Question for those not wanting to Rebuild

[mattmitchl44]

If your numbers are right, they would need some luck to make the playoffs but it's possible. Add a little more and they make the playoffs probably. Once in the playoffs they have a chance to make a run. Teams can and have done that. Competitive teams draw more fans so not only does it lift a team but it actually lifts a teams bottom line. Losing doesn't do that. Losing Gray hurts. Losing Donovan hurts. But if they get top talent in return then not so much. Losing Mikolas and Matz is a plus. Any replacement is likely to do as well or better IMO. Easing the pressure on Walker and Scott by improving the team can only help them at worst. This team should add quality free agents to help and make the playoffs.

The Cardinals are trying to build an organizational future that isn't so dependent on luck.

And, no, if you have a consistently Top 5 farm system, basing your roster construction on the annual development of prospects isn't "luck."

The problem is you can't consistently keep a top 5 farm system. You're subject to the eccentricities of the draft. You draft good it helps you win, you win you get a worse draft position. This up and down process can be mitigated with good free agent signings but success will always leave you in a poorer draft position. You can hope for lightning from lower picks and supplement with free agents or you can put your eggs into losing and drafting high. We see the Pittsburghs and Miami's getting these high picks but it never seems to make them winners. I wonder why.

You can consistently draft better than average. At every point that the Cardinals draft there are future major leaguers available to be drafted. The teams that do a better job of identifying and developing them (and international signings) will always have an advantage in their farm systems.

Because Pittsburgh and Miami have ~$100 million less in ML payroll than the Cardinals to put into:

1) aggressively locking up the players they do develop with lower cost, long term contracts and
2) selectively adding key FAs at the right time

Not really. No one knows if a player will break out. The consistent winners use their minors as trading cards to land major talent. Occasionally a young stud filters through. Depending mostly on minor league talent is why the lesser teams constantly lose. When you stick someone like Siani into the lineup for 400-500 at bats it's always going to end bad. That's why he can't stick anywhere. My proposal is to not cut salary at all. Instead play your hand every single year. If you absolutely must trade away top talent (Gray), it's a must to get top talent that is very near major league ready. Why not compete every single year? There just isn't a good excuse not to.

Then how have teams like Cleveland, Tampa Bay, and Milwaukee consistently get more production out of young players on their rosters - and have been in the Top 10 in regular season wins over the last decade?

They do it because they are consistently better at identifying, acquiring, and developing young talent. Of the Top 10 batters and Top 10 pitchers for those teams over the last decade (60 total players), 35 (58%) came to the majors with those teams and another 22 (37%) were acquired by trade as pre-ARB or ARB years players.

Those are the models. Then add tens of millions more in payroll on top of that.

Without delving into the history of those clubs and seeing their specific builds over the years I really can't speak strongly to their circumstances, but I will say, what did they win in that period? Any championship's? I will say that Tampa had some novel strategy with using openers for games and some other things and getting players like Garcia(I think) hot in the playoffs helped, but they won't spend and if they had supplemented their teams during those times they might very well have a Championship. They did come up with some wicked pitching during that time also. As for the Brewers, well, they have had an exceptional run of luck acquiring mediocre players that played way above average for them. I don't know if it has to do with the park they play in or just great luck, but remember that guy "Yelich" that's a superstar? Without him who knows. They did develop some pitching and that always helps but again, they won the Central. That's far from a championship and during most of that time the Central was considered the weak sister.

On one hand you want to say the Cardinals should "just get into the playoffs, it's a crapshoot" and on the other you want to downplay what Cleveland, Milwaukee, Tampa Bay have achieved because they didn't "win anything" in a crapshoot. But what they did win was a lot of regular season games, which would have frequently ensured they weren't getting super high 1st round draft picks - yet they still maintained an ability to consistently generate a lot of cost controlled young talent.

As has been stated over and over and over again - the Cardinals need to do what Cleveland, Milwaukee, Tampa Bay have shown can be done when it comes to developing young talent and then they need do to it BETTER by having greater payroll resources to add more expensive veteran players than those teams can afford.

It's a "weighted" crapshoot. When you get in you always have a puncher's chance. It's better and more exciting than losing for years over some mythical rebuild bull. Over and over and over again, your way is by massively losing for years. My way is continually putting the best possible team within guidelines on the field for a chance to get in the playoffs. One doe NOT preclude the other. Bot can be done at the same time. The Cards are living proof of that concept. For a large period of time they were one of the most winning teams in baseball, a perennial playoff contender. That brought 3 million through the turnstiles consistently and kept them flush. Over that time their philosophy was to contend every year for a WS championship and they won a few. It's important to give fans at least a semblance of you trying to win in a season, otherwise why even play? They have the ability for do all the draft and develop (bleep) and still sign top tier talent at the same time. People like you are giving a false argument.

To address the 2nd point first - and the reason there were able to do that for an extended period of time was because they had a tremendous amount of "value" in Pujols, Molina, and many others because they had them under contract at well below full market value.

You can't count on finding another singular player who gives you the "value" that Pujols did, but you can find two players that each give you half the "value" that Pujols did, or three players that each give you one-third of that "value." And that's what they need to find that they don't have at present.

And we all agree that we want to see the organization put a team on the field that can legitimately contend for NL pennants and WS championships as often as possible. Right now, however, they are not close to that, precisely because they don't have the "value" in young, cost controlled players that they need to be that consistently contending team. To any conceivable limit that they might spend to - $180, etc. million - they aren't in position to put a 9X win team on the field in 2026. They could spend now, put another 8X win team on the field and very likely get bounced in the first round of the playoff - basically the same thing they've been doing for a decade.

[mattmitchl44]

Without delving into the history of those clubs and seeing their specific builds over the years I really can't speak strongly to their circumstances, but I will say, what did they win in that period? Any championship's? I will say that Tampa had some novel strategy with using openers for games and some other things and getting players like Garcia(I think) hot in the playoffs helped, but they won't spend and if they had supplemented their teams during those times they might very well have a Championship. They did come up with some wicked pitching during that time also. As for the Brewers, well, they have had an exceptional run of luck acquiring mediocre players that played way above average for them. I don't know if it has to do with the park they play in or just great luck, but remember that guy "Yelich" that's a superstar? Without him who knows. They did develop some pitching and that always helps but again, they won the Central. That's far from a championship and during most of that time the Central was considered the weak sister.

Yes, but the whole point of this is that, unlike the Brewers, TB, and Cleveland is that they do not have the capability to spend in the top 10 to top 1/3 of teams in the league, but the Cardinals do. Nobody here, or with the Cardinals, who are in favor of this model are saying that they have to drop their payroll to the level of those teams. Why do people keep overlooking this?

If the Cardinals are able to build a system that allows them to get production out of young players year after year, they can aford to spend more on more established players when the time comes.They spend as they historically always have under this ownership group once they are able to get their infrastructure in place. Yes, it might take a year or two to get the infrastructure in place to do this, but people have to be patient, or at least try to understand what they are doing.

It's literally what they have done for the years when the organization has had the most success.

Again, another "but they can't walk and chew gum at the same time" post. When will you guys understand that they can do both every (drat) season. They've proven they can because they did it and in the process won some championships.

They can do both only AFTER they have a consistently functioning Top 5 farm system delivering talent to the majors. Until they have that, they can't.

[Ronnie Dobbs]

To address the 2nd point first - and the reason there were able to do that for an extended period of time was because they had a tremendous amount of "value" in Pujols, Molina, and many others because they had them under contract at well below full market value.

You can't count on finding another singular player who gives you the "value" that Pujols did, but you can find two players that each give you half the "value" that Pujols did, or three players that each give you one-third of that "value." And that's what they need to find that they don't have at present.

And we all agree that we want to see the organization put a team on the field that can legitimately contend for NL pennants and WS championships as often as possible. Right now, however, they are not close to that, precisely because they don't have the "value" in young, cost controlled players that they need to be that consistently contending team. To any conceivable limit that they might spend to - $180, etc. million - they aren't in position to put a 9X win team on the field in 2026. They could spend now, put another 8X win team on the field and very likely get bounced in the first round of the playoff - basically the same thing they've been doing for a decade.

The Pujols and Molina thing is a great point. We happened to draft one of the greatest players of all time, and later we drafted one of the greatest catchers of all time. They then locked up one of the greatest players of all time in what was the largest contract for a player with that amount of MLB time in history. That has to be maybe the greatest contract extension in history when you consider what kind of production he provided over those 7 years.

Like you said, you can't bet on drafting one of the greatest players of all time, but you can ensure that when you draft players who end up very good players at the MLB level, that you get a crack at extending them for a long time for below market value. Then you can go out and fill out a team to compliment those players. Obviously, that is a reason why you want to have a, preferable ahead of the game, but at least an up-to-date system of drafting and developing players.

Finally, I'm not trying to discredit the Cardinals developmental system from those days, they were obvious pretty good at what they did, but we might not be looking back so fondly for those years had they not hit on Pujols.

[CCard]

Without delving into the history of those clubs and seeing their specific builds over the years I really can't speak strongly to their circumstances, but I will say, what did they win in that period? Any championship's? I will say that Tampa had some novel strategy with using openers for games and some other things and getting players like Garcia(I think) hot in the playoffs helped, but they won't spend and if they had supplemented their teams during those times they might very well have a Championship. They did come up with some wicked pitching during that time also. As for the Brewers, well, they have had an exceptional run of luck acquiring mediocre players that played way above average for them. I don't know if it has to do with the park they play in or just great luck, but remember that guy "Yelich" that's a superstar? Without him who knows. They did develop some pitching and that always helps but again, they won the Central. That's far from a championship and during most of that time the Central was considered the weak sister.

Yes, but the whole point of this is that, unlike the Brewers, TB, and Cleveland is that they do not have the capability to spend in the top 10 to top 1/3 of teams in the league, but the Cardinals do. Nobody here, or with the Cardinals, who are in favor of this model are saying that they have to drop their payroll to the level of those teams. Why do people keep overlooking this?

If the Cardinals are able to build a system that allows them to get production out of young players year after year, they can aford to spend more on more established players when the time comes.They spend as they historically always have under this ownership group once they are able to get their infrastructure in place. Yes, it might take a year or two to get the infrastructure in place to do this, but people have to be patient, or at least try to understand what they are doing.

It's literally what they have done for the years when the organization has had the most success.

Again, another "but they can't walk and chew gum at the same time" post. When will you guys understand that they can do both every (drat) season. They've proven they can because they did it and in the process won some championships.

They can do both only AFTER they have a consistently functioning Top 5 farm system delivering talent to the majors. Until they have that, they can't.

Dream on. Go back to the stratomatic. Too many questions and terrible play to be good faith by the owners. What happens 5 years down the road when they still don't have your mythical top 5 minor leagues.

[CCard]

If your numbers are right, they would need some luck to make the playoffs but it's possible. Add a little more and they make the playoffs probably. Once in the playoffs they have a chance to make a run. Teams can and have done that. Competitive teams draw more fans so not only does it lift a team but it actually lifts a teams bottom line. Losing doesn't do that. Losing Gray hurts. Losing Donovan hurts. But if they get top talent in return then not so much. Losing Mikolas and Matz is a plus. Any replacement is likely to do as well or better IMO. Easing the pressure on Walker and Scott by improving the team can only help them at worst. This team should add quality free agents to help and make the playoffs.

The Cardinals are trying to build an organizational future that isn't so dependent on luck.

And, no, if you have a consistently Top 5 farm system, basing your roster construction on the annual development of prospects isn't "luck."

The problem is you can't consistently keep a top 5 farm system. You're subject to the eccentricities of the draft. You draft good it helps you win, you win you get a worse draft position. This up and down process can be mitigated with good free agent signings but success will always leave you in a poorer draft position. You can hope for lightning from lower picks and supplement with free agents or you can put your eggs into losing and drafting high. We see the Pittsburghs and Miami's getting these high picks but it never seems to make them winners. I wonder why.

You can consistently draft better than average. At every point that the Cardinals draft there are future major leaguers available to be drafted. The teams that do a better job of identifying and developing them (and international signings) will always have an advantage in their farm systems.

Because Pittsburgh and Miami have ~$100 million less in ML payroll than the Cardinals to put into:

1) aggressively locking up the players they do develop with lower cost, long term contracts and
2) selectively adding key FAs at the right time

Not really. No one knows if a player will break out. The consistent winners use their minors as trading cards to land major talent. Occasionally a young stud filters through. Depending mostly on minor league talent is why the lesser teams constantly lose. When you stick someone like Siani into the lineup for 400-500 at bats it's always going to end bad. That's why he can't stick anywhere. My proposal is to not cut salary at all. Instead play your hand every single year. If you absolutely must trade away top talent (Gray), it's a must to get top talent that is very near major league ready. Why not compete every single year? There just isn't a good excuse not to.

Then how have teams like Cleveland, Tampa Bay, and Milwaukee consistently get more production out of young players on their rosters - and have been in the Top 10 in regular season wins over the last decade?

They do it because they are consistently better at identifying, acquiring, and developing young talent. Of the Top 10 batters and Top 10 pitchers for those teams over the last decade (60 total players), 35 (58%) came to the majors with those teams and another 22 (37%) were acquired by trade as pre-ARB or ARB years players.

Those are the models. Then add tens of millions more in payroll on top of that.

Without delving into the history of those clubs and seeing their specific builds over the years I really can't speak strongly to their circumstances, but I will say, what did they win in that period? Any championship's? I will say that Tampa had some novel strategy with using openers for games and some other things and getting players like Garcia(I think) hot in the playoffs helped, but they won't spend and if they had supplemented their teams during those times they might very well have a Championship. They did come up with some wicked pitching during that time also. As for the Brewers, well, they have had an exceptional run of luck acquiring mediocre players that played way above average for them. I don't know if it has to do with the park they play in or just great luck, but remember that guy "Yelich" that's a superstar? Without him who knows. They did develop some pitching and that always helps but again, they won the Central. That's far from a championship and during most of that time the Central was considered the weak sister.

On one hand you want to say the Cardinals should "just get into the playoffs, it's a crapshoot" and on the other you want to downplay what Cleveland, Milwaukee, Tampa Bay have achieved because they didn't "win anything" in a crapshoot. But what they did win was a lot of regular season games, which would have frequently ensured they weren't getting super high 1st round draft picks - yet they still maintained an ability to consistently generate a lot of cost controlled young talent.

As has been stated over and over and over again - the Cardinals need to do what Cleveland, Milwaukee, Tampa Bay have shown can be done when it comes to developing young talent and then they need do to it BETTER by having greater payroll resources to add more expensive veteran players than those teams can afford.

It's a "weighted" crapshoot. When you get in you always have a puncher's chance. It's better and more exciting than losing for years over some mythical rebuild bull. Over and over and over again, your way is by massively losing for years. My way is continually putting the best possible team within guidelines on the field for a chance to get in the playoffs. One doe NOT preclude the other. Bot can be done at the same time. The Cards are living proof of that concept. For a large period of time they were one of the most winning teams in baseball, a perennial playoff contender. That brought 3 million through the turnstiles consistently and kept them flush. Over that time their philosophy was to contend every year for a WS championship and they won a few. It's important to give fans at least a semblance of you trying to win in a season, otherwise why even play? They have the ability for do all the draft and develop (bleep) and still sign top tier talent at the same time. People like you are giving a false argument.

To address the 2nd point first - and the reason there were able to do that for an extended period of time was because they had a tremendous amount of "value" in Pujols, Molina, and many others because they had them under contract at well below full market value.

You can't count on finding another singular player who gives you the "value" that Pujols did, but you can find two players that each give you half the "value" that Pujols did, or three players that each give you one-third of that "value." And that's what they need to find that they don't have at present.

And we all agree that we want to see the organization put a team on the field that can legitimately contend for NL pennants and WS championships as often as possible. Right now, however, they are not close to that, precisely because they don't have the "value" in young, cost controlled players that they need to be that consistently contending team. To any conceivable limit that they might spend to - $180, etc. million - they aren't in position to put a 9X win team on the field in 2026. They could spend now, put another 8X win team on the field and very likely get bounced in the first round of the playoff - basically the same thing they've been doing for a decade.

In 2011 the Dodgers payroll was around 110 million. The Cards and Rangers(who met in the WS) were in the low 90's millions. Not a lot of difference huh. Now fast forward, the Dodgers are what, 300-350 million? And where are the Cards, 120 million. It's a disgrace. A slap in the face to 3 million fans. And you have the audacity to get on here and justify it. How pathetic.

[CCard]

Again, another "but they can't walk and chew gum at the same time" post. When will you guys understand that they can do both every (drat) season. They've proven they can because they did it and in the process won some championships.

Yes, and why did they do it? They didn't just start from scratch and were immediately successful. It took building of the developmental infrastructure to get it in place so that when they were at a point where they could be truly competitive, they could start bringing in those more established, potentially more expensive players.

We have to build that again (you know, reduild) to get to that point where we were in the past. Unless you think that we are producing players like we did in the first 10 years of the 2000s, then I would think you would agree that development needs more improvement.

Your point is pure foolishness. The Cards had the 16th highest payroll in baseball in 2025. For this franchise that's a disgrace. You all get on here and justify it, kissing DeWitt's a$%. You make me sick. They could easily be spending 50 million more, easily. Imagine what that could turn this team into.

[mattmitchl44]

Without delving into the history of those clubs and seeing their specific builds over the years I really can't speak strongly to their circumstances, but I will say, what did they win in that period? Any championship's? I will say that Tampa had some novel strategy with using openers for games and some other things and getting players like Garcia(I think) hot in the playoffs helped, but they won't spend and if they had supplemented their teams during those times they might very well have a Championship. They did come up with some wicked pitching during that time also. As for the Brewers, well, they have had an exceptional run of luck acquiring mediocre players that played way above average for them. I don't know if it has to do with the park they play in or just great luck, but remember that guy "Yelich" that's a superstar? Without him who knows. They did develop some pitching and that always helps but again, they won the Central. That's far from a championship and during most of that time the Central was considered the weak sister.

Yes, but the whole point of this is that, unlike the Brewers, TB, and Cleveland is that they do not have the capability to spend in the top 10 to top 1/3 of teams in the league, but the Cardinals do. Nobody here, or with the Cardinals, who are in favor of this model are saying that they have to drop their payroll to the level of those teams. Why do people keep overlooking this?

If the Cardinals are able to build a system that allows them to get production out of young players year after year, they can aford to spend more on more established players when the time comes.They spend as they historically always have under this ownership group once they are able to get their infrastructure in place. Yes, it might take a year or two to get the infrastructure in place to do this, but people have to be patient, or at least try to understand what they are doing.

It's literally what they have done for the years when the organization has had the most success.

Again, another "but they can't walk and chew gum at the same time" post. When will you guys understand that they can do both every (drat) season. They've proven they can because they did it and in the process won some championships.

They can do both only AFTER they have a consistently functioning Top 5 farm system delivering talent to the majors. Until they have that, they can't.

Dream on. Go back to the stratomatic. Too many questions and terrible play to be good faith by the owners. What happens 5 years down the road when they still don't have your mythical top 5 minor leagues.

What happens if you sign two or three expensive veterans right now and they all turn into Anthony Rendons - the Angels version?

You can play pessimistic "what ifs?" all day. We know that what I lay out can be done because we've seen the Guardians, Rays, and Brewers, at least, do if for a decade.

[mattmitchl44]

Again, another "but they can't walk and chew gum at the same time" post. When will you guys understand that they can do both every (drat) season. They've proven they can because they did it and in the process won some championships.

Yes, and why did they do it? They didn't just start from scratch and were immediately successful. It took building of the developmental infrastructure to get it in place so that when they were at a point where they could be truly competitive, they could start bringing in those more established, potentially more expensive players.

We have to build that again (you know, reduild) to get to that point where we were in the past. Unless you think that we are producing players like we did in the first 10 years of the 2000s, then I would think you would agree that development needs more improvement.

Your point is pure foolishness. The Cards had the 16th highest payroll in baseball in 2025. For this franchise that's a disgrace. You all get on here and justify it, kissing DeWitt's a$%. You make me sick. They could easily be spending 50 million more, easily. Imagine what that could turn this team into.

An 81 win team?

[mattmitchl44]

In 2011 the Dodgers payroll was around 110 million. The Cards and Rangers(who met in the WS) were in the low 90's millions. Not a lot of difference huh. Now fast forward, the Dodgers are what, 300-350 million? And where are the Cards, 120 million. It's a disgrace. A slap in the face to 3 million fans. And you have the audacity to get on here and justify it. How pathetic.

Thank you for making my point.

In 2011, the Dodgers were outspending the Cardinals by $20 million, or just under 20%. Now, even if the Cardinals spend $200 million, the Dodgers are outspending them by $125 million, or nearly 40%. And multiple other teams are on the Dodgers heels in terms of spending as well.

Baseball has changed and the Cardinals, now more than ever, have to develop more young, cost controlled talent to compete.