Four questions whose answers will define the Cardinals’ season in 2024

Baseball executives aren’t entirely different from most other people who work in offices, in that they prefer to shirk as much work as possible during the week ahead of Christmas and especially aren’t keen to buckle down during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Once the gears of the machine crank back to life, though, the realization of work to be done sets in, and normal rhythms continue apace.

The St. Louis Cardinals are roughly five and a half weeks away from reporting to spring training in Jupiter, and in those weeks and those which will follow, it’s these stories which will come to define their 2024 season.

What additions will be made to the bullpen?

Jordan Hicks, Chris Stratton and Drew VerHagen covered a combined 156 ⅓ innings for the Cardinals out of the bullpen in 2023, and to date, none has an obvious replacement. The assorted high upside arms acquired in the offseason’s opening weeks will make some contributions, as will prospects yet to make Major League debuts like Andre Granillo and Ryan Loutos.

Still, if the motive for bringing in three veteran starters was inning certainty, it stands to reason that there’s still a great deal more to be done in the bullpen on that front. No reliever is a certainty year over year and high price point additions to the bullpen have not been historical successes for the Cardinals, but without certain promotions, they may yet be encouraged to gamble.

Middle relief can generally be found as camps open – of the three listed above who departed, only Stratton has a new team – so a number of reliable veterans remain on the board. It would behoove the Cardinals to select a few.

What is the state of the spring training facility?

Most fans – outside of those with a Jupiter vacation planned for the spring – don’t think particularly often about the state of the team’s Florida campus. And yet it matters enough to players that tours are common for free agents, and enough to the team that they spent years lobbying Palm Beach county and the Marlins to raise sufficient funds for a substantial overhaul.

A project that was set to begin as early as the end of last spring has been set back at least a year, with whatever work did actually begin having to be rolled back as local authorities waffled when the time came to cut checks, The Cardinals have been reticent to discuss the delay for fear of upsetting the rickety fiscal apple cart, but will soon be out of time to spruce up the structures which currently exist.

Included in those renovations is intended to be the long-promised pitching lab which has the potential to bring the club at least up to industry standard for player development rather than lagging behind. The Cardinals, who have invested in modern pitching philosophies from a technological and staffing perspective, simply don’t currently have the right building to maximize those outputs. Every day of construction delay is another day further from seeing results in the big leagues.

What will Nolan Arenado’s rebound look like?

Arenado was not a finalist for the NL Gold Glove at third base in 2023, putting an emphatic end to his streak of ten straight years as the winner of that award in the first ten years of his career. He turned in far and away his worst offensive season as a Cardinal, and excluding the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, his worst year at the plate since 2013, when he was a 22-year-old rookie.

He also wore the frustrations of losing perhaps as clearly as anyone in the clubhouse, and finishing the season on the injured list allowed him to step away and reclaim a little oxygen as the lights went out far ahead of schedule. Whatever midseason relationship well poisoning that may or may not have been seeded by the Dodgers’ higher ups had largely faded by September, but at the end of July, there was a stretch of days in which the seemingly endless insinuations that he might want out of St. Louis felt like they could become self fulfilling.

There has scarcely been a more competitive player to cross the home clubhouse threshold at Busch Stadium. There’s no doubt that Arenado will arrive in Florida burning white hot, ready to white knuckle through a season which could prove last year’s to be a fluke. What remains to be seen is whether it is, or whether it signals a new, disturbing trend.

How large is Yadier Molina’s shadow?

There is a version of Molina’s return to St. Louis which sees him arrive at spring training as an instructor, lightly involved with the day to day operation of camp and more a mascot than someone on the masthead. That is not the version which most people expect.

There is also a version in which he is the looming figure and ticking clock behind Oliver Marmol at the end of the dugout. Neither man wants that perception; both are publicly very eager to work with the other. Until Marmol signs an extension, though, the tension will be impossible to ignore.

Ultimately it will fall to Molina to solve that puzzle and find ways to make substantial contributions which do not overwhelm the staff currently in place. He will, as much as possible, need to be felt without being seen. For one of the most publicly visible Cardinals of a generation, that may prove too tall a task.