2008 MLB Regular Season

Hot Offseason Action: St. Louis Cardinals

This is one of a series of posts in belittle and berate each team for their blunderous offseason bungling, and sparingly salute them for scarce successful strategems.

A case can be made, and made fairly easily, that the St. Louis Cardinals have been the dominant Major League team of the new millenium. Beginning in the year 2000, the Cardinals have gone on an incredible run in which they made postseason appearances in 6 out of 7 seasons, including two World Series appearances and one World Championship. In those 7 campaigns, from 2000 to 2006, the worst season record the Cardinals posted was 83-78 in 2006, but they also won the World Series that year, so all in all it was a pretty awesome run.

But that run decisively came to an end last year, just as I had predicted, and even with perhaps the best player in baseball on their team in the form of one Albert Pujols, the future looks rather grim for the Red Birds, especially in the near term. Since peaking at 105 wins in 2004, the Cardinals have won fewer and fewer games each year. Last year they won only 78, and are very likely to win even fewer this year.

The reasons for this rapid decline are twofold. First, the Cardinals have demonstrated an ironclad determination to refuse to allow their payroll to surpass a threshold $90 million or so, despite opening a brand new stadium two years ago. In order to avoid passing this $90 million threshold, each year for the past four years the Cardinals have allowed virtually all of their free agents to walk, without signing any new impact free agents.

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