Do Cardinals need Carpenter to make up lack of leadership from Goldschmidt, Arenado?
It’s incredibly telling that when the St. Louis Cardinals convened a conference call last week to discuss their reunion with Matt Carpenter, very little was offered up by the team in terms of the way he’ll contribute between the white lines.
President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak was asked about Carpenter’s offseason work in Oklahoma with Matt Holliday and his phenom sons – data is “trending in the right direction.” Does the club have concerns about his being about 20 percent worse than a league average hitter in 2023?
San Diego, the story goes, was a tough hitting environment, “getting him out of there and into here is something he can benefit from,” “we’re encouraged” about his work in the batting cage.
He did not offer those affirmations freely. Instead, he leaned on leadership and the impact Carpenter can have in the clubhouse, and he was correctly touted as a thread to past successes who understands how the game ought to look.
“Carp understands exactly the Cardinal way of doing things and what he was brought up with,” Mozeliak said, “but he also understands the group of players we have, because he’s not that far removed.”
He also stopped barely a whisper short of acknowledging that Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt requested Carpenter’s return by name as a method of removing some of the stress of leadership from their own shoulders.
That admission offered an atypically candid window into the way the Cardinals conduct their business, and it also serves to create a convenient escape hatch should the 2024 season be so unfortunate as to resemble its immediate predecessor.
Mozeliak is the team’s voice, and it’s not often difficult to hear what he’s saying. If the season goes badly – for Carpenter, for the team, or both – talk to the big guys at the corners. They asked for it. This is what they got.
The position staked out here by the club is undeniable. After stepping around a traditional end-of-season press availability in which they would’ve been pressed to offer a fresh autopsy, ownership remained largely silent until the dawn of the new year.
“I think it was just one of those years where what could go wrong, did go wrong,” said chairman Bill DeWitt, Jr., pushing off the first 90-loss season in approximately three and a half decades to the twists of bad fortune.
The offseason strategy largely followed in those footsteps; raising the floor of the starting rotation without much raising its ceiling from a year prior, supplementing the bullpen without turning any heads, and clearing up roster log jams without bringing in fresh blood on the position player side are all perfectly logical.
There has been a sufficient explanation for nearly every move made by the Cardinals this offseason. Save arguably for signing Sonny Gray or trading Richie Palacios for Andrew Kittredge, there have been no moves made which didn’t require an explanation.
And this, too, from DeWitt is an indication of where the team’s rudder is pointed: “I think the culture that [Gray, Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn] and others bring is part of their asset.”
Neither Arenado nor Goldschmidt attended Winter Warm-Up, and the arrival of both at camp in Florida in the coming weeks will be an opportunity for both to reflect on the direction last season took. It will also be a prime opportunity for either or both to discuss why they felt the need to reach outside the clubhouse for leadership that they themselves seemingly felt unable to provide.
That will be a matter of interpretation, and Mozeliak’s revelation of those conversations with those two specific players will leave them defending publicly what they expressed privately. Goldschmidt is heading into the last season of his contract and Arenado endured public flirtations from the Dodgers last summer which, more than anything else, represented truly artful media manipulation on the part of LA baseball operations head Andrew Friedman.
Leaning on a temporary dugout rail in London last summer, Mozeliak mused that it was his belief that the Cardinals would never be permitted by the demands of the fanbase to conduct a full stripped-to-the-studs rebuild. He has, however, crafted his own exit timeline – he plans to step back from his current duties by the end of the 2025 season.
New consultant Chaim Bloom came on board, in DeWitt’s telling, after he called Mozeliak to express interest and Mozeliak (perhaps genuinely, perhaps able to read the writing on the wall) wholeheartedly concurred. There’s a seeming parallel between that and manager Oliver Marmol’s enthusiasm about bringing in a screamingly obvious successor in Yadier Molina; of course both were excited to say yes, but how could they ever have said no?
There has been no more reliable organizational anemometer than Mozeliak in the last 30 years of Cardinals baseball. His place in franchise history is already etched in stone, but it runs the risk of erosion should the wind continue to blow the wrong way.
Among his many skills, though, is not just measuring the direction and ferocity of the wind. He’s also more than capable of adjusting it. The breeze is now blowing gently across first and third base. Should those players fail to take action to shift it, it should not come as a surprise when they’re caught up in its gales.
