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

8. Moving resources away from player development to patchwork their big league club

You'll see throughout this list how all of these mistakes seem to compound themselves, either directly leading to a different "saga" of issues or making another problem even worse.

Part of the reason the Cardinals have failed to develop their top prospects in recent years has been the mismanagement of resources, funneling more and more money from the big league club at the expense of investing in the farm system, as well as the player development department and technology.

Katie Woo did an excellent job of detailing this on her piece over at The Athletic prior to the Cardinals' end-of-season press conference last September. As fans clamored for more money to be spent on the big league roster, Mozeliak slowly honored that request, but did so not because he was being given more cash flow by the DeWitt family, but because they took resources away from player development to find those funds.

Over time, this left both their minor league and big league staffs among the thinnest in all of baseball, especially downsizing their personnel during the pandemic and failing to rehire or replace those positions coming out of that time.

As organizations across the industry expanded their staffs, updated their technology, and invested even more in all things player development to gain an edge over their competitors, the Cardinals regressed and then remained stagnant, instead choosing short-term fixes to their roster rather than fixing the issue at its core. It kind of worked for some time there, but eventually the cracks in the foundation became too much and the whole thing began to fall apart.

We have tangible examples like Jordan Walker being thrown into a brand new position, not receiving help from a roaming instructor to get him up to speed, and debuting in St. Louis shortly after at such a young age, and was expected to perform at a high level.

It got so bad that part of the reason the Cardinals did this transition year was to allow Chaim Bloom an entire year to focus on reshaping and fixing their player development before having to run the whole operation. It's pretty rare to see an executive as established as Bloom come into an organization, spend a full year reviewing it, another full year implementing change, and then taking over. But that's how big the issues had become.

Hopefully Bloom can get things back on track rather quickly, but the years of issues Mozeliak created with this poor reallocation of resources will make that difficult. Yes, the DeWitt family could have given Mozeliak more money to work with, but plenty of organizations have shown they can do more than the Cardinals with less, so that's not a good enough excuse for what went down.