One year after rock bottom, Cardinals finally begin a season energized and hopeful

39 games through the 2024 season, there were real questions as to whether or not massive changes were coming to the St. Louis Cardinals' coaching staff and possibly the front office.

Sitting with a record of 15-24, the Cardinals were in the midst of a seven-game losing streak, one that included a series loss to the historically bad Chicago White Sox, and the club was just a game away from being swept in four games by their division rival, the Milwaukee Brewers.

During that time, special assistant to John Mozeliak and the club's 2023 bench coach, Joe McEwing, was visiting the club's minor league affiliates, with some close to the team believing that McEwing was putting together his own Major League staff in preparation to take over for Marmol should he be relieved of his job in the near future.

This putrid of a start was unheard of in St. Louis, and the voices calling for change were even louder this time, coming off the heels of a 2023 season where the club started 14-25 and finished with a 71-91 record on the year, one of their worst campaigns in franchise history.

If the last two years have taught us anything following the St. Louis Cardinals, or frankly, baseball as a whole, it's that we shouldn't take too much from a less than 40-game sample size. Good teams, bad teams, and mediocre teams all have highs and lows throughout the over six-month campaign, and the ultimate barometer for a club's (regular) season comes when the final out is made in game 162.

With that being said, it's hard not to look at the 2025 Cardinals and notice something vastly different about their start to John Mozeliak's final run as president of baseball operations.

The 2025 Cardinals are off to the best start the club has had in years

After consecutive seasons stumbling out of the gates to a 14-25 and 15-24 records through their first 39 games, the 2025 Cardinals team is riding a six-game win streak and sitting with a record of 20-19 before Mother's Day, a vastly different position than that they have found themselves in previously. In 2023, the club was already 7.5 games back of the NL Central lead, and in 2024, they sat nine games out of first place.

This year, the club sits in second place, trailing the Chicago Cubs by two games for the NL Central lead and playing with a far different level of confidence and swagger. Yes, just six games ago, the club sat with a 14-19 record and was struggling to get things back on track, but even at that time, the club just had a different vibe around it than they had in previous years.

In 2023, the club was in shock at how poorly they started. Projected by many to win the NL Central, they basically threw away their chance of doing so one month into the season, and you could see that wear on the team every single day as they tried to get the train back on the tracks.

In 2024, the club felt the pressure to rebound from the disaster that 2023 was, and while they went on that infamous 33-18 Mother's Day run after their 14-25 start to the season, many struggled to believe they had what it took to finish the job, and they ended up losing steam and missing the playoffs for the second straight year.

While Mozeliak has been open about his hope to see the club "surprise" some people in 2025, I think it's safe to say these are the lowest expectations anyone has had for this club in a long time. With an emphasis on the young talent this year, playoffs were not necessarily the priority - development was.

While previous expectations cannot become an excuse for what the club struggled so mightily (and trust me, we've talked plenty about their issues), there is no mistaking how the 2025 group has come out with a level of energy, positivity, and excitement that just has not been present as a whole since the 2022 season.

No, I'm certainly not ready to "buy in" on this team making the playoffs. I predicted they would finish with an 80-82 record this year, but I've been very open about seeing a wide range of outcomes for this club. It wouldn't shock me to see them fall apart and sell at the deadline, and it also wouldn't shock me to see them win a weak National League Central or sneak in as a playoff team. I would bet on them being somewhere in the middle, not one of the worst teams in baseball, while also not being a playoff team, but we certainly can't rule anything out.

But what I can confidently say about the 2025 Cardinals right now is that, as currently constructed, they are a whole lot of fun, and the youth of this team is making them worth watching.

While Jordan Walker and Nolan Gorman continue to struggle at the plate, and most of us want to see young arms like Michael McGreevy get full run at the big league level right now, the young core of Brendan Donovan, Lars Nootbaar, Ivan Herrera, Victor Scott II, Matthew Liberatore, Masyn Winn, and veterans like Willson Contreras, Nolan Arenado, Sonny Gray, and Steven Matz are moving this team into a much stronger position than they've started in the last several years.

Taking a glance at their team stats through the first 39 games of each of those campaigns, it's not hard to see how much more well-rounded and competent this club has been to begin the year.

I'll preface this again: There are still 123 games to be played. The Cardinals could have a terrible week of baseball and all of this looks a lot different than it does right now. No one should be calling them a playoff team right now, but we also don't need to ignore what we've seen so far either.

With the data we have available to us right now, we can say this for certain: The Cardinals are off to a much better start to their season than the previous two campaigns. It's up to them to either build upon or squander that, but hey, it's a lot easier to project brighter days ahead when you aren't almost ten games under .500 in the early parts of May.