Ranking the 10 worst and most inexplicable Cardinals sagas under John Mozeliak

The St. Louis Cardinals find themselves positioned as sellers at the 2025 MLB Trade Deadline, and while that doesn't come as a shock considering expectations prior to the season, how exactly they got to this is mind-boggling.

I mean that in multiple ways. Big picture, it's wild to think that just over a decade ago, John Mozeliak was leading an organization that was the apple of most owners and front office's eyes - they seemed to do everything well. They won a World Series in 2011, lost a Hall of Fame manager and slugger, and didn't seem to miss a beat. They continued to draft and develop with the best of them, making timely free agent signings and trades, and continued to find themselves in the NLCS or World Series every year from 2011-2014. In fact, in each of those years, the Cardinals either won in the World Series or lost to the team that would go on to win it all.

Zooming in, even how this year has played out is jarring. While fans are used to really odd decision-making from this organization at this point, Mozeliak continues to outdo himself, and that's led to another example of horrible management from the president of baseball operations with how he has handled Erick Fedde in 2025.

STL Sport Central's Brenden Schaeffer declared Mozeliak's handling of Fedde as "the worst and most inexplicable saga of the Mozeliak era", and it got me thinking...where do I rank the Fedde debacle in terms of the many, and I mean many, crazy sagas we've seen under Mozeliak's leadership?

Today, I am going to try my best to rank the 10 worst and most inexplicable sagas of the Mozeliak regime based on a number of factors that are quite subjective, so this list will likely be different than yours. I am going to provide ten different trends, strings of decision-making, or singular decisions that were so terrible and unexplainable that they embarrassed the front office, ownership, and this fanbase.

Ultimately, I ordered this list based on the level of insanity it took to get to that place, not necessarily the most consequential poor decisions Mozeliak made. Just because something goes wrong on a grand scale doesn't make it more insane than "smaller" decisions. But trust me, there are some pretty significant and long-term developments on this list as well.

Here are the 10 worst and most inexplicable Cardinals sagas under John Mozeliak

10. Allowing veteran leadership in clubhouse to go unchecked

Following the disaster that was the 2023 season, the Cardinals decided they were going to make a run at contention again in 2024, rather than enter a rebuild or aggressive retool. Even with aging veterans on their roster and a new young core emerging, the Cardinals hoped to blend the two together and prove that 2023 was just a one-year blip.

While hindsight says it was the wrong choice, and there were fans who critiqued it at the time, I saw why they thought they could get back to contention, and if ownership was willing to fork over some cash, it was the perfect offseason to target some high-end pitching to headline their rotation.

Mozeliak did bring in Sonny Gray, but avoiding making a major trade for a starter like Dylan Cease or Tyler Glasnow, and did not serioiusly entertain signing big name starters like Blane Snell or Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Instead, they filled out the rest of their rotation with Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn, and decided to that was enough to turn things around.

Well, and then the Cardinals made two really odd signings to serve in bench roles on their roster - Matt Carpenter and Brandon Crawford. Why? Well, because Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt requested more veterans on the roster, because "their team was all young guys" back in 2023. Arenado believed that having someone like Carpenter, the later addition of Crawford, and guys like Lynn and Gibson was going to allow the Cardinals to "talk to the young guys and hold them accountable" while Arenado and Goldschmidt handled their business.

Arenado blamed that need on the fact that he and Goldschmidt weren't really vocal people, but come on. We are talking about two guys who are supposed to be future Hall of Famers and competed for (and Goldschmidt won) the NL MVP back in 2022. They can't hold young guys accountable? They can't lead the clubhouse? I'm not saying there shouldn't be more veterans around, but they really thought they needed Carpenter and Crawford, who both took away potential roles from more impactful players, to do that for them?

Not everyone can be Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina, Matt Holliday, Adam Wainwright, or Chris Carpenter, but man, you can't convince me that it's not Goldschmidt or Arenado's role to step up and be those guys. And Mozeliak should have challenged his superstars on that after a horrible 2023 season, rather than caving in and allowing them to run roster decisions.

I haven't even touched on Miles Mikolas, who for years seems to avoid taking accountability for dreadful performances, instead seeking to diminish them or chalk them up to bad luck. Yes, some of this for sure falls on Oliver Marmol, but Mozeliak is the one who sets the roster, and the tone he set the last few years with this has been frustrating to observe from the outside looking in.