Grading Mozeliak, Girsch and the St. Louis Cardinals front office at the season’s midway point

President John Mozeliak and general manager Mike Girsch have been a close-knit team running the St. Louis Cardinals since 2018. But they’ve never seen a season play out like the first half of this one.

The Cardinals are 33-47 through 80 games and in last place. In the power-starved NL Central, last place is an achievement, albeit a very negative one, and that goes double in St. Louis.

In fact, it’s the first time the Cardinals have been below third place this late in the season in the Mozeliak-Girsch tenure. And that raises a very obvious question for a team picked as the consensus pre-season division favorite; What’s happened?

Grading the St. Louis Cardinals at the midway point of the 2023 season

What follows is a mid-term assessment of the Cardinals’ personnel decisions since the conclusion of the 2022 World Series with a particular focus on the extent to which those decisions have helped or hindered the team’s performance.

The standard of measurement is Wins Above Average (WAA), a variant of Wins Above Replacement (WAR). For this purpose, WAA is preferable because unlike WAR, it is zero-based. That means the sum of all the decisions made by Mozeliak and Girsch impacting the 2023 team gives at least a good estimate of the number of games those moves have improved (or worsened) the team’s status this season.

A team’s front office impacts that team’s standing in five ways. Those five are:

1.       By the impact of players it acquires from other teams via trade, purchase or waiver claim.

2.       By the impact of players it surrenders to other teams in those same transactions.

3.       By the impact of players it signs at free agency or extends.

4.       By the impact of players it loses to free agency or releases.

5.       By the impact of players it promotes from its own farm system.

Here’s how Mozeliak and Girsch stack up by those five yardsticks.

Acquired or traded

Based on the data, the trade strategy for Mozeliak and Girsch was to not have a trade strategy. Since the end of the 2022 season, they have acquired only one major league talent in dealings with other teams. That was pitcher Anthony Misiewicz, bought from the Royals in February, and he idled through six weeks of spring training before being sold to the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Misiewicz was not only the only player Mozeliak acquired or bought, he was also the only one they traded away or sold. This apparent apathy toward inter-team dealings is in stark contrast with the established Mozeliak-Girsch pattern, which in previous seasons has fleeced such talents as Nolan Arenado, Marcell Ozuna, and Paul Goldschmidt from other clubs.

And it’s not like Mozeliak and Girsch habitually wait until the trade deadline to swoop in. Ozuna, Goldschmidt and Arenado, their three biggest trade catches, were all winter steals from the Marlins, Diamondbacks and Rockies, respectively.

Their deadline moves have been less spectacular and less productive. Last season, for example, they got pitcher Jordan Montgomery at deadline, and he came at the cost of Harrison Bader. They got Jose Quintana from Pittsburgh, but the cost was blossoming starter Johan Oviedo.

So while the Cardinal front office may have some deadline-related tricks up their sleeve in the next month, their behavior is already out of character with their track record.

Farm system

For all their success in trades, the strength of a Mozeliak-Girsch operation has historically been their farm system. The core of what we think of as the Cardinals — Tommy Edman, Nolan Gorman, Dylan Carlson, Lars Nootbar, Tyler O’Neill, Brendan Donovan, Jack Flaherty, Ryan Helsley, Genesis Cabrera, and Jordan Hicks — has consistently come from the farm.

This season, the farm proudly offered up infielder-outfielder Jordan Walker, of whom it was said that the only problem would be finding a place for him to play in the talent-laden Cardinal scheme.

In the real world of the big leagues, Walker has labored to hold his spot. Offense has not been the problem; he’s batting .306.  But Walker, a natural third baseman, has been consigned to left field because that’s where guys with no position go.

He’s been awful at it, with just  a .957 fielding percentage and a negative Defensive Runs Saved. Those fielding issues are the principal reason why, despite the .300 batting average, he languishes with a -0.8 WAA.

The Cardinals have tried to remedy that concern by using Walker more as a DH and a giving fellow rookie Alec Burleson time in left. But Burleson is batting just .218, and he too has run up a negative WAA.

Matthew Liberatore is a first-year pitcher who’s been given a half-dozen starts in the hope that he could stabilize the obvious team weakness, the rotation. He’s carrying a 5.60 ERA in 27 innings, figures that again work out to a negative WAA.

In point of fact, the two words that go with each of the five farm system products the Cardinals have used this season are “negative WAA.” As a group, the damage totals to -2.7, which even by rookie standards is bleak.

Overall

What’s gone wrong with the St. Louis Cardinals? Pretty much everything, and it has started with the front office. For once in their tenure, the Mozelika-Girsch free agent strategy bombed, the trade strategy was non-existent, and the farm system has produced a crate of stale goods.

Here’s the first-half report card on the Cardinals front office. Note that grades for players departing the organization are based on the reverse of those players’ WAAs with their new teams.

Mode                    WAA               Grade

Acquired                 0.0                   C

Traded                  -0.2                   C

Signed                  -1.7                   D

FA Lost                 -1.0                   B

Rookies                -2.7                   D

Overall                  -3.2                   F

The striking thing about the Cardinals’ front office activity is that there’s been so little of it. Mozeliak and Girsch have only made 15 personnel decisions affecting the big league roster since the end of the 2022 postseason; that’s less than two per month.

And contrary to their usual pattern, almost none of those personnel decisions have redounded to the benefit of the Cardinals. Here’s a stat that will ring loudly with Cardinal fans: Not one of the 12 players added or returned to the St. Louis roster by Mozeliak and Girsch has produced a positive return to the team.

That includes their big catch, Contreras, who’s at -0.2.