There is nothing in the bylaws of Major League Baseball that says that the St. Louis Cardinals must be an annual threat to win the World Series.

The St. Louis Cardinals have won eleven World Series championships, though only three of those came since the Major League Baseball postseason expanded beyond the World Series. Most of their championships came in an era preceding free agency, and even the 1982 title came at the dawn of widespread owner collusion to keep free agent salaries suppressed, a move which the owners conducted for their own (illegal, immoral) gains but which also had the residual effect of small-to-mid market teams being at less of a disadvantage than in future eras. The Cardinals are hardly the only franchise coasting on glories which largely exist outside of living memory–the New York Yankees tout their twenty-seven championships, though just one of those has happened since the month when Juan Soto turned two years old–but their historic success would be the hardest to explain to an outsider. If you told somebody who knew nothing of baseball that there was a franchise that was the most popular team in the country’s most populous city which annually ran a top-two payroll, it would be reasonable to assume that said franchise would be among the most successful. If you told somebody the fundamental structural advantages and disadvantages of the MLB team in the 21st largest combined statistical area in the United States, there would be no such obviousness of historic success.

But there’s no reason it should be this bad. For most of the twenty-first century, the St. Louis Cardinals have been a paragon of consistency, totaling just one losing season from 2000 through 2022 and never missing out on postseason play for more than three consecutive seasons. Among fans, a certain sense of complacency set in, a belief that an 86-win season constituted an organizational failure which necessitated the metaphorical rolling of heads. From a purely results standpoint, if not always a process standpoint, we seemed deeply spoiled: the volume of calls for the job of hitting coach Jeff Albert, whose final year in St. Louis produced an offense which tied for fifth in the sport in runs scored with two MVP candidates and an unparalleled resurgence from 42 year-old Albert Pujols, or especially for the job of Mike Matheny (when my former Viva El Birdos boss Craig Edwards wrote his legendary takedown calling for Matheny’s job, the team had made the postseason field in every Matheny season, had won three consecutive division titles including a 100-win campaign the season before, and at the time it published, the Cardinals were six games above .500 for the season), reflected this sense of entitlement.

The boy who cried wolf is such a clichéd metaphor that many of you will attempt to get refunds from this free blog post, but it applies here. And the key detail of that story is that a wolf does eventually come (maybe we can use the worst person you know just making a great point if you want a more modern example). Throughout 2023, as miserable as the season could be at times, Cardinals fans could reassure themselves that this was surely an outlier, the equivalent to a Patrick Mahomes interception after an ill-advised pass into double coverage or a badly missed Steph Curry free throw. But we now sit just a few days away from the quarter-point of the season and the St. Louis Cardinals are playing at a 67.5-win pace. Baseball Reference gives the Cardinals a 0.2% chance to make it to the postseason; even I think this is a bit overly pessimistic, but even sportsbooks, the ones whose entire extremely lucrative business model is based on giving somewhat inefficient payouts based on true probability, have turned on the Cardinals, presently giving a 90:1 payout on a Cardinals World Series win and a 9:1 on a division title, ranking them fourth in the latter race.

By Wins Above Replacement, the best player on the St. Louis Cardinals this season, Willson Contreras, was injured last night and will likely be out for the next couple months. The team’s second-most valuable player, shortstop Masyn Winn, is extraordinarily watchable and exciting in ways that transcend how much he can contribute to Cardinals victories, but his offense has fallen off a cliff (after a hot start, his wRC+ since April 16th, totaling 62 plate appearances, stands at 44% below league average) and his defensive metrics, while not extensive enough to draw too emphatic of conclusions, suggest that his rocket arm is doing a lot of work in crafting his reputation as a defensive whiz. The Cardinals’ third-most valuable player is Sonny Gray, who started the season on the IL and has only appeared in five games.

That Sonny Gray has been legitimately excellent–his 0.89 ERA is certainly unsustainable but his advanced metrics suggest that his deserved results would yield an ERA in the low-twos–and that Willson Contreras has been a productive hitter are, of course, good things, but they also reflect a problem which has been brewing for years. Gray and Contreras were brought in from the outside, and while this is a great way to supplement the roster, even the richest teams in baseball are fundamentally built upon the strength of homegrown talent. The reason that many people predicted an offensive resurgence in 2024 was not a belief that Paul Goldschmidt or Nolan Arenado would return to 2022 MVP-caliber form (though I don’t believe such a pronounced drop-off from the former was predicted by even the most hardened cynics), but a belief that players who came of age in the Cardinals system that have flashed brilliance such as Brendan Donovan, Nolan Gorman, Lars Nootbaar, or Jordan Walker would make further progress. Dylan Carlson, who was a top-ten prospect in all of baseball more recently than the Cardinals have won a playoff game, has only made eight plate appearances but has produced such weak contact and has misread balls in the outfield so badly that it has been reasonable to question if he will ever be able to exceed the adequacy that has served as his MLB peak thus far.

When the book Moneyball was published in 2003, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane was considered a genuine visionary; every team in baseball, including those with budgets far exceeding that which Beane had, aspired to incorporate his principles within their own organizations. The ultimate irony of Moneyball is that, by increasing Beane’s visibility, what he had previously exploited as market inefficiencies became properly calibrated, and because the floor of what a front office should be had been elevated, Beane no longer had a unique advantage, and he spent his final decade or so as the key decision maker for Oakland as just another front office guy. The problem wasn’t that Billy Beane got dumber; he almost certainly got smarter, but at a much slower rate than the sport as a whole.

And in 2011, when the St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series, turning over most of their 2006 roster while reshaping a barren farm system into one of the strongest farm systems in the sport, John Mozeliak was on top of the world. He was regarded as one of the sport’s greatest minds. And nothing that has happened in the subsequent thirteen years has changed what he accomplished. Similar things could be said about Walt Jocketty, who led the Cardinals with an approach befitting his circumstances. But by the time 2007 ended, even with the afterglow of the previous year’s World Series title, Jocketty’s sell off what few prospects the organization could successfully develop for short-term veterans had caught up–the core of the team, aside from Albert Pujols (we didn’t really know quite yet how much Adam Wainwright and particularly Yadier Molina would be part of the team’s long-term core), was aging, and there wasn’t much in the way of reinforcements coming up in the near future.

It has become increasingly fashionable to critique John Mozeliak’s administration by contrasting it with Walt Jocketty, which of course ignores the mediocrity of the late 1990s in the same way that those who reminisce about music of yesteryear only remember the best of the best (there’s a reason Vietnam War movie montages tend to be scored to “Gimme Shelter” instead of the bubblegum pop that was actually dominating the charts of the era). But the context of when these general managers came around is relevant. And once teams got smart enough to not allow the David Ecksteins of the world, useful role players, to get away for low costs, the Walt Jocketty blueprint no longer worked.

In the late aughts and early 2010s, there were still inefficiencies in Major League Baseball which John Mozeliak could exploit. They deserve credit for developing unacclaimed amateur prospects like Matt Carpenter into viable big-leaguers. They could be aggressive–in July 2014, the Cardinals acquired John Lackey, who would become a pivotal part of their rotation for a season and a half, because the organization immediately recognized Allen Craig’s downfall as a permanent condition rather than a temporary blip. And four months later, following the tragic death of top prospect Oscar Taveras, the Cardinals responded proactively by trading Shelby Miller to acquire Jason Heyward. Mozeliak was not necessarily a swindler–the trades often cited as his most lopsided often omit the context of acquiring players (Matt Holliday, Paul Goldschmidt, Nolan Arenado) with contracts that can or will expire that are subsequently extended–but he could react to what the situation necessitated.

Mozeliak has become far more famous in recent years for his misfires–for trading Randy Arozarena for Matthew Liberatore, for trading Sandy Alcantara and Zac Gallen for Marcell Ozuna, for effectively giving away Adolis García to the Texas Rangers. Evaluating these trades is a bit of a double-edged sword, because each of them was defensible and often outright exciting in the moment, but the reasons that the trades look so poor in hindsight reflect poorly on the Cardinals organization as a whole, which ultimately is the responsibility of the front office.

At the time, Liberatore was the more highly regarded prospect; he was younger by nearly half a decade than Arozarena, and while the Cardinals seemed to have a surplus of viable MLB outfielders, they had a shortage of young pitchers. Sandy Alcantara looked like a future MLB reliever and Zac Gallen was a nonfactor as far as Cardinals prospect rankings go. And while Adolis García’s departure is now presented as trading a player for cash, the reality is even more stinging of an indictment of the Cardinals’ analysis of him–they just wanted him off the roster so they could get what they perceived as a “real” prospect in his place. But it’s fair to wonder why Arozarena, a speedy and smaller center fielder in the Cardinals organization, was able to transform into an effective hulking corner outfielder in Tampa Bay, or to wonder what the Marlins and Diamondbacks managed to unlock in young pitcher the Cardinals considered expendable. Lane Thomas hit 28 home runs in the Majors last year. Lane Thomas!

The so-called Cardinal Way, the one that the organization itself uses to describe its process and not the lazy term used by the rotting husks of old Deadspin commenters to denote something that they happen to not like, is a reflection of how the Cardinals develop players. It’s not unique to the Cardinals, and most of the features are universally acclaimed traits across the sport, but for many years, it seemed that the Cardinals did have some sort of propensity for development, not because of anything magical but because of something within the Cardinals’ infrastructure. But a list of the most productive Cardinals offensive players since 2010 (admittedly a semi-arbitrary cut-off, but I don’t know that a different cut-off dramatically impacts results) shows that very few came up as Cardinals during the Mozeliak years. Here is the list as measured by FanGraphs’s Offensive Runs Above Average.

1. Matt Holliday: Came up with the Colorado Rockies
2. Matt Carpenter: A legitimate Cardinals win, from the 2009 draft
3. Paul Goldschmidt: Came up with the Arizona Diamondbacks
4. Albert Pujols: Pre-Mozeliak Cardinal
5. Nolan Arenado: Came up with the Colorado Rockies
6. Tommy Pham: Drafted during the Jocketty years, but most of his development came under Mozeliak, so I’m inclined to give him at least some credit
7. Carlos Beltrán: Came up with the Kansas City Royals
8. Allen Craig: A somewhat less extreme version of Tommy Pham–drafted in 2006
9. José Martínez: Came up with the Chicago White Sox, but first made it to MLB after a long minor league career as a Cardinal. Gets some credit
10. Tyler O’Neill: Mostly developed with the Seattle Mariners

Before this season, Major League Baseball ranked the Cardinals’ farm system as the 23rd best in baseball. Farm system rankings ultimately do not matter much, but they can at least produce some anticipation for the future. The #1 farm system in baseball belongs to the Baltimore Orioles, as it has for several years; even if the MLB club hadn’t turned the corner last season, the sheer anticipation for the young players prompted buzz, which isn’t nothing in terms of the fan experience. The #2 and #3 farm system belonged to the Chicago Cubs and Milwaukee Brewers, respectively, who presently lead the Cardinals by 6.5 games in the National League Central. The Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates also landed in the top ten.

It is fashionable to criticize Bill DeWitt Jr. for the empty promises of greatly expanding payroll, but this criticism, which is often reasonably fair, is mostly independent from criticism of the organization’s current operations. Could the Cardinals run a higher payroll than one ranked 12th? Yes. If every owner operated with the express purposes of merely breaking even financially and trying to win, would the Cardinals rank materially higher than 12th? Probably not–while the regional popularity of the Cardinals and relatively high attendance (they get a lot of grief for lying about attendance, but what incentive do they have to do so that isn’t shared by any other team struggling at the gate?), Greater St. Louis is still a lower-middle-sized market. But the point remains that, if payroll correlated perfectly with on-field success, the Cardinals would be a playoff team–barely, but they would be. They are currently much worse than that.

Even if Bill DeWitt Jr. started spending money like a man in his eighties who wants to win another championship, adding another Willson Contreras or Sonny Gray alone wouldn’t radically transform this organization. They need change. Multiple hitting coaches and managers had been chased out of town prior to Turner Ward and Oliver Marmol–if they are problems for the team (I’m currently in the “they probably aren’t good but they also probably aren’t in good situations” camp), those that hired them in the first place must be called into question.

Even if hot takes about John Mozeliak are popular among Cardinals fans, it’s not something I enjoy doing–I like the guy personally, I think much of the criticism of him is either superficial (his tone of voice, his manner of dress, etc.) or unrelated to him (criticizing the payroll), and most significantly, I think he has been, by and large, a very good and important part of St. Louis Cardinals history. But sports are the rare industry in which an employee being either terminated or otherwise consciously kept from coming back are the most common cause of turnover. Firing John Mozeliak wouldn’t be a case of taking away his employee badge and walking him down to the parking lot with boxes in hand to make sure he doesn’t steal anything that isn’t nailed down–he is somebody who would, and should, be invited back by the team, and who after the bad taste of the last couple of years had receded into the background, should be politely applauded as the architect of a thrilling championship St. Louis Cardinals team. But the Cardinals do need to make a change; I feel uncomfortable even typing the words “John Mozeliak should be fired”, so I can’t even imagine how uncomfortable the actual action of doing so would be for ownership. But it’s a change that needs to be happen, not to salvage 2024 but to reorganize a once-brilliant organization that has grown stale.