At a crossroad between frugality and success, can Cardinals build a contender for 2024?

On the occasion of the last regular season home game, the St. Louis Cardinals traditionally distribute to the media a fact sheet highlighting some of their accomplishments in attendance over the course of the season.

This year, that sheet said the team snuck across a round number threshold, tallying an average of 40,013 paid fans for its 81 home games.

Of course, that’s not without its fudging. Two of those “home” games were played at London Stadium, each with attendance over 54,000. Factoring simply the tickets sold for games at Busch Stadium, the average attendance was 39,631 – not quite as round or aesthetically pleasing, but seemingly good enough.

Not for the Cardinals, who are nothing if not experts in constructing and then buying into their own reality. It’s ultimately a silly nit to pick and a distinction without difference – the risk, though, is that it becomes symbolic of the path they may tread in an otherwise essential winter.

Monday was meant to be the end of season press conference and wrap up for the club, providing an opportunity to not only cross off important housekeeping items – at least three players are in the midst of recovery from season-ending surgeries, for instance – but also to get a sense of how the club plans to chart its winter.

Instead, with “no immediate news to announce,” per a team official, they’ve opted to ease back into the background noise that accompanies the end of the World Series.

In his most recent public comments, president of baseball operations John Mozeliak already began to gently walk back his earlier season proclamation – repeated several times, and with gusto – that the Cardinals would definitely pursue three starting pitchers this winter.

“I think when I said three, it was at a time when we were really down to one starter at that point,” Mozeliak told Jim Hayes on Bally Sports Midwest. “At the very least, we know we’re going to have to add some depth there because we’re going to need some protection…lots of questions we can be asking ourselves right now, but that’ll help build the GPS for this offseason.”

Mozeliak praised Steven Matz and Zack Thompson and alluded to positive contributions from Drew Rom, but otherwise neglected to finish his count to even five starters, let alone more. Indeed, the calculus of adding three has always included Matz as one of the two incumbents, alongside Miles Mikolas.

Thompson was arguably the team’s most effective starter down the stretch, but has the sort of roster flexibility that, in the past, the team has valued, and used as a tool to increase roster depth. Rom pitched in the majors out of necessity, and while it’s good management to speak well of a new addition, he was clearly out of his depth at this point in his career.

Ten different pitchers started for the Cardinals in 2023, each of the 10 made at least eight starts, and seven made at least 10. When asked in July if there was anything he could have done to augment his sales pitch when pursuing arms over the winter, Mozeliak sarcastically quipped that he “could have been dishonest” with free agents about the available opportunities in St. Louis.

The other option, of course, would’ve been to realistically assess the risks on the roster and approach free agents with the knowledge that opportunity, if not obvious in December, would of course reveal itself. Pitchers get hurt, and other pitchers have to take their place. Four of those 10 starters finished the year with an ERA of at least 5.25; that is, in part, the result of forcing square pegs into round innings holes.

There is also the trade market, which would have largely taken away the ability for a player to object to his new destination at all. The Cardinals were seemingly barely engaged last winter, finding themselves spooked by the asking price for Sean Murphy and neglecting to clear up the cobwebs now cluttering their 40-man roster heading into this year’s cleanup season.

The worst attended game at Busch Stadium this season was on Tuesday, August 15 against Oakland, featuring a paid crowd of 32,528. In context, that means their worst attendance figure was better than the average home attendance of 18 other teams, including all of their divisional rivals except the Cubs.

Their worst day outdrew, on average, the Mets, the Nationals and the White Sox. Of the eight teams to reach the Division Series, four – Arizona, Baltimore, Minnesota and Texas – fell below that mark.

What did the Cardinals learn from arguably their worst season since integration? The team claims they have a firm grasp on the pitching market and designs on rebuilding a woebegone staff. The goal, manager Oliver Marmol has emphasized, is to turn around immediately and contend for a championship in 2024.

A more cynical read of their behavior would be that ownership, long in thrall to stability and wedded to the team’s own plans despite pushback elsewhere in the game, looks at a season of poor results and high anxiety and sees, still, financial stability and success. The fans stayed when things were terrible, so what is the incentive to change course, save for the impossible-to-quantify desire for a championship?

This is the crossroads at which the team finds itself and for which they will eventually have to answer. Whether those answers are durable will bear itself out over the next months.