. Then, over the course of 3-5 years after that, Garcia vastly improved his bat to ball skills. And now Garcia is the kind of middle of the lineup masher that we’d love to have back. Those are the facts. The rest is just conjecture.
You guys argue as though the Garcia fiasco happened in a vaccuum rather than being the currently most visible and appalling example in a multi-year string of bad moves. It looks one way if taken in isolation, and another way taken in the context of a string of losing moves which illuminate the org’s inability to evaluate and project talent.
Bling – that’s where we differ. You see this large crop of players that we gave up and didn’t get a return for and I just see it completely differently. I see one giant mistake which I blame them for 100%.
I only blame them for Alcantara (and partially Gallen). That was a blind pursuit of a big bat that failed monumentally. And it was really downright stupid. Alcantara and Sierra were the 2 centerpieces there that we gave up. Gallen was a throw in who the Marlins then traded away to the Diamondbacks. No one had any sense what Gallen might grow into at that time because he was a brand new minor leaguer. 4th or 5th rounder in the previous years draft I believe. But still the Cards threw him in as an addition on what already felt like a bad trade. And, this move also later created the situation which led to Arozarena leaving. Terrible trade.
Garcia we’ve discussed.
Arozarena is still not settled although it looks reasonably bad at this point. But we desperately needed pitching since we had traded it all away so I understand the move. We’ll see. Libby is still young. I liked Arozarena a lot before the trade and I’m sure the Rays did too.
Lane Thomas does not count at all. He had one lucky year on ball luck at age 30. It would have been stupid of the Cards to hang onto him for several more years of him being bad.
Tommy Pham just clashed with the team. That’s likely why no team has held onto him long. Yeah, the haul we got for him was poor but we were begging to lose him so that’s what you get. Sometimes it’s better to be rid of someone who causes chemistry issues.
Who else? Voit? Sosa? Marco Gonzalez? Oviedo/Nunez? All of those seem like ok trades where the Cards got what they needed. All of the other trades they’ve made have worked out well or been irrelevant. Goldschmidt, Arenado, Montgomery for example. Plus all their deadline deals this past year which look really good at this point. Plus, they’ve made some savvy pickups of waiver wire guys or minor league rule 5 guys like Palacios, Siani, and Brandon Komar. No, in my opinion the front office is not at all broken. They’ve made 2 horrible trades in my time as a fan. Both were out of desperation. Ozuna and Mulder. That’s why I don’t want to blindly pursue a trade for good pitching.
There is no way I will believe we finished in last place solely because of a bad trade 6 years ago. It took a bunch of bad moves to end up where we are. I harp on it because there is no rational reason to think Mo and the gand will suddenly get smart in time for this winter.
I really try to be rational but I have a difficult time in giving the front office a pass for players they give up on performing much better somewhere else, especially at an all star level.
“Well it was just bad luck”
“No one could have seen it coming”
“All of the other teams were wrong also”
“Just be happy for the player”
First off, I don’t think anyone here is unhappy for Garcia, Arozarena, Alcantara, Gallen, etc…. We are unhappy because they are performing at an extremely high level for another team.
And frankly, the “no one could see it coming” argument is very irritating. It is literally the job of our front office and development team to “see it coming”. That is their job! They get paid well for it I’m sure. Us armchair QB’s may seem nitpicky but it isn’t our job to get it right. The company I work for pays me to get certain things right but Cardinal player evaluations isn’t one of them. That is the job of Mo’s department and they don’t do it well.
The Cardinals scouting department has done a pretty good job for the most part since…well, as long as I can recall. Flores has done a nice job in his tenure as well. It’s odd that they have missed out on so many guys of late in trades that have gone on to be successful in other roles with other teams.
Is it all bad luck? I don’t know. Certainly some of it is, as you can expect trades to be somewhat cyclical. The Cardinals cleaned up from about 2009-2015 in trades and since then, have been decidedly in the negative. Free agency has gone through a similar trend. How much of it is simple bad luck, and how much ineptitude? It seems like both could be at play.
Yet the bigger issue is the inability to develop home grown talent that they do keep to supplement their trade acquisitions. The list of guys who looked to be bright stars one year and then never did anything else is lengthening (Reyes, Hudson, Helsley, Flaherty, O’Neill, etc). Similarly, the list of top prospects who busted are growing yearly (Carlson, Perez, Liberatore, etc) and it’s possible we add Walker and Winn to the group soon. Is that bad luck? I can’t say for sure, but the odds are that one guy would turn into a regular All Star with all the ranked talent we’ve had over the last decade. It simply hasn’t happened and it’s why the Cards have failed to be an upper echelon team in any year of late.
The best we’ve done is probably Tommy Edman, Harrison Bader and maybe Paul Dejong (jury is still out on Gorman), who are more role players or utility guys on good teams. We haven’t developed a single starting pitcher still with the club from a group in 2017 that included Reyes, Weaver, Flaherty, Gonzales, Alcantara, Gallen, Fernandez, Oviedo, Woodford, Hicks, Helsley, Gomber, Seijas and Hudson (the only one who has any chance to start with the club that’s still left).
Garcia has been gone for almost four years. The Ozuna trade was almost six years ago. Yet round and round we go here in 2023 about stuff that happened in 2017 and 2019.
Pretty hard for us to tell from here what has been learned or not.
It is literally the job of our front office and development team to “see it coming”. That is their job!
You are spot on, gscott. The criticism that fans shouldn’t critique in hindsight is nonsense. It’s the only way to eval an employee’s performance. I like to say they don’t pay Mo for his hindsight, his job is to deliver foresight.
Another deflection is “we don’t have all the information and aren’t qualified to question xyz decision.” I might not be a structural design expert and don’t have a clue why they used a welded joint versus a bolted joint, but when the building comes crashing down, I know the guys in charge of design, development and/or maintenance screwed up. We’ve been watching the building known as the St Louis Cardinals wobble the last few years and it pretty much crashed down in 2023.
stlcard’s post is also a good take.
Garcia has been gone for almost four years. The Ozuna trade was almost six years ago. Yet round and round we go here in 2023 about stuff that happened in 2017 and 2019.
Pretty hard for us to tell from here what has been learned or not.
If anything had been learned, we wouldn’t be in last place. If anything, they’ve unlearned more since then.
It’s possible that the front office and development team possessed the foresight to clearly see this entire failure coming, but were simply too focused on their own selfish interests to care…My take is that I want a front office and development team full of guys that have one thing on their minds, and it’s not themselves. It’s winning a championship. So, you start by weeding those out…So, to sum up this entire fiasco, I’d have to say that as long as I’m not situated in the structure when the building comes crashing down, I don’t really care who gets buried…
Have the bad trades/player moves continued in the last 4 years? If not, how can one know they have not learned from the mistakes?
That was just what came to mind. Traded Lane Thomas for the John Lester rental more recently that that. Lane has produced 6+ WAR for the Nats, and just put up his best season to date at age 28. Two more years of control. I think Lester produced 0.1 WAR for us. We could line up all the trades and FA signings for the last 4 years if want to argue it shows Mo knows what he’s doing. But again, we are in last place in a bad Division. We are worse that the Pirates, Reds and Cubs. There are only 4 teams in MLB worse than us.
Lane has produced 6+ WAR for the Nats
6.3 BWAR over 3 seasons. 4.3 FWAR over those 3 seasons. I prefer FWAR but either is generally ok for hitters. And all that with about 1450 plate appearances. Remember WAR is a counting stat. Is that good? Not really.
By comparison:
O’Neill – 7.8/7.5 about 1200 plate appearances
Carlson – 5.6/5.2 about 1350 plate appearances
Nootbaar – 6.1/6.4 about 975 plate appearancesSo Lane has basically been at Carlson level production except he’s 3 years older. Carlson is just about to hit his “peak” years whereas Thomas is halfway through them. This is why I just don’t care about Lane Thomas. His 28 homers this year was mildly interesting, but he’s almost at Burleson level of defense in the outfield. Could we have gotten more than Lester for him? Probably not at the time. But I suppose if we could have developed him into an ok outfielder earlier on, then maybe we could have gotten a bit more. But who cares? This is not a good player that the Cards regret losing.
This is not a good player that the Cards regret losing.
Yet.
He’s young, controllable and his performance trajectory is clearly up, which is better than retired and long gone.
2 things bother me about Garcia.
1) as I recall we didn’t have to let Garcia go. We weren’t in a 40 man roster crunch. So it seems likely our management soured on him.
2) He was dealt for cash. Not even a class A prospect.
I think I heard somewhere that Shildt didn’t like him. Whether that’s accurate I don’t know. Whether he was told to prioritize looking at other guys I don’t know. What I do know is we had a far better opportunity to get it right than everyone else, and we decided he was a lost cause.
We weren’t in a 40 man roster crunch.
They had just signed Kim and needed to make room for him. They didn’t waive Garcia because they didn’t think he’d clear, so they grabbed the bag of balls from Texas. This is back when they had assessed Carlson and O’Neill to be their next perennial stars in the OF. Whiff, whiff.
O’Neill was a star. But just for 1 season. His 2021 was worth more than Garcia’s 2023 in FWAR. Yes. That is a fact. Injuries keep tanking him. He’s hardly a whiff. Do I personally want him on the team in 2024? Not really. I’ve lost faith in him. But I think it’s hard to argue that he never had potential back when the decision was made to hang onto him in 2018.
Carlson is over 5 years younger than Garcia. 5 years ago Garcia was still in AAA striking out at an unsustainable rate. Where will Carlson be in 3 years or 5 years? It’s hard to know what the Cardinals believe. All we know is that this year Garcia was far better. But that doesn’t mean they whiffed on Carlson. Carlson is far better at 25 than Garcia was.
I hear and understand all your “accountability” arguments about the front office. It’s really easy to throw that out there. It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and fire every coach or player or general manager every time they do something that didn’t turn out well. He’ll, we could have fired AJ Preller 10 times over. Or maybe you give them just 2 or 3 things that don’t turn out well before termination? That sort of approach in the real world always ends up with people who are afraid to act or make decisions. A lot of really good companies have been crushed because someone decided to hold everyone “accountable”. And while it sounds good in practice and even seems logical, it almost never works in the long run because people work in fear and stop making decisions. They go into self preservation mode. And learning from mistakes also ceases. There are infinite case studies and research that support this. And I’ve seen it in my professional life several times over. But it sure sounds good. “Be tough. Hold them accountable.” I’ve probably terminated over 2000 people in my life. Certainly over 1000. But I’m not so sure, at least not for my first 20 years or so of doing it, that I actually helped those organizations get better with those terminations because we just kept doing the same thing hoping it would get better.
Sometimes people are in the wrong seat on the bus and they do need to be fired or moved. But I don’t believe that’s the case here. At least not with Mozeliak or Girsch. I think they need an honest chance to fix a season that went south in a hurry. 15 winning seasons in a row should buy them that. I want to win as bad as all of you and I personally trust that these guys are the best answer to do so. My faith may be misplaced but I’m all in. They will fix their issues. They began doing so about 3-4 years ago.
15 winning seasons in a row is a nice achievement but that in and of itself doesn’t tell the whole story. This organization has historically been about making the postseason and making deep runs in the postseason. If a Cardinal team goes 82-80 and misses the playoffs is that supposed to be considered a successful year? Hardly. Maybe for the Pirates or some other bottom feeder but not the Cardinals.
In the last 10 years (2014-23) we have been to the playoffs 6 times. Three of those times we were eliminated as a wild card, twice were eliminated in the NLDS, and once eliminated in the NLCS. No WS appearances in the last 10 years.
Again, we have higher standards than some other organizations have. At least I think we do. I think an argument could be made that this organization has become stale and needs a fresher approach.
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