The Cardinals open their final homestand of the 2025 season on Monday night. Three games against the Reds, then three against the Brewers, and then the Redbirds will leave on a jet plane for a six-game road trip to San Francisco and Chicago. The End.
And that’s all for baseball – at least around these parts – until the spring of 2026.
I’m already in the wrap-it-up mode, so here are my random thoughts on the Cardinals’ 2025 season. Sure, the final 12 games could get me to rethink some of these things, but most (if not all) will hold up.
1. Top Storyline: Where did all the people go? Baseball Heaven was less crowded in 2025, with the Cardinals currently averaging 27,838 tickets sold per home game. That ranks 19th among the 30 teams this season. For a full season – unaffected by a pandemic or a labor-related shutdown – the Cards’ per-game average home attendance in 2025 will be the lowest for the franchise since the 1984 Cards averaged 25,154 at previous Busch Stadium.
That said, the Cardinals already have surpassed two million in home attendance for 2025. That’s notable because (in a full season) St. Louis has hit at least two million for the 40th consecutive season. Among the current 30 franchises, only the Dodgers of Los Angeles have a longer such streak in a full season. Cardinals fans have nothing to be ashamed about. It’s up to ownership-management to come up with ways to entice the fans into coming back to Busch.
2. Saying Goodbye: This is the final homestand for John Mozeliak in his role of president of baseball operations. Chaim Bloom moves into Mozeliak’s job after the season. Mozeliak has taken the most frequent and biggest blasts of criticism for the Cardinals’ decline over the last three seasons – which is both fair and unfair at the same time.
What do I mean by unfair? Well, I believe front-office baseball executives can go into late-career slumps. It isn’t unusual because changes in the game happen frequently, and that applies to all professional team sports, and we’ve seen some really accomplished front-office leaders fail to evolve at a quick rate. It happens to the best.
But just because fans are frustrated or angry with Mozeliak now, there’s no reason to erase his positive baseball-leadership accomplishments during his 18 seasons in office. In fact, Mozeliak was a valuable assistant GM to Walt Jocketty before ascending to the top job, so he played an important, behind-the-scenes role that helped set up the Cardinals for two World Series titles and four pennants.
I plan to address Mozeliak’s St. Louis career in a more extensive manner, but for now I’ll leave it at this: since Mozeliak became the head of the baseball department before the 2008 season, only the Dodgers (15) and Yankees (13) have made the postseason more times than the Cardinals. The Cards and Braves are tied for the next place on the list with 10 postseasons each.
From 2008 through 2024, the Cardinals ranked fourth in the majors with 79 postseason games played. And they were sixth overall for most postseason victories. That’s pretty impressive, even with the down years mixed in.
The Cardinals don’t win the 2011 World Series and the 2013 NL pennant without a bunch of important moves made by Mozeliak. And from 2011 through 2014, no major-league team played in more postseason games (61) than the Cardinals. No other NL team competed in more than 38 postseason games over those five seasons. Moreover, the Cardinals led the majors in postseason wins from 2011 through 2015 with a total of 32. That was nine more postseason victories than the No. 2 Giants had during the same five-year stretch.
3. Chaim Bloom’s Difficult Assignment: He’s not officially the man in charge yet, but the handoff from Mozeliak will occur soon. Bloom has spent much of the last two years on a crucial project to modernize the Cardinals’ player-development system, and progress has been made. Bloom will also expand on the Cardinals’ use of analytics and technology. And he’s already brought in several associates to help him turn the Cardinals around and make them great again. But rebuilds aren’t easy … and St. Louis fans haven’t had to concern themselves with a full rebuild for a long time. So this will be different. Bloom is moving in at a time when the fan base is restless and skeptical and upset over many things. I hope they don’t take their frustration out on Bloom, who is not only jumping into a rebuild that is long overdue – but when the Cardinals break on through to the other side of it, the organization will be in much better shape and in a better position to be elite again.
That said, I know this doesn’t matter to some people. I’m enjoying watching them already warming up in the bullpen to have their best stuff ready for the fake-rage performance artistry on “X.”
These are the folks who go on social media to declare how the DeWitts have ruined the franchise … you mean the franchise that was in the dumps when Bill DeWitt Jr. and his group purchased the Cardinals before the 1996 season? That franchise? The one that hadn't made it to the postseason since 1987? The same collapsed and steaming wreck of a franchise that's tied for the 4th in the majors in regular-season wins and 3rd in postseason wins since he became the owner? Interesting.
4. First Up: The Future of Manager Oli Marmol. I have no reason to believe that Marmol will be let go after the season. I fully expect that he’ll return in 2026 for the final year of his contract. The Cardinals will miss the postseason for the third straight season, but Marmol isn’t to blame for that. The issues go above the manager’s level – and into the baseball suites where the talent is acquired, and roster decisions are made. The Cardinals have significant roster issues that will require a lot of time for Bloom to untangle.
I’m surprised to see the Cardinals hanging in at 73-77 with a putrid offense and a weak starting-pitching rotation. With their current run differential, the Cards should be 70-80, so they’re outperforming the underlying factors that should leave them with a record worse than four games under .500 as they enter the final two weeks.
Through Sunday’s win at Milwaukee, Marmol was exactly at .500 (156-156) over his last two seasons. But based on the run differential and other underlying factors, they should be 20 games under .500 over the last two seasons.
In his first four seasons as Cardinals manager, Tony La Russa had a .493 winning percentage, made the playoffs one time, missed the playoffs three times, and had two losing seasons.
Marmol is nearly through his fourth season as manager and currently has a .503 winning percentage in the job and has made the playoffs one time and is headed for a third consecutive year of missing the playoffs – same as La Russa. It remains to be seen if Marmol will have one or two losing seasons by the end of his fourth year.
For the second consecutive season, Marmol has done a masterful job of running the St. Louis bullpen. Over the last two seasons the Cardinals rank fourth in reliever ERA and fielding independent ERA. They are also 11th in Win Probability Added, and rank 3rd in MLB with 94 saves and 5th with 188 “holds” of leads.
The Cardinals are one of the best big-league teams at protecting late leads. Over the last two seasons the Cardinals are 123-8 (.939) when leading through seven innings and 137-5 (.965) when leading after eight innings.
5. As part of the rebuild, Bloom must collect assets to begin the process of upgrading his team’s roster capability in three critical areas while prepping for 2026 and beyond …
A) Address a starting-pitching problem that has produced the 25th-ranked ERA, the 25th-ranked Win Probability Added, and the 26th-ranked strikeout rate over the last two seasons.
B) Address an offense that, since the start of 2024, ranks 26th in homers, 26th in Isolated Power, 24th in walk rate, and 22nd in slugging percentage and 22nd in stolen bases.
C) Balance the lineup to become more successful against left-handed pitching. Over the last two seasons the St. Louis offense ranks in the bottom 10 of the 30 major-league attacks in homers, slugging, Isolated Power, and wRC+ vs lefties.
That’s it for today.
As always, thanks for reading …
–Bernie
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 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, and Bernie does a weekly “Seeing Red” podcast on the Cardinals with his longtime pal Will Leitch. Bernie joins Katie Woo on the “Cardinal Territory” video-podcast each week, and you can catch a weekly “reunion” segment here at STL Sports with Bernie’s appearance on the Randy Karraker Show every Friday morning at 10:30 am.