11 times the Cardinals allowed fear to drive poor decision-making under John Mozeliak

Fear-based decision #8 - Failing to evolve in the area of player development, falling behind in both investment and results

At the end of the 2024 season, Katie Woo of The Athletic dropped one of the biggest stories surrounding the state of the Cardinals organization in years, and the piece was filled with anonymous quotes from Cardinals team employees who were sounding the alarm bells on how bad things had gotten.

“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." This was one of many revealing quotes from Cardinals personnel as the front office and ownership prepared to set the stage for massive changes to the organization.

As Woo detailed in the piece and I alluded to earlier, the Cardinals falling behind in player development didn't just happen over a few years' time span. Instead, it was that slow decay that ate the organization from the inside out, and by the time the results made it to the field, they were already years upon years deep into the issues they created for themselves.

Lunhow leaving after the 2011 World Series championship was one of the major events that began that decay. Over time, Lunhow, Sig Medjal, Mike Elias Dan Kantrovitz, and others flocked from the Cardinals front office to continue moving up in their baseball careers. And honestly, we should look even a few years before 2011 at the passing of both George Kissell and Dave Ricketts two pioneers of "The Cardinal Way" who helped shape what made the organization special all the way back in 1968.

Over time, the Cardinals began to lose that edge they had when the front office was filled with some of the brightest minds in the game. They started to become an echo chamber of ideas, believing they were still at the top of the baseball world when in reality, the game was passing them by. And then when COVID hit Major League Baseball, the Cardinals made major cuts to their personnel and chose to not rehire those positions and run a thin staff for the sake of allocating more dollars to Major League payroll.

It will be Chaim Bloom's task to get them back on track when he takes over next season, but the fall from grace under Mozeliak's watch cannot be understated. It's honestly one of the things that Mozeliak and ownership have failed to take accountability for. Sure, they kind of did when they said they needed to allocate more resources there this offseason, but neither Mozeliak nor DeWitt Jr. will just own the fact that it fell off so drastically when asked about it publically. They try to play both sides, saying changes needed to be made but also acting as those the problem was overstated. Well, according to employees from within their own organization, it's been really bad.