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An April 2024 poll by The Athletic canvassed executives throughout Major League Baseball to rank the best front offices in the game today. When the music stopped, the St. Louis Cardinals were left without a chair as they failed to garner a single vote from their peers.
While this may be surprising to some casual fans, a storm has been brewing between the fanbase and ownership when it comes to roster construction and the overall operational compass of the franchise.
A total of 40 MLB executives who had “experience as the primary decision-maker for a team, either in the past or the present” were asked by The Athletic to rank the best five MLB front offices. Five points were allotted to their top pick and a single point for their fifth and final pick.
The Los Angeles Dodgers (284 points) and Tampa Bay Rays (258) lapped the field.
While the sample size is small, the end result from league counterparts is still a revelation for the historically significant St. Louis Cardinals organization.
The ‘Cardinal Way’ of Doing Things
St. Louis has a long and storied past dating back to the late 1800s that includes a stellar run of winning baseball for a good portion of the new millennia. The organization embraced a burgeoning analytical dynamic that began to seep into the sport in the early 2000s.
The Redbirds’ new focus on an analytically driven business model helped revolutionize baseball.
The Cardinals incorporated Sabermetrics with their standard pillars of scouting and development, leading to a consistent string of homegrown talent and a successful on-field product that reached the World Series stage on four occasions – winning it all twice.
With integral cogs such as Jeff Luhnow and Sig Mejdal heading the analytics surge – and Hall of Fame skipper Tony La Russa in the dugout, the Cardinals set an enviable standard of winning baseball. Credit to previous architect, Walt Jocketty, is warranted as well.
The Inevitable Winds of Change
While it’s true nothing lasts forever, the Cardinals were able to avoid tanking or a deep rebuild while remaining relevant year after year. Once all the aforementioned names either moved on or retired, the team continued its successful ways over the next few seasons.
In 2017, then-general manager John Mozeliak was promoted to president of baseball operations, and the GM job went to fellow Cardinal alumnus Michael Girsch. Former Cardinals pitcher Randy Flores was already installed as the team’s scouting director.
For one of the great baseball cities in the world, most of the last decade has been one to forget in many ways.
As longtime St. Louisan and nationally recognized journalist Bernie Miklasz wrote in a March 2024 piece on Scoops Sports Network, “Since 2015, the Cardinals are 5-14 in the playoffs and have one triumph in a postseason round. Not only that, but 17 MLB franchises have won more postseason games than St. Louis over the past nine years. Ugh.”
Miklasz also touched on a before-and-after reality the Birds on the Bat currently find themselves in.
“The Cardinals have won more regular season and more postseason games than any National League team since the start of 2000. And no NL franchise has made the playoffs more often than St. Louis (16) over the 24-season time frame,” he wrote.
“[Now] the Cardinals are more distant and displaced from their glory-days run under chairman (and owner) Bill DeWitt Jr,” Miklasz wrote. “They seem a lot closer to the mediocrity of Cardinal teams from the 1950s, 1970s and the late 1980s and early 1990s.”
Miklasz also echoed the primary concern toward a trend that seems to have taken hold.
“With the Cardinals becoming more irrelevant in the biggest month of the baseball season – that would be October – it’s fair to wonder whether they can climb back, get on the big stage and stay there for more than a couple of October days,” he wrote.
Make no mistake: St. Louis is a baseball-crazy town where the bar has been raised beyond a mere winning record. Brief October visits or outright omission from the postseason has become unacceptable to the uber-passionate fanbase.
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