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The Cards’ five worst winning percentages since WWII:
This season .416
1978 .426
1990 .432
1995 .434
1955 .442Last time it was lower than .416 was 1919.
Fire.
The.
Manager.Trades need to be made, and Mozeliak probably needs to depart as well. But the one biggest best change by far would be removing the overmatched, underqualified, and inexplicably arrogant buffoon in the dugout.
I think it is too late in the season to salvage it.
Firing Marmol and bringing in the greatest manager in history won’t make this a good team.
Plus, do we want Mo hiring another manager?
The head rolling needs to start with Mo. His replacement would then select the next manager.
The new dynamic duo would then have to figure out what to do with this roster – how to fix it.
Is it a reload / retool or a rebuild? Share the roadmap with the fans and then go make it hsppen.
It has been a full decade since we’ve had a really good team. Since then it’s been stumble along playing luke warm .500 baseball with a good late surge to have a winning record.
Until this season – the 10-24 start blew up Mo’s blueprint. Since then the team has stumbled along but now a good surge won’t save the day – it will take TWO such streaks to salvage 2023….
This Lunhow stuff is bizarre to me. The guy is completely toxic. Good grief.
And whoever our new miracle manager is I hope their pixie dust will magically improve our AAA caliber pitching staff.
Michael Kay on Brian Cashman
It's great to hear when Kay is asked his own opinions on Cashman… His answers sound like 95% of the fanbase
Pleasantly surprised
(On the The Show Heyman/Sherman podcast) pic.twitter.com/w7KydIlU8q
— fan of the Yankees (@realboshek) June 26, 2023
The org has been coasting on momentum since 2011. We’re at the bottom of hill now. If Mo and his system worked, it would have by now. It hasn’t and it won’t. We are in for a rough patch. It will get uglier before anything good happens.
Three Harsh Realities That Cardinals Fans Need To Accept https://t.co/JaOWlOSJ4o
— viva el birdos (@vivaelbirdos) July 2, 2023
Next season will probably be better than this season even it’s still the Mo and Marmol show but it would likely be back to the slog we’ve been on since 2016. A winning regular season record with zero hope of doing any damage in the playoffs if we manage to sneak in
The future is not bright for Cardinal baseball.
4 all-stars. Unfortunately the only ones that came up through the system are playing for other teams.
We supposedly had a wealth of outfield prospects. The two we have remaining of the dream outfield of O’Niell, Bader and Carlson have a collective WAR of 0. The four that Mo has traded away have acollective WAR of 8.9. Two of them on the all-star teams.
Fired a manager who made the playoffs each year and was voted Manager of the Year because he objected the coaching staff Mo pushed on him. Then the coaches left afer the next season under mysterious circumstances.
Hired a manager who seems to be over his head and making knee-jerk decisions left and right. That is a topic for later.
Has an international program that is contributing nothing to the major league team and has no top 100 international prospects. Everyone wails about the big spending year but Garcia and Arozarena seem to be representing that class pretty well for other teams. Way to go Mo.In all fairness Mo landed Goldschmidt and Aranodo and brought Albert back for a final season. And made deadline trades that helped us make the playoffs. Most of his free agent purchases have been a disaster. He seems to thing an aging player coming off a bad year will suddenly reemerge.
But bottom line Mo will never build a strong team unless he changes his approach significantly.
Sometimes I make myself believe that with a couple good starters, a couple good pen arms and a top shelf manager and coaching staff, we could contend. But then I come back down. I think in the end it comes to this: Mo has through the 2025 season to get the fan base to accept lower expectations.
For one thing, a top shelf manager is not going to be consistent with the “philosophy”, whatever it is exactly. If Mo and his philosophy couldn’t tolerate Shildt, he and it can’t tolerate anything that would help. Might as well just stay with Ollie and the other organization men.
And then the system is just not putting out the level of talent necessary to provide the quality of depth that a contender needs to get through a season and a make a run in post. So it wouldn’t really do any good to arrange for a good opening day roster. Attrition would turn it into a bad roster full of holes plugged by unproven and inconsistent hopefuls or whatever depth pieces Mo scraped up over the winter.
Mo has been gliding since the Astros raided the system after 2011, and he is not going to turn things around. He came up with the “competative” spiel, which has been wearing thin even before this year, but which seems to agree with ownership. I doubt he can continue to even put together a team that meets any definition of competative. His solution will likely be to come up with a new way to define success, a lower bar that he can achieve. He’s got two years to get the fanbase and ownership to buy into that, so I expect to see the new spiel rolled out soon, or maybe as we get close to ST next year.
Hochman suggests trading impending free agents Flaherty and Montgomery. Thoughts?
They have made their promises to Arenado to continue to build a winner, due to his past opt outs. Selling off the rotation members mentioned and you have a disgruntled Arenado, who is under hard contract for four more seasons. Bad PR.
The FO will try to trim the roster where they have depth. PDJ, Hicks and Stratton are the likeliest FA’s-to-be to be dealt.
Whether or not Arenado gets disgruntled about moving starters Flaherty and Montgomery depends on who ends up in next years rotation instead. He’s not going to be disgruntled about two guys who are better.
Anybody who is offed needs to be replaced. Pitchers and position players. Where is something better going to come from?
It’s your “who are better” scenario, you tell me where “better” came from.
Did you add Walker, Winn or Gorman to Flaherty/Montgomery to get better pitchers?
Fleecing another club is not a realistic game plan.
JMO, Arenado knows where the team stands better than any of us. He knows they are in last place and aren’t likely to improve enough this season to matter. He knows which of his teammates are most likely to leave as free agents. Like all of us, he would look at who is coming in and assess how they can help win in 2024 and beyond. If trades can help, why wouldn’t he be supportive? Because he is holding onto low odds hope that 2023 can be salvaged? Would he be happy with a weak division title and another quick playoff exit? My guess is not. He wants to earn a ring. Maintaining the status quo won’t get them there.
Of course, the real question is whether ownership and management would trade away the guys bccran mentioned mid-season. It would he unprecedented in the DeWitt years and have a short term negative impact on ticket sales and TV ratings, which fill the coffers.
If he wants a ring, he might try hitting in the postseason instead of disappearing. I give him credit for playing hard. He ran the based hard vs NYY just this weekend.
“Better” pitchers means including core talent from the lineup in trade. No-one is giving examples of how we bring in “better”. Tell me who you traded away to get better pitching and I’ll show you shuffling deck chairs.
To get better, you keep the lineup core intact and buy FA pitching during the offseason.
Would trading Flaherty and Montgomery and Hicks, for example, impact the core lineup? Standing alone, they might fetch a decent haul of younger players, especially in a market in which proven pitching is in very high demand.
Trying to sign front line starters as free agents in the offseason isn’t likely to work. They don’t pay for the handful of top guys so settle for the Leakes and Matzes instead. Their bullpen record isn’t much better.
Their recent strategy has been to try to trade for contract and cost controllable pitchers. A year ago at this time, none of us knew anything about Montgomery. Guys like that may be out there in the trade market.
That’s what they should do BW, but they won’t. It’s asking the win now guys (1B/3B) to punt on the season. I’m not so sure that sells in the clubhouse. Maybe…..
Sure wouldn’t hurt our draft position 👀Because of the Gallen and Alcantara results, I don’t think Mo will trade younger, cost controlled guys like Walker, Gorman, Liberatore, Graceffo, McGreevy, Winn, Herrera, etc. Those are the young, foundation players of the future. And I sure don’t see Goldy and Arenado being discussed. But guys like Monty (Boros client), Flaherty (wants free agency) DeJong, O’Neill will probably be on the table for sure. As well as Yepez, Gomez, and Baker.
The interesting ones are Edman, Carlson, Donovan, Noot, and Burly. Guys they might like to hold onto, but for the right deal……
FWIW, I tend to agree with you, bccran. They may also have to dip into the “interesting” offensive guys to get the right kind of pitching deals done.
Arenado may become disgruntled? If so, I’d say that’s good. Every member of the 26 man should all be more than a bit disgruntled. In my view, guys like Chris Carpenter, Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina and Scott Rolen all seemed to take on a countenance and attitude that impressed me as disgruntled. Tony LaRussa impressed me as perpetually disgruntled. I’d say it’s high time for Arenado and the rest of the Redbirds to stop being “Shiny happy people holding hands” and become very disgruntled. I think there’s a good chance that being disgruntled is what it’s gonna take to fix the Cardinals.
Last year, the objective of deadline trading was to get what we needed to make postseason. It does not seem likely that Mo will have that same objective this year. Rather, the objective in dealing at the deadline, as opposed to over the winter, is that contenders needing a certain piece will offer a good deal to get it.
We will have to be willing to trade the good stuff if we are going to be of interest to the contenders at the deadline. That “certain piece” is not likely to be a conplientary guy or bench player or depth guy. They will want a steady reliable starter, like Monty, rather than a coin flip every time out guy like Flaherty. They will want a steady everyday starting position player who upgrdes a hole, like Bader was last year. If they need a pen arm, they will want one they can count on.
Does “a decent haul of younger players” automatically make the roster better?
Say they trade Monty, Flaherty and Hicks for two top 100 SP prospects. That would be quite a haul for 3 half-season rentals.
You just acquired two more Liberatore types. Now tell me how we pitch better in 2024.
Acquiring unproven pitching with upside is not how the 2024 pitching staff gets better. It gets better by buying proven pitching over the offseason, like contenders do. Hope for decent youth as mlb “better” is not a sound strategy. It’s fine for added depth but immediate results are unlikely. The roster still needs proven, to be better.
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