St. Louis Cardinals right to get rid of Kolten Wong, but they can’t bank the cash
If you read this blog often, you probably know that I am entirely unsurprised by the fact that the St. Louis Cardinals decided to decline their $12.5 option on Kolten Wong. It just made too much sense. $12.5 million is an awful lot of money to pay for a guy who hits .260 with little power. Sure, he’s an excellent defender. But second base isn’t a premium defensive position. Ozzie Smith wouldn’t have been the Hall of Famer he was if he played second. He knew that, and it’s why he refused to play there late in his career when he was trying to hang on to playing time. Wong might be a better player than Tommy Edman in some respects. But he’s 24 times as good as Wong -- and that’s how much more money he was going to make.
So, while anyone who was paying attention could see the Wong divorce coming, I just hope to be surprised by the rest of what the Cardinals have up their sleeve this winter. My gut tells me, despite front office leader John Mozeliak’s insistence otherwise, that this team is going to let franchise icons Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright walk and, basically, go into full rebuild mode. And it ain’t gonna be pretty, that’s for sure.
Really, there aren’t a lot of viable options with the team already announcing that it plans to cut payroll in 2021. There is no getting around the money the Cardinals owe to Dexter Fowler, Matt Carpenter, Andrew Miller, Milkes Mikolas and Carlos Martinez. Unless other teams have their own version of Randy Arozarena, a young, cheap slugger that they want to give away for virtually nothing, I don’t see a lot of wiggle room in the budget for improvement.
What I’d like to see happen is to find a way for the Cardinals to give away Carlos Martinez’s salary and combine that money with Wong’s paycheck to find a middle of the order bat for 2021 and beyond. But I don’t believe that is what this front office has in mind. What I think is going to happen is that we’re going to watch the overpriced veterans play out the string, giving playing time to youngsters like Nolan Gorman, Dylan Carlson, Max Shrock and Andrew Knizner as the season goes on.
The problem with that is not only are the Cardinals going to drain a lot of talent off the roster in the short term, it’s going to be awfully hard to rebuild it when the payroll is cleared. First, we know that team chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. and Company aren’t going to celebrate the freedom of five years of payroll paralysis by going out and spending a giant pile of money on all the top free agents on the market. But, if the team wanted to do so, could it? For years it seemed that veteran stars like Carlos Beltran, Matt Holliday, Reggie Sanders, Lance Berkman and Mark McGwire were willing to take less money to play in St. Louis where they “had a chance to win every year.” Does anyone think the Cardinals have been a top World Series contender in more than half a decade? I’m also pretty sure word has gotten around that St. Louis doesn’t pay top dollar on free agents, so I wonder if players have grown weary about taking fewer dollars to play for the honor of playing for a middle of the pack team.
At some point, the Cardinals must prove their commitment to winning — both to players and to fans they expect to continue to shell out money to buy tickets to see their favorite team play. The Birds have had a lot of loyalty from their supporters over the past few decades, and much of it was earned through an earnest effort to put the best team on the field possible. But the days of rosters with Albert Pujols, Jim Edmonds and Scott Rolen anchoring a cast of sturdy role players are long in the rear view mirror.
In short, this team has pretty much already been torn down. When Fowler, Carpenter and Miller are gone at the end of the 2021 campaign, pretty much the whole roster is going to be populated with players on the right side of their first trip though free agency. At some point, this team is going to have to spend the going rate for top talent. Frankly, I would have preferred it spent $30 million a year on Bryce Harper or Anthony Rendon than $34.5 million on Matt Carpenter and Dexter Fowler. But maybe that’s just me.
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Scott Wuerz is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan. The Cheap Seats blog is written from his perspective as a fan and is designed to spark discussion among fans of the Cardinals and other MLB teams. Sources supporting his views and opinions are linked. If you’re looking for Cardinals news and features, check out the BND’s Cardinals section.
