Hanging By a Thread

The sword is suspended but for how long?

The story of Damocles and King Dionysus is well known, but the short version is that the king allows Damocles to have a taste of what it is like to have all the riches and power of the kingship, but he suspends a giant sword over the throne that is held in place only by a single horse’s hair. While the general moral is that you can never be too comfortable in power, there’s another reading: sometimes there’s not much keeping things from crashing down.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2024 Cardinals, brought to you by Greek literature.

There is a decent chance that the newest version of the baseball St. Louisians will be a pretty good one, though that’s not the story Baseball-Reference is telling. Still, this winter you could imagine Sonny Gray fronting the rotation, Lance Lynn giving up fewer homers, Steven Matz continuing his late-season run, the offense doing its job as the younger players stepped forward and the MVP guys improved, and the rebuilt bullpen doing its job. It wasn’t a team you necessarily went to Vegas and put money on to win the World Series, but the weak NL Central seemed there for the taking and after that, well, who knows….

Those dreams, however, may be hanging by a thread. A rapidly unraveling one. Gray had the hamstring strain felt around the Midwest and will miss the first two weeks of the season. Cardinal starters had a 5.84 ERA in the spring (with one game left to play), good for 25th (but hey, they were ahead of Milwaukee and Cincinnati, so that’s something). The offense took some hits with Tommy Edman not being healthy and Lars Nootbaar cracking some ribs and the bullpen lost a bullet with Kenyan Middleton. The thread seems to be fraying.

And all of that is before Jordan Walker did his best football blocking technique while Dylan Carlson was trying to catch a fly ball Monday. How much more can that hair take before the sword comes down on this team’s chances?

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This season may be the most important season in my lifetime.

You could have probably made the case for 2006 for a while. Going into that season, Tony La Russa had been here 10 years and never could get over the hump. There was that NLCS trip in ‘96 which ended pretty roughly, then the 2000s saw some reasonable runs but never the big wins. Especially after 2004 and 2005, there was a real discussion about whether he could ever get it done. If the club doesn’t win in 2006, you wonder if he’d been around much longer. After all, Walt Jocketty got removed the next season, though that had more to do with the culture clash going on in the front office.

I can’t think of another season, though, that had so much riding on it. It’s one thing to need to make the playoffs. After 2016-2018, getting back to the playoffs was important. However, that’s a bit different than trying to avoid a second consecutive losing season, especially when you aren’t in a rebuild. Two consecutive bad years in some places is a rough stretch. Two consecutive bad years here and now will trigger a complete course correction.

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The stakes are huge. If this team loses, there’s a good chance that, extension or not, the club is looking for their fourth manager in less than 15 years. It seems likely that the president of baseball operations will spend the last year of his contract doing something different than what he’s done for decades. Most of the pitching staff can be a free agent at the end of the year and it would be hard to argue, even if Lynn or Gibson had a good year, that it would be in the long-term interests of the team to bring them back.

The young players would stick around, of course, but Paul Goldschmidt has notably not signed an extension this spring, going against all the conventional wisdom. If the team struggles, he could be moved at the deadline to start reworking this organization into the next great Cardinal team.

To all appearances, this team seems like it is in “must win” mode. Yet the front office and ownership seems to be treating this as just another year.

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There’s no doubt that John Mozeliak has said the right things about being embarrassed about last year’s results, about feeling the pressure that this fanbase puts on the organization to consistently win. He’s spoken about learning from last year and trying to improve on what he would freely admit was not his best year. (Though it should be noted that he and others such as Michael Girsch and Randy Flores did a solid to excellent job at the trade deadline last year. There’s a good chance that those moves will pay dividends as early as this summer.)

Yet when you look at this team…there’s still a little feel of 2023 around it. Gray ups the pitching staff’s ceiling, because there was no one of his caliber on the squad last season, but the rest of the rotation is eerily familiar. We’ve already seen that they are one hamstring away from being mediocre at best. Miles Mikolas did have a good spring but his profile doesn’t match any other Opening Day starter. Could this team be good? For sure. But even though spring training stats shouldn’t influence us because of small sample sizes and various quality of hitters, the overall rough outings have taken a toll on the optimism.

The words have been there. The urgency. The importance. Yet it’s not so important that the club is going to go over the first luxury tax threshold to get a pitcher like Jordan Montgomery who would make this team feel a whole lot better. It was more important to be safe, to get pitchers who “eat innings” even if they give up four runs or more while doing so. (There’s been a LOT of first inning runs this spring, haven’t there?) Winning is important and a major goal, but let’s do it on our terms.

By now there is no reasonable reason the Cardinals haven’t gotten Montgomery besides not wanting to go over that threshold. A mark, you will note, they have never come close to surpassing. If they were to go over it, they would pay a 20% tax on the part that cleared the mark. So if they are about $20 million short of it now but signed Montgomery to a $30 million deal, it would turn out to be….$32 million (and, of course, any moves during the year that increased payroll would also hit that tax). With so many pitchers coming off the books for next year, the club could easily reset their tax counter. It’s not like we’re talking about adding a huge long-term deal that could cripple the franchise for the next five years.

Adding someone like Montgomery would put a little more fabric on that thread, perhaps keeping the sword at bay for a little longer. As it stands right now, there’s actually more risk than this conservative organization usually likes, given the fact that there’s a low chance of strong seasons from the pitching staff and a lot better chance we’re trying to guess which pitcher will Zack Thompson replace in June.

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The pitching staff was always going to need a strong offense to support it. That pledge may have a hard time being fulfilled.

The loss of Edman for an unforeseen length of time—seriously, if he’s back before June, I would be pretty surprised at this point—isn’t great, but Tommy’s skills are in his versatility, not really his hitting. Losing Nootbaar was a big blow, not only because of his OBP talent but because his off-season promised to be one that helped him tap into his power. Now, with weeks off and ribs to heal, we will have to see how he does when he returns.

The hardest blow, at least emotionally, may have come Monday with the loss of Carlson. It’s very possible that it’s just a small thing and maybe he’ll be ready for Opening Day. However, there’s also a real chance that the club is going to wind up with only Michael Sianti as the only person that can play center field when they take the diamond in Los Angeles on Thursday.

Carlson was finally starting to take advantage of the situation that had opened up for him with the absence of Nootbaar and the off-season trades of Tyler O’Neill and Richie Palacios. He led the team in home runs this spring—the fact that only he and Jose Fermin have multiple homers is a little concerning for an offense that is supposed to be one of the league’s best, but I digress—and had a 1.227 OPS in the last week of spring. He looked like he was putting it all together until he was unable to jump over the solid block of Jordan Walker in front of him. Again, hopefully it’s not a big thing, but you hate to see a shoulder injury with the power sapping potential it has.

The Cardinals hit 16 home runs this spring, one less than the Padress and three less than the Marlins, so maybe you can factor in the stadium, but their OPS was 24th and they were tied for 20th in stolen bases. Again, spring stats are pretty close to meaningless but it’s not exactly what you want to see when the only real chance this team has on most night is to outslug the opposition.

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Let’s use this to clear the mechanism as it were. We’ll get all the negative stuff out in the air and look to the positive on Thursday when the season begins in earnest. No matter how you look at it, though, this is a vital season in the history of the Cardinals. We’ll see which direction it goes.