Congratulations to John Mozeliak for rejoining the rest of us here on Planet Reality, where we try to live in the real world.
The Cardinals president of baseball operations finally departed his Mozoleum to take some action and make some news.
Starting pitcher Erick Fedde was designated for assignment.
He gone.
Now do Miles Mikolas.
Checking the news that came through the transom, I saw several references to “struggling” starting pitcher Erick Fedde.
Yeah, you could say that.
Fedde, however, was hardly a solitary man in this.
The Cardinals just completed a ruinous 1-5 road-tripping humiliation at Arizona and Colorado. After getting swept by the Diamondbacks, the Cardinals wobbled into Coors Field and lost two out of three games to a Rockies club that has the worst record (26-76) in the majors. The Cardinals are so pathetic right now, they can't even take a series from the Rox after winning the first game. The Cards lost the final two games at Coors by a combined 14-4 score, and I believe the Redbirds have reached a new low in a season that's gone horribly wrong.
On this tour that leads them to the SELLER mode at the July 31 trade deadline, the Cardinals had a starting-pitching ERA of 10.00. The only professional and dignified performance came from rookie Michael McGreevy, who was mussed for two earned runs in seven innings to lead the Cards to their lone triumph in Denver. But on this road to nowhere, the other STL starters were blitzed by the Diamondbacks and Rockies for 28 earned runs in 20 innings. That's a 12.60 ERA. Sonny Gray, Miles Mikolas, Andre Pallante and Fedde were defenseless.
Imagine that: the only Cardinal starter who pitched a good game was the young guy, McGreevy, that Mozeliak repeatedly blocked from entering the St. Louis rotation. Oh, man, the irony is rich.
Yeah, Fedde "struggled."
But John Mozeliak has struggled more than anybody who gets a paycheck from the Cardinals.
Fedde was designated for assignment which was an obvious move. I'll tell you about another obvious move that should have been made: Mozeliak should have been designated for assignment instead of being allowed hang around for a final season as the president of baseball ops.
Mozeliak's Cardinals have now lost 13 of their last 18 games.
The no-show offense is hibernating, the starting pitching is battered and bloodied, and the team has lost all of its fight. During Wednesday's 6-0 drubbing by the Rockies, St. Louis hitters were zombies on parade. Dumping Fedde was the easy thing, but this team has an expanding list of problems.
Fedde’s tormented existence as had many line drives whistling past his head, a load of home-run bombs carrying through his airspace.
Fedde’s earned-run average this in 20 starts this season (5.22) was so grotesque, he’ll probably become a member of the “Ban the ERA” club that was formed several years ago by the smartest guys in the room. (Just ask them; they’ll whip out their IQ.) Fedde may sign on with Baseball Prospectus and write a detailed analysis about why ERA is a hopelessly flawed and overrated statistic that shouldn’t be taken seriously.
I actually came to feel sorry for Fedde. It’s not as if the sad-faced man wanted to be a sluggo on the mound. He came into 2025 with an expiring contract and can become a free agent after the season.
After leaving the U.S. to refurbish his pitching arsenal in South Korea – and winning the KBO’s equivalent of the Cy Young Award in 2023 – Fedde returned to the states and pitched well for the White Sox during the first four months of the 2024 season.
That wouldn’t last. And along came Mozeliak to trade for Fedde before everyone realized his work for the White Sox was mostly a mirage.
Fedde had an unfortunate experience as a Cardinal.
– Fedde was the centerpiece of Mozeliak’s trade-deadline strategy devised to boost the 2025 Cardinals into the playoffs, but Fedde went 3-7 in his 10 starts for STL after the deal was consummated. With Fedde failing to spark the Cardinals, the team slipped out of contention.
– Fedde made 30 starts as a Cardinal and the team had a record of 8 and 22 in his assignments.
– During the 30 seasons of Cardinals baseball with Bill DeWitt Jr. as owner, 132 St. Louis starting pitchers have worked at least 100 innings in a season. Fedde’s 5.22 ERA this season ranked No. 120 on that list of 132.
– In his last five starts for the Cardinals, Fedde was smashed for eight homers and 26 runs in 17 and ⅔ innings. The bludgeoning included more walks (11) than strikeouts (8), and opponents bullied Fedde for a .407 average, .478 on-base percentage and .778 slugging percentage. The home-run rate against him was a startling 4.1 homers per nine innings.
— The Cardinals had a 5-15 record in Fedde’s starts this season. And by the time he was pulled from Tuesday’s loss at Colorado, Fedde had no confidence, a broken spirit, and no job.
— This season 65 MLB starting pitchers have handled 100+ innings. And among the 65, Fedde ranked 64th in ERA, 65th in strikeout rate, 65th in strikeout-walk ratio and 65th in WHIP.
Fedde was the coda for the end of the John Mozeliak era in St. Louis. The Cardinals were once the envy of major-league baseball for their record of drafting and developing an abundance of homegrown, cost-controlled pitching. But Mozeliak let the player-development system deteriorate and give way and crash. And a once-proud organizational identity was tarnished.
Through neglect, DeWitt and Mozeliak squandered a substantial organizational strength – cultivating and developing pitching – and Mozeliak had no choice but to make risky trades and chase down free-agent starters for quick plug-ins to just fill the empty rotation spots.
It has not gone well. Over the last three seasons the Cardinals rank 26th among 30 teams in starting-pitching ERA. When the internal pipeline was flowing with pitching talent from 2012 through 2019, St. Louis had MLB’s third-best starting rotation ERA.
Mozeliak was so out of touch with reality that he (1) held onto Fedde instead of trading him last offseason when the pitcher still had solid trade value. Then (2) Mozeliak stubbornly blocked McGreevy from claiming a rotation spot. And (3) that preposterous, mindless decision cost the Cardinals at least a few victories and reduced their postseason probability.
As Fedde continued to absorb a sequence of brutally punishing starts, Mozeliak wouldn’t stop the fight and turn to McGreevy instead.
The Cardinals have won six of seven games with McGreevy as a spot starter over the last two seasons, but Mozeliak enfeebled his own team – all because of the stubborn pride that drove him to stand by Fedde instead of recognizing the mistake and moving on from it.
In his final 12 starts for the Cardinals, Fedde had a 6.38 ERA and the team went 2-10.
Mikolas is still standing, even though he has the sixth-worst ERA (5.07) among 82 innings-qualified starters since the beginning of 2023. But I'm sure Miles would tell us that the 5.07 ERA since the beginning of 2023 is misleading because of all the soft contact, and bad bounces and just having unfortunate luck. I'm sure that he would tells us that he's been "pretty solid." He would be quite pleased with himself.
The Cardinals were in pretty solid shape for a while, but the rotation couldn’t hold. But Mozeliak could have given his team a better chance to win by subbing out Fedde or the smug Mikolas to give McGreevy the opportunity that he earned.
Since June 10, however, Mikolas and Fedde had a combined 8.34 ERA in their 14 starts.
And the Cardinals won only three of the 14 starts.
How can you expect to capture a wild-card spot when you give so many starts to two liabilities? And Mikolas and Fedde are liabilities. This season the Cardinals 28-15 when not starting Fedde and Mikolas.
To put it another way: the Redbirds have a .407 winning percentage this season when Mikolas or Fedde start a game. But when the other Cardinal starting pitchers have the assignment, the team’s winning percentage is .651.
Fedde, finally, is gone. Mikolas needs to be next. But this all comes too late. And this is another reason why the team’s No. 1 liability this season is John Mozeliak.
Thanks for reading …
Bernie was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2023. During a St. Louis sports-media career that goes back to 1985, he’s won multiple national awards for column writing and sports-talk hosting – and was the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch from 1989 through 2015. You can access all of his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him weekdays on the “Gashouse Gang” or “Redbird Rush Hour” on KMOX (104.1-FM and 1120-AM) and he is a regular guest on the “Cardinal Territory” video show hosted by Katie Woo of The Athletic. Bernie does a weekly “Seeing Red” podcast with Will Leitch on the Cardinals.