For young, streaky Cardinals, losses come with teachable moments — and hope
Alec Burleson stepped to the plate in the bottom of the fourth inning on Friday night with a runner on second and no one out. A second-pitch fastball ran in hard on his hands, and he fought it off with a lazy fly ball to left field that kept Masyn Winn firmly anchored to his base.
The St. Louis Cardinals would lose that game 6-5 to Atlanta, which was also the score at the time of the at bat.
It was a teachable moment for the coaching staff that encapsulates so much of what the 2025 season has always supposed to have been about, however much competitive success has come and gone.
“You have a real skill set in actually being able to hit the ball where you want,” manager Oli Marmol said. “How you miss has to be productive. If you don’t miss, there’s two runs on the board. If you do miss, that guy’s standing on third with one out, one way or another. Understanding when to be a hitter and use the whole field, and when your miss just has to be pull side, regardless of result of up or down.
“That’s a really good opportunity for him to understand, ‘I have a one-way miss here.’...If I miss, it’s gonna be a ground ball to second. If I don’t miss, it’s gonna be a double to right-center or a homer. That’s missing the way you need to miss.”
Marmol offered that explanation to the media after he’d already had the conversation with Burleson and found him receptive and welcome to the correction. It’s a small moment in a tough game that might otherwise have gone unnoticed, but the commitment to development which has accompanied the 2025 season makes those moments essential. It’s why, the night before, Marmol caught himself from the podium when he nearly described a loss as fun.
“This was a fun. If we find a way to tie this game, I feel like we win it,” was where Marmol settled on Friday night. “There’s a lot to learn from this game for our hitters. We’ll take this one, and you can break it down a lot of different ways and make sure that this isn’t a wasted opportunity.”
Entering the break at just five games above .500 and a game and a half out of the Wild Card race, it would be difficult to claim the Cardinals aren’t at roughly the spot in the standings that most might’ve anticipated at the season’s outset. What has been less predictable is the way at which they’ve arrived at this point, struggling out of the gate, catching fire in May, and then stumbling back down to reality.
It’s the sort of sine wave that might be expected from a team with limited experience and without the overflow of developed talent that can float the top of the league through their inevitable lean moments. If they look like an inexperienced team, it’s because they are one, and the only way through that is to find the teachable moments that carry over to future opportunities.
“I would attribute it to a lot of the feedback loops, of trying to shorten that,” Marmol said when asked why his team has been as successful as it has. “The conversations that will come out of [Friday’s game] are good, individually, that are already taking place today, but then at 11:30 when we do it as a group. That’s what allows us to be just a tick better next time. And without that feedback, consistent feedback that we have, I think you would be looking at a losing record.”
The discussion of “small little wins” that are hopefully paid forward in future success can be deceiving, and Marmol pushed back forcefully when asked if those are more important to him than the standings.
“You play for the score,” he emphasized. “It’s meaningful. It’s to test every night if you did it well or not. We just can’t be fooled that just because we won, we were good, or because we lost, we weren’t…Sometimes you win a game, and you played like [garbage], and you missed a lot of opportunities, and you just got lucky. You better learn from those as much as some of the losses.”
The dilemma the Cardinals have faced and will face in the coming weeks is how much value to put on a winning environment in the midst of the development. That attitude – developing winning players by winning games – was more or less the ethos of the team’s minor league system throughout a decade which saw an unending stream of productive major leaguers coming from the levels below.
Now, with that system having grown stagnant and a full force effort behind its revival, the team is faced with a raft of players who arrived in St. Louis without having ever won in significant fashion in the minors. MLB is not a development league, but more and more, both with the Cardinals and throughout the game, there is a need for patience as players are put through a finishing school curriculum.
All the while, jobs and money and fame and pride are wrapped up in the bottom line of winning. An impatient team would be willing to throw the long term lessons overboard for that short term gratification. The Cardinals would perhaps be among that group in recent years, and are now fighting their baked-in organizational instincts toward revision to the mean. That comes, they hope, from one conversation at a time, and fighting one battle after another even if they aren’t all won.
“I remember managing at Palm Beach and State College,” Marmol said, “and people would always ask, ‘is it winning, or is it development?’ I will never separate it. It’s developing winning players.”
