The Cardinals can't get tangled up in John Mozeliak's Angels tomfoolery

St. Louis Cardinals fans said a little prayer for the Los Angeles Angels on June 26 after the announcement that the Angels had brought on former Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak as an interim replacement for dismissed general manager Perry Minasian. Cardinals fans are still lying awake at night ruminating over Mozeliak's final few seasons in St. Louis as he oversaw the collapse of a once-mighty empire, and now that he's at the helm of another squad, Mozeliak may be hungering for the scraps of the team he left for dead. But under Chaim Bloom, the Cardinals are now too smart to engage in those antics.

Bloom raided the den of the Boston Red Sox, whom he oversaw from 2020 to 2023, trading away Willson Contreras, Sonny Gray and Steven Matz for a bevy of prospects from a Red Sox system he knew well, and in a similar fashion, Mozeliak is obviously intimately familiar with many players in the Cardinals organization who were drafted and signed under his watch. But unlike Bloom, who appears to be in tune with modern baseball analytics, Mozeliak had long cherished players who rarely prosper in the current iteration of the sport.

Mozeliak learned in the trial by fire that was the Cardinals' dismal 2023 season that pitching to contact and relying on defense no longer works. Teams can't depend on ground balls now that the shift is heavily regulated and players are making harder contact than ever. Therefore, if Mozeliak decided to call Bloom and discuss a deal, he'd likely be looking for the exact type of players whom the Cardinals have been stockpiling since Bloom took over and brought the team into the current era.

Although the Cardinals' new CEO, Bill DeWitt III, left the door open for the Cardinals to pivot from their original goals in 2026 of builidng for the future, Bloom seemed to squash that vision, reiterating that the Cardinals need to stay the course. Left unsaid, but what every fan could gather from it, is that the Cardinals will likely sell their remaining assets at the trade deadline.

Given the Angels' current situation, one would think that they would also be looking to offload their valuable pieces. The Angels currently sit in the basemen of the AL West, owning a 34-49 record. They have a few assets that they could sell off, including Jo Adell, Reid Detmers, Jose Soriano and, of course, Mike Trout.

But according to Jon Heyman of MLB Network, the Angels are wary of selling at the deadline since none of those four are on expiring contracts. It's a familiar feeling for beleaguered Angels fans, who saw their team stand pat with all-world superstar Shohei Ohtani at the 2023 deadline in a futile attempt to contend for the postseason and then allowing him to walk in free agency.

The Cardinals and Angels don't match up as logical trade partners

With the Cardinals, Mozeliak held a similar thought process to Minasian of contending every year, with the idea that anything could happen if the team made the postseason. But no such hopes appear to be on the horizon for the Angels, and with their farm system ranking 28th in baseball according to MLB.com, a hopefully wiser Mozeliak surely wouldn't be tempted to go for it with a team far out of the playoff picture and desperately in need of young reinforcements.

Whether the Angels sell sensibly or buy brazenly, the Cardinals are in no position to dance with Mozeliak. The Cardinals shouldn't fool themselves into purchasing major league talent at the deadline in hopes of competing, especially following their recent losing skid, and if Mozeliak somehow concludes that going for it all is the right move, the Angels don't hold the prospect capital that the Cardinals may demand when compared with other teams. Why would the Cardinals flip Riley O'Brien to the Angels when the bullpen-depleted Los Angeles Dodgers could provide a more prized haul of talent?

If Mozeliak saddles up to Bloom and tries to sweet-talk him into a trade, the Cardinals executive needs to put up his hand and stop the conversation. The Cardinals and Angels aren't compatible, and any deal would result in heartbreak for all involved.

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