Cardinals catcher takes biggest swing of home finale: Front office has to be ‘hungry’

The St. Louis Cardinals wrapped up their home slate with perhaps the most fitting variation of a win for this year’s team – the pitching was outstanding, the offense was barely sufficient, and a few breaks and flips of a coin determined the outcome.

“It’s an interesting way of scoring,” manager Oli Marmol smirked from the postgame podium, “but it’s a win.”

The two Cardinals runs in Sunday’s 2-1 victory came on a botched pop-up to right field with two out which allowed a hustling Masyn Winn to score from first base and a wild pitch to cap a walk to Winn which scored Lars Nootbaar from second.

Both were hustle plays. Winn’s run, by a quirk of official scoring, came via a hit. Neither was reflective of an offense operating at anywhere close to competitive capacity, which in large measure has defined a team that has struggled to get much past the .500 mark.

“We’re out of playoff contention [and] they’re still playing the game hard, and that’s what you want to see,” Marmol said. “They’re playing for pride, as far as just finishing strong.”

Pride only goes so far without material support. The Cardinals entered play Sunday with the second-fewest runs scored in the National League, the fourth-fewest home runs, and the fourth-worst team OPS.

The areas where help is needed are not a secret, and players see them as well as any outside observers. Catcher Willson Contreras stopped perhaps an inch short of begging for help from outside the organization, but made clear his views on what priorities should be over the winter.

“There’s some areas that need to be addressed,” Contreras said. “I don’t know if the front office is going to, but...we didn’t come together as an offense at all, during the whole year. There’s a lot of holes throughout the lineup as well, from one to nine.

“The only thing we can control is show up next year and keep working. But as an organization, I think the Cardinals are one of the biggest organizations in baseball, and if I was them, if I was the front office, I’d have to be hungry to own this division. We haven’t owned this division the last two years.”

Contreras is correct.

Counting home runs is perhaps the simplest way to measure an offense, and yet a lack of the long ball was chief among this team’s biggest flaws. None of Contreras, Nolan Arenado, Paul Goldschmidt, Nolan Gorman and Jordan Walker put up close to the totals which the team was counting on, and that proved to be an unrecoverable flaw.

It is not a flaw which is impossible to fix in a winter, and it’s not one that can be ignored. Money doesn’t fix all problems, and the unique challenges which accompany hitting in cavernous Busch Stadium cannot be ignored. But there will be home runs for purchase on the market this winter, and the Cardinals have the financial muscle to flex which will allow them to do so.

Those finances will be under close scrutiny, and a quiet announcement on Sunday afternoon seemingly underlies the necessity of patching the sizable power leak. The Cardinals announced a home attendance draw of just more than 2.8 million tickets in 2024, the first time in the history of Busch Stadium that they sold fewer than three million in a full season.

The tickets sold number, of course, doesn’t account for bodies passing through turnstiles, and down the stretch, those totals were perhaps half of the announced attendance on many nights. The craven way to read that trend is to assert that lagging attendance prevents spending; the aggressive way to read it is to realize that spending will drive attendance, and that market solutions have an important place.

The next week and a half will set the tone for a crucial winter. The club is expected to host an end-of-season press conference as soon as Monday, September 30; from that gathering, there’s likely to be announced staffing changes which stretch from the front office to the dugout, and in so doing, an opportunity for the Cardinals to reset the energy from a frustrated fan base that doesn’t view 2024 as a solid improvement from a dismal 2023.

Rather, the feeling seems to be that the improvement hasn’t been enough, and that decades of dedicated fan support haven’t yielded sufficient support in return from the front office and ownership. Cardinals fans are waiting to be shown commitment and change, and they aren’t alone.

“That’s a good question for the front office to answer,” Contreras said when asked which pieces needed to be upgraded for 2025. “I think if you look at the numbers as an offense, you will notice what’s possibly missing.

“As a group, we need to make an adjustment next year, for sure.”

Contreras took the winter’s first big swing. It’s on team leadership to follow up.