You could make a case, despite a few decidedly mediocre seasons in the back half of the decade, that the St. Louis Cardinals were the Team Of The 2010s. The San Francisco Giants won the most titles, but were nondescript otherwise. The Boston Red Sox got a pair themselves but also had some downright lousy seasons in there. The New York Yankees won the most games, but never even made a World Series; the Los Angeles Dodgers won the second-most but never won a championship. Third came the Cardinals.

That case, halfway through the 2020s, does not apply to this decade. The Cardinals are tied for 13th in regular season wins. That the Cardinals made the postseason in the first three seasons of the decade feels like it requires an asterisk–2020 was a shortened season with an expanded postseason (granted, their fifth-place National League finish would theoretically get them into the second Wild Card under the ten-team playoff), 2021 saw the Cardinals uncompetitive in the National League Central and relegated to a single road playoff game, and while the 2022 season did see a division title come to St. Louis, their postseason run lasted eighteen innings. Their last victory in front of a paying audience in the playoffs came on October 9, 2019, which also marks the last time the Cardinals played in an NLDS game.

I make a conscious effort in analyzing the Cardinals to not overstate their woes, because I understand that fans who have become accustomed to successes are more likely to overrate their deficiencies. They haven’t been terrible. But they have been mediocre. And they have been boring. Oh my, how they have turned into the most uninteresting team you could imagine. There’s a reason this is my first post on here in two months–once the excitement of the return of Tommy Pham came and went (as did Tommy Pham), it became apparent that this was a Cardinals team content to run out the clock on their season. It wasn’t that I didn’t watch any of their games, but inevitably I felt like a sucker when I did.

Attendance dropped in St. Louis, and despite what some opportunistic state legislators in the area exurbs would like for you to believe, the reason is that there is a lack of compelling product. Attending a St. Louis Cardinals game is an affirmative task–I accepted my fair share of free tickets this season and I would continue to do so for the foreseeable future, but even when you don’t have to pay for a ticket, one does have to sacrifice their free time. You are almost certainly paying for something along the way–whether it’s parking or some sort of ride or transit or just whatever the time you spend walking to the stadium is worth to you; you are either paying premium prices for food and drink or at the very least putting yourself into a situation where those things are not available to you at market rates; you are either sitting outside during unpleasant weather or devoting the rare just-right weather day or night during the St. Louis summer to watching a baseball team that seemingly lacks ambition.

It is not a civic duty for you to attend St. Louis Cardinals games just as it is not, apparently, the moral responsibility of the Cardinals to provide a better product for their fans next year.

The Cardinals are scheduled for a press conference at 2 p.m. this afternoon, and it has already been reported that whatever changes are coming for the Cardinals, they will not consist of changing president of baseball operations John Mozeliak nor field manager Oliver Marmol. As for these specific moves, I cannot say I am surprised–Mozeliak’s tenure is an unqualified success on the whole, and for all of the problems that the Cardinals have had, I would not tend to blame the team’s tactics. Of course, if you aren’t going to point the finger at Marmol, whose last two seasons have been considerably worse than any year of now-Padres postseason-bound manager Mike Shildt, the (I think valid, to be clear) excuse would be a lack of talent, and there isn’t much reason to believe the talent of the Cardinals is going to improve in any meaningful way next season.

It was reported yesterday, by Katie Woo of The Athletic, that the Cardinals do not intend to bring first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, in the final year of a five-year contract extension, back to the team next season. This was followed by an even bigger bombshell, reporting from USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale that suggested that the Cardinals could be interested in shipping last off-season’s prime free agent acquisition, Sonny Gray.

In a vacuum, the Goldschmidt divorce makes sense. While Goldschmidt certainly held up his end of the bargain over the life of his contract, he has clearly hit his decline phase, and while he is still employable by a Major League team, it is understandable given the Cardinals’ volume of poor defenders at other positions who could fit in at first base (Alec Burleson, Jordan Walker, Nolan Gorman to a lesser extent) that the team would prefer to not have a 37 year-old written in pen at first base for the 2025 season and beyond. And dangling Gray, while I think this is far less likely (though while Bob Nightengale’s erroneous reporting has long been a meme, I also don’t think he’s inventing these rumors out of thin air), is not without some logic–he will probably never be more valuable to another team that he is right now, and the Cardinals could plausibly acquire a prospect or two in the process.

But these moves only make sense from a competitive standpoint if they are starting moves, ways to clear some payroll and then use the extra room in the budget to sign more, presumably younger, players. And the Cardinals have presented little evidence that they intend to increase payroll, and have even threatened to slash payroll if attendance slipped.

I don’t want to get too mad about actions that haven’t even happened yet. But the writing is already on the wall. And if the masterplan of this organization is to spend less money while not adjusting their organizational philosophy one iota, fans will be fully within their rights to not buy tickets. I’m not saying that fans should actively protest the team, per se–God knows there are way bigger injustices in the world to protest, if that’s how you want to spend your time–but if you don’t want to make adjustments in your life for a team that refuses to make adjustments on their end, that’s completely understandable.