During rebuild, the measure of Cardinals’ success is not wins and losses
For the first time in decades, this is a St. Louis Cardinals team that was assembled with something other than winning in mind as the team’s primary objective. To hear that over the winter from those responsible for making those decisions is one thing, but to see it in action has been something of a different experience.
Cardinals fans have had little to no exposure to a team with its eyes set on the far off horizon, and however strong the urge for realism, a season-opening sweep of the Minnesota Twins set a high bar and opened doors to a future of potentially unexpected success.
In the 19 games following that opening series, the Cardinals went 6-13. They started 1-10 on the road. They aren’t as bad as either of those numbers suggest, and they play a much more high-energy and optimistic brand of ball than the moribund 2023 team, but it would not be a tremendous shock if the record ended up in much the same place.
The idea, for the team, is to keep focus elsewhere. How well that holds up to the scrutiny of a season remains to be seen.
“I’ve wrapped my head around that prior to game one, understanding how I need to operate in order to get the most out of them,” manager Oli Marmol said over the weekend of his team. “You have to. Our staff has done an incredible job of that. I would give them a ton of credit.”
There are teaching moments sprinkled all throughout the early season games.
Thomas Saggese broke for home on a ground ball on Saturday night that he knew right away was a poor read, and he was corrected. He had another odd looking play on Sunday in which he seemed to hold up on a line drive single to center, only to remember there were two outs and his hesitation might’ve cost 90 feet.
Andre Pallante and Pedro Pagés were out of sync and out of sequencing in the first two innings against the Mets last Thursday, but corrected course and finished strong.
Growth opportunities will occur during games as well as throughout the season, and the Cardinals will measure their success or failure by their ability to seize on those moments, even as the occasional agony of the scoreboard risks weighing them down.
“There’s a difference between ‘let’s talk about this for you to learn’ and ‘we’ve already talked about this,’” Marmol explained. That description, that growth and finish and polish, sounds an awful lot like the process which teams used to command from players at Triple-A, and which often saw players not reach the majors full time until they were well past 25 years old.
Jordan Walker is not yet 23 and in his third MLB season. Nolan Gorman, not yet 25, is in his fourth. Pallante is pitching his age-26 season. Iván Herrera is also not quite 25, and Pedro Pagés is just 26. Saggese and Masyn Winn are both less than a month removed from turning 23.
All of those players also lost at least one minor league season to the pandemic. Time doesn’t stop and the league doesn’t stop handing out trophies, and for a team with the history of competitive success that the Cardinals have enjoyed, there will be no sympathy points handed out by the rest of the league.
And yet for all of the years of delayed decisions and skepticism that the committed local fan base would support anything close to a full rebuild, the Cardinals have reached that developmental fork in the road regardless.
They will not finish the season with a .300 winning percentage over an extended stretch and they will not win less than 10% of their road games. But learning now to measure success and failure by something other than the final score, at least in the short term, will go away toward relieving so much of the angst that might otherwise follow the Redbirds around in 2025. That’s harder to swallow in the dugout than it is for those on the couch, and squaring to that reality takes active buy-in from those tasked with shepherding it.
“I get more excited about that,” Marmol said of the teaching opportunity in front of him. “As a manager in the big leagues, you get to teach more, and you find those moments a lot more.”
That is, to his view, a consequence more of the long-term trends in the game than any failing the Cardinals have had in shoring up their own development system. Even as they push a turn toward focusing on growing players in house and rejuvenating a system that was once the envy of the league, they realize that there is a shifting of the tides throughout the game that left them paddling, for years, in the wrong direction.
Perhaps it’s rationalizing. Perhaps it’s putting a happy face on what may well be a losing team. But it is an attitude that’s necessary for surviving the ebbs and flows of a season, especially when the lows have potential to cut so deeply.
“My head’s down on…making sure that these guys are better than yesterday,” Marmol said. “You want them to get rewarded by being in the win column, because that feels good, but our staff is so head down on making sure that they’re continuing to get better every day.”
