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

1. Failing to bring outside voices into the organization sooner

For all of the faults that we can point to during John Mozeliak's regime, the Cardinals had a ton of success under his leadership, not just in spite of it. I know many want to act like Mozeliak's early years of success were purely because of Walt Jocketty and Jeff Lunhow, but that's extremely disengenuous to Mozeliak and the body of work he put together.

Jocketty brought Mozeliak over to St. Louis with him, following their time in Colorado, starting out as an assistant in scouting operations and rising all the way up to assistant general manager before he took over for Jocketty. The two drafts that Mozeliak oversaw, 1999 and 2000, saw the club draft future Hall of Famers Albert Pujols and Yadier Molina. Does Mozeliak not get credit for drafting two of the best players in Cardinals' history?

After taking over for Jocketty following the 2007 season, he turned Jim Edmonds into future World Series MVP David Freese and Scott Rolen into Troy Glaus after both players asked out of St. Louis. Mozeliak flipped top prospect Brett Wallace and others in an aggressive trade deadline move for Matt Holliday, and ended up convincing Holliday, a Boras client, to resign in St. Louis that offseason. He signed Lance Berkman, who was a huge piece of their run in 2011. Mozeliak traded a young star in Colby Rasmus at the 2011 trade deadline to acquire the finishing touches to a championship club.

Look, I just spent thousands of words reminding you of all the ways Mozeliak has really hurt the Cardinals in recent years, but he has brought a World Series to St. Louis, two National League Pennants, five NLCS appearances, six division titles, ten postseason appearances, and a .543 win% since he took over for Jocketty. Has it been perfect? No. But we can't play revisionist history and take away the success he had.

What we can do, however, is point out how Mozeliak failed to adapt as an executive, and allowed an organization that was the envy of all other front offices in baseball to turn into the laughing stock of many.

This could have been avoided, though. Back in the mid-1990s, the DeWitt family made a huge change and brought in the leadership of Jocketty and Tony La Russa. In the 2000s, the club dipped into the business world and brought Jeff Lunhow's forward-thinking processes into the equation. Ownership was proactive about bringing in fresh voices to the organization. But apparently, Mozeliak didn't learn from that and allowed the system to grow stale.

Mozeliak replaced Jocketty after the 2008 season, and both Lunhow and La Russa left the organization after 2011 as well. The Cardinals' success continued at a very high level for another four seasons, but the cracks began to show in 2016, and things haven't been the same ever since.

Chaim Bloom coming on as an advisor after the 2023 season was a long-overdue step in that direction. Bloom taking over for Mozeliak after the 2025 season is a breath of fresh air. But it should not have taken nearly this long for the organization to realize they needed new voices in their midst. I've heard Mozeliak mention that in the past, but instead of making hard decisions and changing out voices like Gary LaRocque from player development to back up that sentiment, they continued to allow an echo chamber of voices to persist.

Now, that's not to say that everyone in the front office walked in lockstep with Mozeliak; it's hard to know. But in an industry as competitive and cutting-edge as Major League Baseball, limiting yourself to your own strategies and opinions rather than branching out and stretching yourselves is how you fall behind. And fall behind the Cardinals did.

It wasn't blatantly obvious on the surface, and it's taken close to a decade for that systemic deterioration to fully rear its ugly head, but that's the cruel part about how much this final "saga" has defined the latter stages of Mozeliak's tenure. For as long as they allowed themselves to fall behind the times, it is going to take a while for the Cardinals to return to their prior prominence, if they even can under Bloom. I really like what Bloom and his team have been bringing to the organization, but there is no guarantee of future success.

No, most baseball executives don't get a storybook ending with their organizations, but most also don't get almost a decade of run to unravel something as special as what the Cardinals had going for them. It's a shame, it really is, and it's what ultimately will make it difficult for many Cardinals fans to ever embrace Mozeliak again, even with the overwhelming success the beginning of his tenure with the club was.