The day was September 27, 1959, and the St. Louis Cardinals finished their season with a doubleheader sweep of the San Francisco Giants. By this point, neither the Giants nor Cardinals, though armed with baseball legends like Willie Mays and Stan Musial, were contending for the National League pennant, but 19,477 fans flocked to what had previously been known as Sportsman’s Park, the team’s highest home attendance in over a month and a half, to watch the two teams play. If you were one of those in attendance, you may have left the stadium for a soda fountain or sock hop (my entire concept of the 1950s comes from Grease and/or Back to the Future) to listen to America’s number-one song, “Sleep Walk” by Santo & Johnny, or perhaps Bobby Darin’s ascending hit “Mack the Knife”. Perhaps you went to the movie theater to catch Alfred Hitchcock’s classic North by Northwest. Or perhaps you simply went home and reflected on what a bummer it was to see your beloved St. Louis Cardinals, for the second consecutive season, lose more games than it had won.

The good news is that if you have such a memory, unless you were an extremely precocious child, you are likely in your seventies or older, to which I congratulate you on a long and hopefully happy life despite being the kind of person who reads this website. The other good news is that this would be, to date, the last time you watched back-to-back losing seasons from the St. Louis Cardinals.

To paraphrase site contributor Alex Turpin (former site contributor? I don’t know, he hasn’t written here in a while but as far as I know, he still has access to do so, haven’t checked that in a while) over the weekend, St. Louis Cardinals fans are indeed annoying people, but not for the reasons that many people on the internet think. It isn’t because we have particularly bad worldviews relative to any other group of people but because of a sense of entitlement so strong that failure to live up to expectations not only makes us unhappy, which to some degree is normal and expected, but makes us believe that the world is somehow conspiring against us. Alex compared Cardinals fans to King of the Hill wacky conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble, not exactly a flattering comparison, before two minutes later comparing Cardinals fans to the Unabomber. Which is, of course, ridiculous, as Ted Kaczynski grew up in Chicago Cubs territory (though I assume, if he ever were a fan, abandoned the team once they installed lights at Wrigley Field).

I have personally never understood the notion of flaunting how many championships your favorite sports team has won, having not contributed to the on-field product or even having watched most of them live, but if you are one to do that, unless you’re running up against a New York Yankees fan, being a Cardinals fan is a decided advantage (my way of trolling the Yankees is by the act of having a beard). Eleven World Series championships is probably more than your enemy’s favorite team. But the defining characteristic of the Cardinals franchise since 1960 has not been championships–five is above the expected number per franchise since then of 2.46 (for teams that existed in 1960) but this puts them behind the Yankees, level with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and just one ahead of the Athletics and Red Sox–but consistency. Even the mighty Yankees had four consecutive losing seasons from 1989 through 1992, and three consecutive from 1965 through 1967. The Cardinals haven’t even had two in that time.

I have made a point over my years of baseball writing to explain my somewhat unpopular belief that, to me, the most important function that a baseball team can serve for its fans is not winning championships but keeping fans invested throughout the season. A simplistic way to look at this is that a seven-game World Series will last, barring rainouts, a maximum of nine days. An entire playoff run takes up less than a month. But the six months that precede the postseason, by definition, are a longer stretch. If a team is eliminated from postseason contention on the final weekend of the regular season, a thing which the Cardinals have done multiple times in the last decade, the lack of playoff games is a genuine disappointment but they at least provided six months of entertainment. That’s most of what they are capable of doing. Most teams are able to accomplish something along these lines, particularly in a format where 40% of the league plays postseason baseball, so I don’t want to give too much credit, but most teams aren’t as good at reaching that threshold as the one I like because I grew up 20 minutes from their home stadium. And I enjoy that.

A problem I have with the “World Series or bust” mentality that many fans have–and to be clear, this is very much not exclusive to Cardinals fans–is that it is a virtual guarantee to disappoint you. I am old enough to be president of the United States and I’ve seen my favorite team win the World Series twice. And that’s above-average! Even if I were a New York Yankees fans and got to see my team win more than any other team has, I’d get five. That’s 18% of the titles given since 1996, which means 82% of the time, you don’t get a World Series parade. It simply isn’t healthy to live life that way.

Because of their sustained success–their perpetual ability to remain viable–the Cardinals organization probably is entitled to a bit of a mulligan. Something like last season–a 71-91 campaign which was easily the worst vibes season of my memory that didn’t involve the team constantly having to quarantine because their players were getting the disease causing a worldwide pandemic–was probably overdue, and even if there were legitimate criticisms to be made about the front office, the manager, and the players, I’m inclined to forgive it once. Once.

I didn’t think the Cardinals would go 71-91–I thought they were probably division favorites or at the very least a team that would be viable contenders for the crown throughout 2023. But the reasons to be suspicious that the Cardinals might be underachievers were everywhere. This was a team that, the year before, had heavily relied on thirtysomethings Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado, and it was extremely unlikely that the franchise would once again have two MVP finalists, much less that it would come from the two guys on the likely downsides of their careers. This was a team that had started Jose Quintana, a deadline rental, in their first playoff game in 2022 and hadn’t seriously addressed its starting rotation beyond the continued employment of Jordan Montgomery–Miles Mikolas was getting older, Adam Wainwright was getting ancient, Jack Flaherty was a ticking injury time bomb, Steven Matz was never realistically meant to be anything more than a third starter at best, and the rest of the rotation depth was either unproven or Dakota Hudson. They made the most predictable free agent signing in franchise history, inking Willson Contreras to replace Yadier Molina, and they brought back Adam Wainwright, but otherwise mostly stopped.

The Cardinals made it a point to address their starting rotation this off-season, which they did, but the holes were largely of their own making. This part isn’t a criticism–in a lost season, trading Jack Flaherty and Jordan Montgomery, even if for spare parts, is the right decision. But when you put the groups of Potential Low-End Ace, Flashy Guy With Serious Question Marks, and Middling Veteran Who Might Be Okay But Also Might Be Rough, is there that sizable difference between the departed trio of Jordan Montgomery/Jack Flaherty/Adam Wainwright and the incoming trio of Sonny Gray/Lance Lynn/Kyle Gibson? Gray signed for an identical average annual value to Montgomery, Flaherty signed for $3 million more than Lynn, and there isn’t really a comparison for Gibson and Wainwright since one of them signed a contract for baseball and one of them signed a contract for recording music. I’d probably go with the current trio, and with the additions of Sem Robberse and Drew Rom to the expanded roster, I’m more content with their six-through-ten depth, but let’s not pretend that this rotation is lightyears ahead of how we felt about 2023.

Not that they had much of a choice, and not that parting with them would have made strategic sense, but the Cardinals are still relying on a pair of aging corner infielders and they are counting on an unproven MLB bat to provide some sort of production at the plate from the shortstop position. After last year’s Willson Contreras designated hitter debacle, I don’t want to get too confident at the catcher position, either. Which brings us to an outfield that will likely deploy Alec Burleson, Victor Scott II, and Jordan Walker this afternoon. I actually might be higher than most on this trio of players by virtue of being relatively bullish on Burleson, but this is still a passable-at-best defensive corner outfielder with a career 83 OPS+ in 400 plate appearances. I think Jordan Walker improved defensively throughout the season–I’m not the only person to have claimed this–but I can’t pretend this might not be a “it’s just a little airborne it’s still good it’s still good” situation given how cataclysmic his defense was early in the season. And Victor Scott II sported a .763 OPS in the first half of last season–in high-A.

My pick to win the National League Central this season is the Chicago Cubs, though I have the Cardinals in second, barely ahead of the Milwaukee Brewers, with the team missing out on Wild Card spots to the San Diego Padres, Philadelphia Phillies, and Arizona Diamondbacks. I don’t think the Cardinals are going to be awful this year–I have a hard time imagining they will be worse than the twenty games under .500 at which they finished last season. But I don’t know that. And much of the optimism for the Cardinals in 2024, including perhaps some of my own, comes from the idea that because the Cardinals are always good, that they will continue to be.

There is only one player on the Cardinals–Lance Lynn, returning this season–who has won a World Series with the Cardinals (going by Baseball Reference; I know that Matt Carpenter had some plate appearances in the 2011 regular season). No St. Louis Cardinals player (or manager, for that matter) was alive for the franchise’s third-most-recent title, and given their ages, it’s quite unlikely that several aren’t even old enough to remember 2006. A majority of the Cardinals’ championships were won during an era in which St. Louis was such a prominent city that it played host to two franchises in a sixteen-team league. The twenty-fourth largest media market in the United States, one in the smallest quarter of MLB teams, does not a divine right to be perpetually great.

The Cardinals will probably never be as dynastic as they have been in the past again. This is true for the New York Yankees; it’s hardly a St. Louis-only problem. But they absolutely can be better than 71-91. As much as Cardinals fans are often inclined to complain about ownership, often righteously, the team’s payroll does exceed its market size–it ranks 11th in MLB per Spotrac, with every market outpacing them being considerably larger. “The Cardinals could afford to spend more” is probably true but no more so than with any other team. Bill DeWitt Jr. does not seem to be an aggressively hands-on owner–he does live in a different MLB city (Cincinnati) after all–so I doubt it was his decision to extend Miles Mikolas into his late thirties. It wasn’t likely his fault that the Cardinals bounced back and forth early last season on Willson Contreras or on Tyler O’Neill. It likely wasn’t Bill DeWitt Jr. who fostered such a contentious clubhouse that the team felt it necessary to load up on mid-to-late-thirties “clubhouse leader” types this off-season, and it wasn’t he who executed the countless controversial trades the Cardinals made over the last few seasons. To be fair to (in the case of the latter) John Mozeliak and/or Michael Girsch, I supported trading Sandy Alcantara, Zac Gallen, and Randy Arozarena at the time, but as somebody who is not employed by the Cardinals, I will never have to answer for those moves.

I’m glad Mozeliak, Girsch, and Oliver Marmol remain with the Cardinals, because the former two have done a lot of good for the Cardinals and I blame most of the latter’s shortcomings on the former two (I still think Mike Shildt is a better manager, but that ship has sailed). I can forgive 2023. But I fear that most of my good faith, and that most of what optimism exists about 2024, is muscle memory. The team doesn’t have to win the World Series, or honestly even the division, for me to consider 2024 a success to some degree or another, but they have to do better than last year. Otherwise, not only is the job of every architect of this team at risk, but the Cardinals run the risk of being something they haven’t been since the Eisenhower administration–irrelevant in the National League. The primary reason that the Cardinals run a higher payroll than their market size isn’t DeWitt’s generosity but because they have cultivated a large regional and national fan base, one which will fracture in subsequent generations if the team starts to perform like the Pittsburgh Pirates, where mediocrity is the default setting.

I am curious what a world looks like in which the Cardinals are just another team. But not curious enough to actually wish to see it. Go Birds.