The St. Louis Cardinals suck and the New York Times called them out

The John Mozeliak/Bill DeWitt Cardinals emperor has no clothes. That's been obvious for some time, but The New York Times/Athletic just MASSIVELY called them out. Here's the nut grafs, about one-quarter in:

“We’re in trouble,” one team employee said. “This is not easily fixable within the next year, or year after. This is going to take some time.

“I don’t know how this was f—ed up so bad over the last few years.” ...

“It’s broken,” one staffer said. “Our system is broken in a way. How it got there, I don’t know.”

The big question is, how much difference will it make?

When you have nutters on r/cardinals like u/holdmywong saying this team could have a better winning mark than the 2006 World Series winners, all while ignoring things like the Pythagorean of this year vs that, and the fact that everybody not a "junior Mo" knows the facts, or you have people like u/milyabe saying "Cardinal Way" like Bernie Miklasz 2010 (who I called out at the time), and then protesting they didn't say it was unique? it could take a LONG time.

Seriously? Mo's going to be as "unobtrusive" as possible until the end of next year and his expected retirement. Likely successor Chaim Bloom? We know what he was like in Boston. (He wasn't as horrible as his worst detractors say, but he wasn't nearly as good as his most ardent defenders claim.) And, Bill DeWitt III's vague noises this summer about wanting taxpayer money for stadium tweaks?

Yeah, the piece notes Bloom was good in Tampa. But that was a decade ago. More general managers and presidents of baseball operations — even some owners — are more grounded in the analytics world today. That issue applies here in St. Louie, too:

(H)igh-profile success almost always ensures that other organizations take notice, and eventually rivals built similar analytical models. Over time, a key difference emerged: Other clubs invested more in their models than the Cardinals were investing in theirs. As innovation spread through the industry the Cardinals stagnated. Their advantage began to slip.

There you go, Bloom.

And, Mo is straddling two horses. 

(A)ccording to people familiar with the organization’s business decisions, Mozeliak has been operating with a set amount of money to split between the Cardinals’ entire baseball operations department, and the front office has repeatedly chosen to invest in the big-league team. Those decisions resulted in repeated cuts to player development, both stateside and in Latin America.

So, this is really Bill DeWitt, per Miklasz, not putting a crowbar in DeWallet. Now, one wonders if to some degree this is like the Dallas Cowboys, where Stephen Jones restrains Daddy Jethro Jerry. 

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Update, Sept. 30: Chaim Bloom has officially been named Mo's successor for 2026. Also of note? GM Mike Girsch got shoved in a fancy broom closet with the title of "vice president of special operations."

Several posts related to it at the r/Cardinals subreddit.

This one rightly wonders how much more of a leash Bloom will have than Mo did.

This one, from a Red Sox fan, splits the diff on Bloom's over/under.

Via a third, Bob Nightengale, after discussing who he thinks should be given this year's MLB awards, looks hard at the Cardinals' future. He thinks they will go semi-full rebuild, starting with shopping Sonny Gray. It's said that the Cards, acting like a low-ball team, would try to trade Gray to the low-ball Reds. He also notes the Brew Crew are interested in Goldy.