If the St. Louis Cardinals want to get better, they need better baseball players

The St. Louis Cardinals have failed to produce offensive contributors through their farm system over the past several years. But where the team may have hurt itself even more is in its failure to add marquee players to its roster in the last half decade plus.

They have lots of “good” players. But how many players on the St. Louis Cardinals would actually inspire a casual fan to buy a ticket just for the purpose of seeing them play? The best case answer is “not many.”

Sure, Paul Goldschmidt is a top 10 percent quality Major League Baseball player with a power bat and a sticky glove at first base. But he’s a quiet personality who doesn’t create a lot of hype at the box office. And that’s not his fault because, if he was the glue in the middle of a more talented roster, it would amplify the impact of Goldschmidt’s play. When you hit a home run to win a game and win a battle for first place in your division, fans get fired up. When you hit a home run to cut the deficit to 6-2 as you fight it out with the Cincinnati Reds for third place, let’s just say that the bragging rights don’t run so deep.

The top way to sell tickets to a sporting event is to field a winning team. Especially on a consistent basis. Cardinals fans have rewarded the team’s success on the field with success in the accounting office. It’s assumed that the team is going to sell more than 3 million tickets every year, something that is only possible in a handful of other MLB cities, all much larger than St. Louis. But, even when the Cardinals haven’t been great over the past 25 years, they’ve still had fan favorites who kept the cash registers ringing and put them in a position to add to the talent base the next season and come back stronger.

Mark McGwire is one example. The Cardinals weren’t very good at all during his stretch with the team. But he was one of the top draws in baseball and people would pay to see him mash baseballs into orbit. Besides McGwire, Albert Pujols, Jim Edmonds, Scott Rolen, Chris Carpenter, Lance Berkman, Larry Walker, and Carlos Beltran were all guys people would fork over cash to see. Who is on the roster like that now? Paul De Jong? Meh. Matt Carpenter? I think not.

The three players with the highest levels of name recognition among St. Louis fans on the 2020 Cardinals squad were catcher Yadier Molina, pitcher Adam Wainwright and second baseman Kolten Wong. It’s entirely possible that none of the three won’t be with the team in 2021. When the team prints its tickets for next season, if those guys are gone, whose picture will it print on them? Harrison Bader? Tyler O’Neill?

I just don’t think it’s realistic anymore for this team to continue to refuse to pay market value for premium players. I get that it can’t get into bidding wars with the likes of the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Mets and Chicago Cubs. But you can’t keep shooting yourself in the foot by over-committing to mediocre players like Carpenter and Dexter Fowler or pitchers Carlos Martinez and Miles Mikolas and expect to compete with teams that have better players and six or seven of the eight starting positions.

If the Cardinals are going pass on competing in 2021, they need to make a full out effort to reload the roster in 2022 — and to create a new marketing effort to recast the Cardinals from a team that has become an also-ran to a club that is intent once again on trying to make it to the World Series every year. Otherwise, fans are going to start to disappear in the wake of a pandemic that kept them out of ballparks from October 2019 until at least April 2021. And I don’t think, the way things are going, we’re going to be that luck. It may very well be that we have a second-consecutive shortened season next year from which to rebound.

So, make the most of it. Add not one — but two — new bats to accompany young slugger Dylan Carlson and a slate of impressive young hurlers to announce the Cardinals are back. Enough of this middle of the road, playing it safe stuff.

This story was originally published November 16, 2020 at 5:09 PM.

Scott Wuerz

Belleville News-Democrat

Scott Wuerz has written “Cheap Seats,” a St. Louis Cardinals fan blog for the Belleville News-Democrat, since 2007. He is a former BND reporter who covered breaking news and education.