Lynn Worthy | Post-Dispatch
Sports columnist
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I wanted to hear Cardinals leadership say the words. Not that they were running out the manager or that they were turning over the roster. No, I wanted some combination of Bill DeWitt Jr., Bill DeWitt III and Chaim Bloom to acknowledge they’re in a multi-year rebuild.
I wanted them to make it clear that they’re not expecting next season to be a magical turnaround. I wanted them to make it clear to folks who consider it their birthright to have playoff baseball in St. Louis, that they’re not going all in next year. I hoped for blunt and straightforward.
Instead, they let us read between the lines a bit to see that the Cardinals don’t view this as a complete teardown, but they also won’t go into next season with a true win-now-or-else mentality.
If there was ever a time for that sort of frankness to land with the fan base, this new beginning under Bloom felt like as good an opportunity as any.
Also, a day earlier it sure seemed as though outgoing president of baseball operations John Mozeliak teed them up to finally drop the façade, exhale deeply and admit that not even the Cardinals are immune (sorry for bringing up a sore spot from the COVID days).
“The unique thing about the role that I had with the Cardinals is we never tried to rebuild,” Mozeliak said on Monday. “The word you may hear tomorrow may be different. But that’s for them to speak.”
Well, they spoke. They didn’t explicitly say that they’re multiple seasons away from expecting to contend, and yet they still told us that was the case.
I guess it’s a matter of not wanting to give that quote that will create a headline that gets seared into people’s memory or that soundbite that will haunt them without end on television or audio broadcasts.
There’s also not wanting to convey a defeatist attitude to the players, staff, front office or anyone else in the organization.
“I think we are where we are. In terms of rebuilding, we’re obviously looking to build a better team,” Cardinals principal owner and CEO Bill DeWitt Jr. said. “We’re not going to throw everything out and start from scratch, and we’ve got some good young players coming. We’ve got a bunch of good young players on the club now, and we’ll build around all of that.”
That’s your acknowledgement that the rebuild is already ongoing and that it will clearly continue for some period.
They’ve had three years without a playoff berth, two losing seasons in three years and an upcoming offseason with the potential trades of veterans Nolan Arenado, Sonny Gray and Willson Contreras looming.
Yeah, the rebuild is definitely already underway.
Make what you want of Bloom dancing around questions about next season’s expectations like New York Giants rookie Jaxson Dart hitting a TikTok dance in the back of the endzone, but Bloom definitely said the Cardinals will operate with a long-term focus for years — plural on years.
“I think that we do need to go into this thinking that we need to be in this mode and think this way for multiple years,” Bloom said. “But, again, if we just stack good decisions and smart moves one on top of another that usually makes it go quicker.”
At times you might have heard ambiguity from Bloom or interpreted some wiggle room into his phrases such as “hard decisions” and “short-term sacrifices” and not taking “shortcuts.” But multiple years is as clear as the water in one of those postcards from Turks and Caicos.
There’s no doubt that the declining fan turnout at Busch Stadium will play a role in the club’s ability to continue to punch above its weight as far as roster building and adding free agents.
It just remains to be seen how the relationship between payroll, results and attendance will coalesce in the future.
“I mean look, you’ve seen the empty seats,” team president Bill DeWitt III said after the news conference in response to my question about continuing to punch above their weight. “By the way, 2.2 (million) isn’t the bottom falling out. A lot of teams would take that. But it’s not where we’ve certainly been and where we want to be.
“That’s a big revenue drop that we hope to build back, and it all works together. If you improve the team, I think those ticket sales come back.”
In his outgoing remarks, Mozeliak credited the fan base coming to games, even more so than the club’s television contract, for the club’s sustained success.
With fans having sent a message with their absence relative to past years —3.4 million tickets sold in 2019 prior to the pandemic, 3.3 million in 2022, 3.2 million in 2023 — it remains an open question whether fan turnout will have to facilitate increased payroll or if the Cardinals will attempt to spark ticket sales via free-agent additions to galvanize the fans.
“You can double down on it when the momentum is going in the right way,” Bill DeWitt III said. “If it’s going the other way, it’s really hard to say, ‘All right, we’re just going to sign the next Juan Soto,’ and say that’s going to get you from there to there. Particularly if it’s not consistent with the long-term goal of what Chaim is trying to do, which is build for sustainability.
“A big free-agent deal can be part of that strategy, but it’s not like the thing that you lead with. You’ve got to make sure your minor league systems, your drafts, your player development — all that foundational base of a pyramid — is in good shape, and then you can maybe add those keystones. And the revenues are critical to that. They’re very important, obviously.”
Bill DeWitt III came off as very candid and sincere when he said he couldn’t predict with any certainty whether the team would need to do some “pump priming” via free agent additions to generate ticket sales or whether improved results on the field might raise revenue and lead to increased spending on payroll.
That approach will likely become clear over multiple offseasons.
Cardinals leadership didn’t put out a specific timeframe for the rebuild, but they told us in many ways that this will not be a one-year process.
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Lynn Worthy | Post-Dispatch
Sports columnist
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