Cardinals News: St. Louis to hire Oliver Marmol as manager

The St. Louis Cardinals are hiring Oliver Marmol as manager.

The St. Louis Cardinals are set to hire Oliver Marmol as manager, as first reported by Katie Woo and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic. The team will announce the move at a 10am press conference on Monday morning.

Marmol, 35, was expected to be the Cardinals manager after Mike Shildt was fired. The team wanted to hire his replacement quickly and Marmol, the team’s bench coach under Shildt, was lauded by his predecessor as a future manager. But the move to hire Marmol came quicker than most people thought, underscoring just how convinced the front office must be that he is the right person to lead the team back to the World Series.

But the league-wide sense is that the Marmol hire is either 1) underwhelming or 2) full of questions about whether he is ready for the job because he is so young. He will likely be asked the latter question at the press conference tomorrow, but the Cardinals are convinced that it will not be an issue. As Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Jeff Passan of ESPN wrote, Marmol has long been highly regarded in the organization.

The Marmol hire likely ensures that most, if not all, of the current coaching staff will remain in place for next season. That means that Jeff Albert, the hitting coach who drew fans ire and was part of why the front office moved on from Shildt, should return. The same applies for pitching coach Mike Maddux, who is widely regarded as one of the best in the game.

The fact that Marmol was widely regarded in the organization likely means the players will support this move, but it will be interesting to hear Nolan Arenado and Yadier Molina’s thoughts on the move. It will also be interesting to hear if the Cardinals consulted Arenado during the process – something many insiders thought they should do – or if president of baseball operations John Mozeliak kept his players in the dark.

Either way, Marmol appeared to be the Cardinals’ manager of choice. Now, he’s set to lead a team that enters 2022 with World Series aspirations.