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.

9. Top prospects consistently flaming out

Player development is the name of the game in baseball, but it's also the thing that is so messy and unlinear and not as simple as some make it out to be. Top prospects flaming out happens all the time. But it is a problem that the Cardinals have seen what seems to be a high percentage of them fall flat on their face compared to other organizations.

The Cardinals have done a really nice job of consistently developing average to good big leaguers. Tommy Edman, Brendan Donovan, Lars Nootbaar, Kolten Wong, Tyler O'Neill, Harrison Bader, Paul DeJong, Carson Kelly, Luke Weaver, Jordan Hicks, Ryan Helsley, Jack Flaherty, and so many more. Some of those players have even been great at times (Donovan, Edman, Helsley, O'Neill, Flaherty, etc.), but for the most part, the Cardinals really don't develop stars.

Something each of those players has in common is that they weren't top-end prospects. Some were top 100 guys for sure, but none of them were top 20 prospects in all of baseball. But whenever the Cardinals have had their hands on top prospects since the death of Oscar Taveras, it has gone poorly.

Jordan Walker, Dylan Carlson, Nolan Gorman, Alex Reyes, and at least to some extent for now, Matthew Liberatore have failed to live up to the promise that they had. Sure, injuries played a role for many of them, but ultimately, their performance never lived up to what it needed to be. There's still story to be written when it comes to guys like Walker, Carlson, Gorman, and Liberatore, but time and time again, the Cardinals have failed to see their top prospects become the players many thought they could be.

Again, some of that is the nature of baseball, but if you look around at pretty much every organization, they have been able to develop a star in the last decade. St. Louis has not. Not from their top prospects, and not from even their lesser-known young guys. Ivan Herrera may be that guy, and so could JJ Wetherholt, but as John Mozeliak's tenure comes to a close, he's going to have to look in the mirror and realize that the last star the club internally developed came back in the early 2010s in the form of Matt Carpenter.

Sure, he's gone out and acquired some via trade over the decade, but being unable to pair that with elite homegrown talent has been a major point of concern for the Cardinals over the years.

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.

7. Swinging and missing on an Oscar Taveras replacement over and over again

The death of Oscar Taveras was a huge tragedy and a massive blow to the Cardinals' long-term plans. No, most organizations don't have to deal with something as horrible as this, but how the Cardinals failed to rebound for years accelerated many of their issues as an organization.

Taveras passed away in October of 2014, and while he was a part of their fourth straight trip to the NLCS, he was expected to become the star middle-of-the-order bat to propel them through the rest of the 2010s and into the 2020s in the seasons that followed. In response to the tragedy, Mozeliak went out and made an aggressive move, one that would spark a chain of huge swings that failed time and time again.

First, Mozeliak traded a package headlined by dynamic starter Shelby Miller for Jason Heyward, who, although he had a great season for the Cardinals in 2015, would sign with their rival, the Chicago Cubs, the following offseason.

After the Cardinals regressed in 2016 and the Cubs went on to win the World Series, the Cardinals snatched outfielder Dexter Fowler from them in free agency, thinking they had solved their outfield woes, but instead grabbed a terrible contract for their books.

After the 2017 season, the Cardinals got really aggressive, first agreeing to a trade for reigning NL MVP Giancarlo Stanton before he vetoed the deal, but then turned around and sent Sandy Alcantara and Zac Gallen to the Miami Marlins for Marcell Ozuna.

After that mess, the Cardinals decided to pass on Bryce Harper, believing their investment in Fowler and young outfielders that were on the way would be the answer to their woes, but once again, those things did not pan out.

Sure, the Cardinals got their stars in 2019 and 2021 by trading for Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado, but it came after years and years of failing to replace Taveras both internally and externally. This left plenty of money wasted and young talent sent elsewhere, hurting the Cardinals' long-term outlook in a major way.

The fact that Mozeliak still points to Taveras' death as an issue for the club shows you how deeply it impacted their decision-making for so long. Again, it was a major tragedy, but just how much Mozeliak put his eggs in that basket for the future of the organization was a major issue, and he followed it up with mistake after mistake that cost the Cardinals big time.

6. Sunk cost fallacy with bad extensions and free agent signings

Whenever the Cardinals did spend big money in free agency or by signing a player they developed to an extension, well, Mozeliak was very, very hesitant to admit defeat on those contracts, and it has cost the Cardinals both financially and in the win-loss column.

Let's take a trip down nightmare lane....and no, I'm not going to worry about putting these in chronological order or rank which were the worst deals.

How about Fowler and his aforementioned $82.5 million deal with the Cardinals? The highest bWAR Fowler ever put up for the Cardinals in an individual season was 1.7, and while he had an .851 OPS in year one of his deal, it ranked from .576-.754 in the three years following. It took until year five of the deal for Mozeliak to finally say enough is enough and eat the deal while shipping Fowler to the Angels.

The Cardinals signed Mike Leake to a five-year, $80 million deal prior to 2016, and he only made it one and a half seasons with the club before they had to dump his contract too. Leake posted a 4.46 ERA in 56 starts for St. Louis, a huge overpay for a player who, at best, was a middle-of-the-rotation starter but turned out to be worse for St. Louis.

How about the second Matt Carpenter extension? After eight incredible seasons with the club, Carpenter was in the final year of his first extension with the club, and midway through the 2019 season, the Cardinals extended Carpenter again, this time for his age-34 and 35 seasons.

Carpenter finished the final year of his first extension as a big league average hitter, posted a 79 OPS+ in year one of his new extensions, and finished out the 2021 season with a 63 OPS+ while continuing to play every day for the club. It was really bad, and it made his end with St. Louis (before returning in 2024) really sour for all parties involved.

Oh, and let's not forget Miles Mikolas, who, like Carpenter, Mozeliak extended early, and man, it's been horrible ever since he signed the dotted line. And yet, the Cardinals keep running him out there.

Brett Cecil, Greg Holland, Luke Gregerson, Paul DeJong, the list can keep going on. Mozeliak really struggles to part ways with bad investments, and it hurts the club big time.

5. "Philosophical differences" with manager Mike Shildt

We may never know what truly happened between Mozeliak and former manager Mike Shildt, and while I do think Cardinals fans overstate Shildt's importance to the club and ability as a manager, it's hard to think of many things that can be categorized as more "inexplicable" from Mozeliak during his time running the club.

Following a historic win streak that got the Cardinals into the 2021 playoffs to then be knocked out by the Los Angeles Dodgers in the Wild Card round, Mozeliak apparently intended to extend Shildt, but by the end of whatever conversation they had, Shildt was instead fired by the club.

Here's where it gets complicated: we don't know for sure what happened. There are different reports and theories out there on what the disagreements were about, but ultimately, I'm not going to focus on that. The point is, how did things go this south on a dime with the manager? And considering all of the other things on this list, what are the odds it had to do with poor decision-making or processes that Mozeliak had that Shildt was not a fan of?

Mozeliak hasn't exactly earned the benefit of the doubt from this fanbase, so it's no wonder that there are so many questions surrounding this and distrust built within the fanbase toward Mozeliak. It also started Marmol out on a bad foot with the fanbase, and he is constantly compared to Shildt and considered to be "Mozeliak's puppet" by some fans.

Mozeliak has always called the issues between him and Shildt "philosophical differences", refusing to go into further details. Shildt, on the other hand, has stated that there were things he and Mozeliak disagreed about, but he was shocked that it somehow led to his firing.

Here's the cold hard truth - even though I don't think it was a big deal that Shildt was let go, and I think Oliver Marmol has been unfairly criticized by many fans, the issues that Marmol has had to deal with during his tenure as manager are likely many of the things that Shildt himself called out. And no, I am not saying Marmol has not called these things out as well. Have you not heard how vocal he's been about the whole Fedde situation? Marmol is not a guy who avoids conflict, and he's acknowledged that he and Mozeliak disagree behind closed doors, but

Mozeliak has set up his managers to fail in recent years, and those philosophical differences seem to be the downfall of his regime.

4. Scapegoating Willson Contreras for their own overreliance on Yadier Molina covering their deficiencies

I mean, talk about public humiliation. Still, to this day, I cannot believe how poorly the Cardinals handled Willson Contreras back in 2023, and it is incredible to me that he still wants to represent the organization in spite of that.

After a terrible start to their 2023 season, some members of the Cardinals' pitching staff reportedly complained to Marmol and Mozeliak about Contreras' ability behind the plate, and the club decided to remove catching duties from Contreras altogether, announcing that he would become an outfielder/designated hitter for the club for the rest of the year.

After rightfully being called out by the fanbase as well as both local and national media, the Cardinals quickly backed off that stance, instead just putting Contreras at designated hitter for a few weeks before allowing him to return to catching duties, but the damage had already been done.

The Cardinals somehow expected Contreras, who had always been a sub-par defensive catcher, to magically step in and replace Molina defensively, one of the, if not the, greatest defensive catcher to ever live. As an organization, they lagged behind in terms of what they needed to do to prepare catchers and their pitching staff, because frankly, they relied on Molina to carry that load. So when he left, they were in shambles, not just because they lost an all-time great, but because they got lazy and fell behind in their own jobs.

Not only that, Contreras was also tasked with catching a terrible pitching staff, one that completely imploded during the season, and not just because of him, like they wanted people to believe. Adam Wainwright was awful that season, Miles Mikolas wasn't much better, Jack Flaherty was about as inconsistent as can be, and when Steven Matz was healthy, he was bad too. Their young arms of Dakota Hudson, Jake Woodford, Zack Thompson, Matthew Liberatore, and Drew Rom didn't do much better either.

It was a dumpster fire of a situation, and all of baseball called the Cardinals' bluff when they tried to pin it on Contreras. Was he part of the problem? Yes. But he was not the main issue, and he's done nothing but handle that situation, among other issues, like an absolute professional. The Cardinals are extremely lucky to have Contreras in their organization, and yet they have rarely treated him with that level of respect.

Losing a franchise icon like Molina is difficult, but Mozeliak made it far messier than it needed to be.

3. Handling of Erick Fedde following the 2024 season

No, the Erick Fedde saga has not been the worst and most inexplicable saga of John Mozeliak's regime in my books, but the fact that it has gotten as insane as it has and happened in this year of all years is truly a testament to how far things have fallen under Mozeliak's leadership in recent years.

Remember when Bill DeWitt Jr. fired Mike Matheny and said, “In some places a winning record, or even .500, is even acceptable. Not with this city, not with this franchise, not with its history, and not with the fans,"? Yeah, I do too. Well, Mozeliak has kept his job through some pretty awful years as of late, and he outright sabotaged the Cardinals' 2025 season with how he handled Erick Fedde this year.

No, trading for Fedde was not a mistake, but not trading him in the offseason was. I've been over that so many times, so I won't rehash that again. But then, as the year went on, two things became clear. First, the Cardinals were looking like a surprise team and performing much better than people expected. And second, Erick Fedde was unraveling and things were going to blow up if they did not take swift action.

I get it, Fedde had a fine ERA going into his start against the Chicago Cubs at the end of June, but literally every number under the hood had been screaming all season that Fedde was getting lucky and that he was pitching terribly. He was walking the world, striking out next to no one, and when players hit the ball, they hit it hard and it went far. Uh, that's bad in every sense of the word.

Oh, but the Cardinals kept running him out there, and as Fedde got shelled time and time again, Mozeliak made it even more difficult to get the Cardinals' season back on track. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that the Cardinals are likely looking at adding to this team at the deadline if they had replaced Fedde with McGreevy in the offseason or earlier in the season.

The Cardinals went 5-15 in Fedde's starts this year, a horrific .250 win%. In non-Fedde starts, the club is 47-36, and that includes all of Miles Mikolas' starts. We are talking about a team that is competing for the second Wild Card spot right now with the New York Mets on that kind of win pace. That's how bad Fedde has been for them this year.

You can't convince me that if McGreevy was in the rotation this whole time they wouldn't be a much better team. It's insane because not only did the Cardinals block McGreevy's runway with Fedde's presence, but they actually made the team worse as well.

What a poetic ending to Mozeliak's tenure, single-handedly sabotaging his chance at a surprise contending season as a send-off by trying to recoup Fedde's trade value over.

2. Commitment to an outdated pitching model

Look over at the Milwaukee Brewers, who for years now seem to have pitching that grows on trees. They draft and develop pitching with the best of them, know what arms to target from other organizations' farm systems, and sign and trade for the right veterans to complement their staff when needed.

Uh, that used to be the St. Louis Cardinals.

In the 2010s, the Cardinals were the organization that everyone looked at and wondered how they got so much pitching. While Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter headlined the rotation going into that decade, they were soon joined by the likes of Michael Wacha, Carlos Martinez, Shelby Miller, Lance Lynn, Jamie Garcia, Joe Kelly, Trevor Rosenthal, Kevin Siegrist, Jason Motte, Seth Maness, Mitchell Boggs, Fernando Salas, Marco Gonzales, Luke Weaver, Alex Reyes, and so many other young arms that came through their system.

They knew which veterans to target to maximize that group as well. John Lackey, Jake Westbrook, Edwin Jackson, Pat Neshak, Randy Choate, Edward Mujica, John Axford, Marc Rzepczynski, Octavio Dotel, Arthur Rhodes, and again, many more names helped the young pitching reach the heights that it did.

But then, over time, things changed. Lunhow left and took a lot of the Cardinals' staff with him, and the Mozeliak regime seemed to continue to lean on old systems and models that, for a time, continued to sustain them, but eventually fell behind the rest of baseball. Rather than adapting to the new way to draft, develop, and acquire pitching, the Cardinals dug their heels in, and pitching went from being their superpower as an organization to their Achilles heel.

Much of their issues post their incredible run from 2011-2015 have been pitching-related. They failed to develop their top arms, traded away future Cy Young contenders, and handed out terrible contracts to various free agents. Sure, they found ways to shore things up through timely trade deadline deals, but their pitching staff failed to match the level of excellence they achieved in the early 2010s, let alone even come close to it.

So even as the club finally acquired superstar bats in Goldschmidt and Arenado, they never had the pitching to truly put themselves in true contention. This is now the most pressing issue on Bloom's plate as he takes over baseball operations. Since 2020, the best starting pitchers the Cardinals have developed internally are Matthew Libeartore and Andre Pallante. That's horrible.

It has to change moving forward, and it is a shame that Mozeliak allowed this to fall apart under his watch.

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.