The Mariner model might be a good one for the rebuilding Cardinals to copy
Running a baseball team isn’t the only job where telling too much of the truth can get someone in professional hot water, but in the grander scheme of things, it’s relatively low impact.
The gaffes tend to work their way into jokes, even if they start with anger.
When Seattle Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry DiPoto said two years ago that a team winning “54% of the time” would be well positioned to win a World Series over a 10-year stretch, Mariners fans and the broader baseball ecosystem were apoplectic. Settling for mediocrity in a competitive environment seems like it runs antithetical to the competitive spirit on which the game is built.
And yet the Mariners, having won their first division title since they set the MLB record for wins in a season in 2001, are now arguably as close to a World Series championship as the franchise has ever been. They haven’t dipped below .500 since the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and they’ve won 90 games (on the button) in three of the last five years.
If they are not the model for the kind of organization the St. Louis Cardinals wish to re-establish themselves as, it’s only because the sample is a little too small and DiPoto’s wheeling and dealing is a little too aggressive. DiPoto’s comments engendered anger not because they were wrong, but because they struck too close to the heart of truth for modern baseball ownership, and they’re too likely to be supported by too many around the game.
Seattle’s top three players by wins above replacement this season – catcher Cal Raleigh, centerfielder Julio Rodriguez and pitcher Bryan Woo – are all homegrown development success stories. Behind them come the veteran complimentary pieces, including former Cardinals outfielder Randy Arozarena, shortstop J.P. Crawford and second baseman Jorge Polanco. Crawford was acquired early in his career as part of a prospect swap in a larger trade, but the other two are recent acquisitions with ticking clocks on their contractual status.
Logan Gilbert, George Kirby and Bryce Miller are all homegrown, with Gilbert and Kirby joining the organizations as first round picks. The veteran outsider in the rotation, Luis Castillo, signed a team-friendly deal soon after being acquired; he can scarcely be blamed at enjoying the run suppression environment of Seattle’s Safeco Field more than the bandbox from which he originated in Cincinnati.
All the while, the Mariners are running a sub-$175 million payroll, good for just about dead in the middle of the league. This is a big team in a big city with big dollar owners who simply haven’t had to fork over significant cash in the free agent market because the internal development system is spinning like a top.
They are the envy of the non-economically stratified parts of the game. If the Cardinals under current ownership continue to make it clear that they have no interest in playing in the deeper parts of the free agent pool, then there are much worse models they could choose to emulate.
While the Milwaukee Brewers draw a great deal of attention among baseball’s final four for the state of their organization, that admiration is less reflected than might be expected throughout the game. More than one set of eyes has rolled in response to praise for their method, and a source once darkly posited that it’s easy to get players on board when they know they’ll be shipped out of town if they disagree with their deployment or start to make significant money; Corbin Burnes, Josh Hader and Devin Williams have all been discussed in that context.
Seattle, though, has taken care of its homegrown core, though that ethos will be put to the test in the coming years as Gilbert and Kirby progress through arbitration and Woo reaches it. It’s also true that most developmental systems look a lot better if they manage to home grow 80% of a rotation as well as two superstar talents through the middle of the field. Even the Rockies would struggle to whiff on Raleigh and Rodríguez, though their prodigious skill at wasting skill would make it a real possibility.
Whatever the Mariners are now, they have not always been a bastion of success. They’ve been over .500 for five consecutive seasons, but only seven of the last; 10 the Cardinals, even in their depleted state, have reached that threshold in eight of the last 10, with the exceptions being 2023’s blown out mess and this season’s sputtering down the stretch.
Still, it’s hard not to see the framework of what they’ve built – especially from an owner’s perspective, given the cost efficiency – and think that it fits a mid-market team that wants desperately to reclaim its annual relevance and is building more or less from the ground up.
All the Cardinals have to do in order to achieve that is sprout a rotation from nothing and sign two homegrown superstars to career-length contracts at below market rates. They might be somewhat less than 54% likely to pull it off, but it seems like it’s worth a shot.