Five moments that shaped the Cardinals in 2023 and will echo into their future

Constructing a list of the five best moments of the year for the St. Louis Cardinals in 2023 means first figuring out if there were in fact five good moments. With a stretch and a bend, it’s possible to locate a few, but none are without their potential downsides.

Instead, in a year which will certainly serve as a fulcrum point one way or another, it’s much simpler to identify the moments which helped define the year.

These are the events on which a lost year turned, and some will echo far forward into the team’s future.

Jordan Walker makes the team

Entering spring training in February, the Cardinals advertised a competition in the outfield for playing time, but it was a competition which was always engineered to be won by Walker.

From the first game, he was grouped with the big leaguers, and despite a long spring of work in left field, a sudden pivot to right toward the end of the spring schedule signaled that they’d made up their minds on where he best fit.

For two years running, Oliver Marmol has run out his opening day lineup as a dress rehearsal on the penultimate day of spring, and Walker’s placement in that lineup made it clear that he would break camp in the big leagues before the final official transactions hit the wire.

The team’s horrible start played a role in his May round trip to Memphis, but once he was back, he became a lineup fixture and arguably the most encouraging sign for the future in a year filled with disappointments.

Tyler O’Neill gets called out

O’Neill was not the first young outfielder to be benched by Marmol and chastised for a perceived lack of hustle; Harrison Bader endured the same treatment before being traded in 2022.

Bader, it turns out, was playing on a sore foot at the time which eventually took months out of his season. O’Neill, in an attempt to avoid injuries which had plagued him in the past, got caught watching the ball and slowing up around third base in an April game against Atlanta, and the resulting he said/he said spun out into a multi-day story.

From that point forward, whatever fences were mended between player and manager, O’Neill’s days in St. Louis were numbered. He dealt with back soreness which took a big chunk from the middle of his season and ended the year on the injured list with a foot sprain before being traded to Boston just after the winter meetings.

What was most notable was not that O’Neill was called out, but rather that the manager felt he needed to be the one to take that step – and he did so in the season’s opening weeks. It would portend the tumult that burned at varying heats all season long.

Three pitchers are traded on a Sunday

An unusually sheepish John Mozeliak promised a trade deadline sell-off in an impromptu press conference held in the team’s clubhouse lobby, and he did not back down from that assurance.

Front running the market ahead of the August 2 trade deadline, the Cardinals swung two deals to send out three players during one game, as Jordan Hicks was sent to Toronto and Jordan Montgomery and Chris Stratton were packaged together to Texas.

To watch the deals unfold in real time was to see the team’s clubhouse and training staff running messages up the dugout tunnel to the manager at the end of the bench, and then to see players heading back down the tunnel to meet Mozeliak and learn their destinations. The Cardinals beat the Chicago Cubs 3-0 that day, but by the time the ball was handed to JoJo Romero for the ninth inning, the moving and shaking was in full force.

Montgomery was the only one of the three who stuck around to meet with the media after the deal, and he spoke warmly (enough) of his time in St. Louis before heading off to earn a World Series ring with Texas and an enormous (pending) free agent pay day.

Adam Wainwright wins 200 (And gets rocked on the way)

In the waning years of Wainwright’s career, the numbers he put up on the radar gun never seemed important – unless they got a little too low. From his opening spring outings, it was clear that his mechanics were just a bit off and his pitches were lacking just a bit of their typical snap, so it was hardly a surprise when he came up with a lower body strain that he claimed originated from the weight room at the World Baseball Classic.

Entering the year just five wins short of his milestone, there were times when it was almost physically difficult to watch him pitch. Atrocious outings in Miami and Kansas City each saw lingering questions about how long the team could let him carry on, and there were never satisfactory answers or explanations. But what was done was done, and he would get his shot.

On September 18, sitting on 199 wins, Wainwright warned the team that they needed to have another starter ready, because he was unsure he could muscle his way through any innings at all. Instead, he twirled seven shutout, walking off after getting Josh Donaldson to loft a harmless flyball against a patented curveball, the last pitch of his career.

Yadier Molina returns to the fold, waiting

As soon as the team eagerly slammed the book shut on the 2023 season, attention shifted to preparations for next season. Molina’s return in some capacity or another had been guaranteed for a matter of weeks, but sorting through the right role and the right level of commitment (while minimizing the looming threat to others in the dugout) took time.

The announcement toward the end of the winter meetings that he would be officially re-joining the team as a special assistant to Mozeliak was not unexpected. Nor was Mozeliak’s declaration that he would be, at times, in uniform and in the dugout, and that he would spend most of his working hours handling things with the big league players and coaching staff.

Where that eventuates is far and away the early favorite to be the most defining Cardinals moment of 2024.