In the late summer of 2016, the St. Louis Cardinals again were in the playoff hunt because this was, after all, the St. Louis Cardinals. Under baseball boss John Mozeliak, the Cards won the 2011 World Series, made the 2012 National League Championship Series, made the 2013 World Series, reached the NLCS again in 2014 and won 100 games in 2015.
Back then, I hosted a radio show with Post-Dispatch scribes Derrick Goold and Ben Frederickson. And one day, I made a proclamation that I still think about after all these years: “If 'Mo' keeps this up, he’ll be on the outfield wall!â€
It was bold, but I felt if Mozeliak kept it going, he’d go down as an iconic executive, worthy of his face on the Busch Stadium left field wall, alongside players with retired numbers (and Rogers Hornsby, Jack Buck and August A. Busch Jr.).
But here we are. The Cards missed the playoffs that fall of 2016. And 2017. And 2018. From 2019-2022, they made the playoffs ... but won just four combined games. They missed the playoffs in 2023, embarrassingly, and they’ll miss the playoffs in 2024, maddeningly.
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It’s time. Mozeliak should be replaced as president of baseball operations. He has one more year on his contract, but surely they can cook up a way to keep him involved but not as the baseball boss. The front office needs to be refreshed and refurbished.
Chaim Bloom, naturally, makes sense as the successor. He’s already a Cardinals adviser. The former Red Sox and Rays exec has a remarkable résumé and would bring a new perspective and energy to the front office.
And so what you’re now reading is a culmination of columns I’ve written this month, this season and, really, this era of underachieving Cardinals baseball. It’s fair to point out that Mozeliak and his staff are smart baseball thinkers. Passionate employees. And they have access to advanced analytics that fans and journalists don’t. But it simply comes down to results. And the results have been bad. Painfully bad.
Everything that made the Cardinals the Cardinals has evaporated. The winning, of course. The offensive firepower. The development of young pitching prospects. The savvy spending. The luster (or at least some of it) from being an elite and revered franchise. And the attendance.
People didn’t come. The crowd in the final weeks were sparse and even historically low at Busch Stadium III. The annual streak of 3 million fans ended Sunday after 18 years at the new park. The devoted fan base became a hopelessly devoted fan base and then, by this summer, just hopeless.
And Mozeliak has become the primary target of the fans’ ire. Heck, the home crowd booed Mozeliak at a ceremony at the end of the 2023 season. And he was booed at the home opener in 2024 — and that was before this awful, .500 season unfurled.
If Cardinals Chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. can’t see (or accept) that there is a problem with status quo, then there is a problem with ownership. If DeWitt brings back Mozeliak in the exact same job and says something about still believing in 'Mo' and his model, we’ll see St. Louis sports fans as mad as they’ve been since the Rams left.
Yes, any move DeWitt makes is a baseball business decision — not one to appease social media. But as I write this from the Busch press box Sunday, and I see empty rows upon rows at the last home game, one has to think that it’s all related.
DeWitt publicly praises Mozeliak all the time. Understandably so — along with all the winning seasons and the 2011 trophy, Mozeliak’s teams have earned DeWitt quite a bit of money. But it was also DeWitt who said this telling quote. It’s from 2018, when the Cardinals fired manager Mike Matheny — and it’s a quote that’s been cited across St. Louis all summer:
“In some places, winning is just a winning record — or even .500 is acceptable. Players have a nice season, go home, get back to their families and so forth. But not in this city, not with this franchise, not with its history and not with our great fans.â€
Of course, it’s DeWitt’s team that is now around .500. You’d hope he deems that as unacceptable.
His best hitter does.
After Sunday’s final home game of the year, catcher Willson Contreras stood by his locker. Contreras dealt with two broken bones this year, but his on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS) of .846 (in 84 games) is the highest on the team. And his OPS in 2023 is tops on the team, too.
Asked about 2024, Contreras was blunt: “Big disappointment. We cannot be OK with these results, again. It might be better than last year, but if you look at the Cardinals as an organization, it's a huge organization for (Major League Baseball), so we should be hungry to be on top of this NL Central. And we haven't done that in the last two years. ...
“There's some stuff that I'm pretty sure that the front office knows that we need to be better at. (This year) was a big disappointment for me, and I'm pretty sure the rest of the guys feel the same way.â€
Blame can be spread. Plenty of Cardinals and Cardinals staffers had underachieving seasons. But they all work under Mozeliak.Â
So no, Mozeliak won’t end up on the left field wall. But he will, very likely, end up with a red jacket in the Cardinals Hall of Fame. A lot of great seasons and postseasons. But 2019 was the last time the Cards won a playoff series (the National League Division Series vs. Atlanta). A half-decade ago. And it’s been more than a decade since they won the pennant.
The Cardinals need to restore the aura of the past with fresh leadership in the future — the immediate future.