Front-office poll shows how far Cardinals have fallen

The New York Jets went 5-12 this year, missing the postseason for the 14th consecutive year.  They fired their coach and general manager mid-season and will be looking for their fourth full-time coach since firing Rex Ryan in 2014.  A damning article in The Athletic earlier this year detailed how their owner, Woody Johnson, used Madden ratings as a basis for nixing a trade for a wide receiver and also reported that his teenage sons have a say in personnel matters.

And yet, those same Jets received votes when The Athletic recently polled 40 front-office executives and coaches in each of the four major sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NHL, and MLB) and asked them to rank the top five front offices, in order, in their respective sport.

Want to guess which organization received no votes? Ladies and gentleman, your St. Louis Cardinals.

Sixteen MLB teams received votes. That includes the Brewers, which is not surprising, but it also includes the Reds, who garnered one fifth-place vote. And while it might be tempting to blame this on the biases of The Athletic (cut to vigorous head-nodding from Blues fans), this poll, as noted above, came directly from peers.  What does it say when the Cardinals can’t even garner a single vote?

Josh Jacobs, our Site Expert extraordinaire, brought an optimistic outlook of this poll last week. As always, Josh made some excellent points and anyone who can take an objective view of the poll would agree that there’s a silver lining there.

I’m not here, though, to be objective.

This is, to be fair, a new look for me. I’m optimistic by nature (just ask my wife, who often has to remind me that optimism has its time and place), and usually wear rose-colored glasses when it comes to our favorite team. But this poll left me feeling something that has only come to the forefront recently – embarrassment.

It used to be that the Cardinals front office could seemingly do no wrong. It traded away players who went on to make minimal impact, it traded for players who were superstars, and it developed a pipeline of impact talent.  There’s a reason “Cardinals devil magic” was a thing.

But now? It’s as if the team can’t get out of its own way. The on-field product has obviously staggered, as the team has missed the postseason more often than not since 2015. The playoff appearances we were treated to were often too short, with the last series win coming in 2019 (which was quickly followed by an embarrassing sweep).

There have been too many free agent misses and too many free agents passed on. While some trades (Arenado and Goldschmidt) were of course huge wins reminiscent of the old Cardinals Way, too many others were duds. The team seems unable to internally develop an outfielder or a starting pitcher.

And the organization somehow seems to make things worse with every press appearance, from the debacle of mishandling Willson Contreras during his first year to the tone-deaf comments coming from ownership.  

The Cardinals used to be the pride of the National League and perhaps it was naïve to think it would continue for years and years. Maybe we as fans became too spoiled with the successes of the team since Bill DeWitt took over.

But it sure seems that nobody in baseball thinks highly of this team anymore. Maybe that changes during the Chaim Bloom era and maybe it changes after this soft reset, or pivot, or whatever word the team wants to use.

But for now, Cardinals devil magic has seemingly simply become Cardinals smoke and mirrors.