10 burning questions the Cardinals must answer if they want to win back their fans

It's not hard to see that many St. Louis Cardinals fans are fed up with the current state of the organization and those who are calling the shots. Some have felt that way for a long time, while others have joined that train as the Cardinals appear headed toward their second consecutive losing season.

Back in February, Katie Woo of The Athletic (subscription required) polled 3,070 Cardinals fans on various questions regarding the state of the team. Among many other things, she found that...

1. 48.5% of fans were pessimistic about the state of the franchise, while just 23.2% of fans were optimistic.
2. Only 31.1% of fans were confident in this ownership group, while just 28.3% of fans were confident in John Mozeliak and the front office. The vote of confidence was even smaller for manager Oliver Marmol.
3. Even with all of that, 55.5% of fans were confident that the Cardinals would continue to be a competitive franchise.

When fans were asked what a successful 2024 season would look like, 94.3% of the respondents believed that the playoffs were the minimum expectation, with 60.9% of those fans believing a playoff series win was needed and 6.1% thought winning the World Series was the only way to be successful.

Well, it's safe to say the Cardinals are on track to increase the dissatisfaction of their fanbase, and if they are not careful, they may lose a lot more interest from the fans that make the operation function going into 2025.

If the Cardinals want to win back their fanbase, they need to answer these 10 burning questions between now and next season.

Question #1 - Who is tasked with leading the front office moving forward?

This is an unpopular but accurate take - John Mozeliak's tenure with the St. Louis Cardinals has been successful, and he will be a Cardinals' Hall of Famer someday. And yet, it is also true that Mozeliak's time in charge of baseball operations needs to come to an end.

From 2011-2015, turned the Cardinals into one of the three most successful organizations in the sport. They won one World Series, made it to four straight NLCS, and made it to another World Series. Bernie Miklasz had the following stats on a recent episode on his YouTube channel: The Cardinals had the most postseason wins (32, the next-best team had 23), the most games played in the postseason (61, which is 28 more games than any other team in the major played in the postseason).

Since 2016, the Cardinals have just four postseason wins and have been to one NLCS (where they got swept by the Washington Nationals). They've missed the playoffs four times (five if they miss again this year) and had three managers over that stretch. While they got back to being competitive from 2019-2022, they were nowhere near the powerhouse that Mozeliak made them into in the early 2010s.

It's time for a new regime in St. Louis. Mozeliak is not oblivious to that - he's been very open about needing to transition his leadership in the near future and bring in an outside perspective to an organization that is a bit stale - but that change must happen this offseason, not next year. For one, I don't think the Cardinals are prepared for the potential drop in revenue that may occur next year if fans do not believe real change is happening, and second, fans are right, this team needs a different guiding voice as soon as possible

I don't think Mozeliak needs to be fired or booted from the organization. Mozeliak can step into a different position with the club for the final year of his contract and allow someone like Chaim Bloom to take over. The aforementioned Bernie Miklasz and Jeff Jones of the Belleville News-Democrat both told me they believed this scenario is coming this offseason on the Dealin' the Cards podcast.

Bloom seems to be the favorite to take over, and you can read more about my thoughts on him here. Bloom seems like a match made in heaven for St. Louis, and his expertise in player development and scouting would be a major asset to an organization that used to be the best in baseball at that and has lagged in recent years (especially in player development).

If it is not Chaim Bloom, I do think we've reached a point where fans will not be accepting of an internal hire. That's nothing against Randy Flores, Michael Girsch, or anyone else in that front office, but I just don't believe fans will accept new leadership that doesn't come from outside the organization.