“Spending” and “payroll” were the most unfortunate words spoken last week during Chaim Bloom’s introduction as the new St. Louis Cardinals president of baseball operations.
Because in this highly agitated baseball borough, the obsession with payroll and spending generates instant overreaction and another opportunity for some of the most aggrieved fans to declare their utter and unconditional disdain for the ownership-management group led by Bill DeWitt, Jr.
Never mind the Cardinals’ long-term success under DeWitt – until he let things slide in recent seasons, something I’ve criticized repeatedly. The only issue that matters is spending, payroll, spending payroll, spending, payroll. These folks are convinced that if DeWitt started throwing money around, there would be a renewal of bliss and the return of championship-contending ball in what used to be America’s best baseball town.
Judging by the sparse crowds at Busch Stadium in 2025, it sure looks like the impressive colony formerly labeled as the Best Fans In Baseball is on hiatus. Which is fine. The customer is entitled to do what they want with their time, money, and emotions.
My only wish is that people would be more focused in dispensing their justified and understandable criticism.
It seems there’s some sort of unofficial contest out there among fans to win a “Most Outraged” award. And some of these good folks are going to more extreme lengths to deliver their angry condemnations, and portray themselves as grievance-loaded victims.
On Sunday, the Seattle Mariners won their first postseason home game since 2001 … an extraordinary span of 8,752 days between home-ballpark postseason victories for the Mariners. To put it another way: the Mariners’ home postseason-victory drought lasted 23 years, 11 months and 16 days.
(Sidebar: This is where some of the more grievance-addicted Cardinals fans can now jump and say something like, “nearly 24 years without winning a postseason home game? That’s nothing compared to the suffering we’ve gone through with DeWitt’s Cardinals.”)
Of course, that is what a loon would say. And though the loon population within the fan base is small – most fans are reasonable – the cuckoos give the entire fan base a bad name, and that isn’t fair.
Sunday there was a caller to KMOX who offered a remarkable opinion: The DeWitt family is just as bad as the late Bill Bidwill (and family) as a St. Louis sports franchise owner. Therefore DeWitt needs to go away.
Interesting. Hey, but I’m always up to consider an irrational and completely baseless point of view. And I owed it to this gentleman to take his opinion seriously just in case there was a meaningful element of truth in it.
In Bidwill's 28 seasons of owning the St. Louis football Cardinals here in The Lou, the franchise made the postseason three times, missed making the playoffs 25 times, and never won a postseason game.
The team known as the Big Red had 12 winning seasons, 14 losing seasons, and two .500 seasons. Bidwill’s regular-season winning percentage here in St. Louis was .479. And in losing their only three postseason games in representation of St. Louis, the Cards were outscored by an average of 17.6 points in the defeats.
In 30 seasons of ownership of the Cardinals, DeWitt has the National League’s third-best regular season winning percentage (.542) and has won more postseason games than any NL team (75) since 1996.
DeWitt’s Cardinals have made the postseason 17 times, third most in the NL. And among the 30 MLB franchises, only the Yankees have won more postseason rounds than DeWitt’s Cardinals. The baseball Cardinals have also been a huge generator of tourist dollars for St. Louis because of loyal fans who travel here from other regions to watch baseball.
Since 1996, the Cardinals have hosted 71 postseason games at their two ballparks. And they’ve won 43 of those games for a home postseason winning percentage of .606. Both World Series titles under DeWitt were clinched at Busch Stadium. The four pennants won by DeWitt’s team were an immense source of pride and positivity for the metropolitan area. The kind of feel-good image making that St. Louis city definitely needs.
And I don’t forget this, either: when the Cardinals needed a new ballpark, the DeWitt ownership group stepped up to fund 78 percent of the cost. That’s substantially better, from a public standpoint, than the overwhelming majority of stadium deals that border on scandalous.
But what do I know? If this gentleman who called KMOX insists that the DeWitts have been just as bad (if not worse) for St. Louis sports as the Bidwills were – well, who the heck am I to present these bothersome little facts that suggest otherwise? I am a brute.
Never mind that DeWitt’s biggest and most negligent mistake was looking the other way as the player-development system turned rusty, moldy, outdated and antiquated.
That’s why the screaming for more spending is so strange to me at this time. The Cardinals have entered a rebuild phase. The size of the payroll simply doesn’t matter much right now. That’s why I don’t understand why Bloom and DeWitt broached a topic that will only lead to more whining about payroll, payroll, payroll.
Because unless Bloom and DeWitt come back later in the offseason and say the team is raising their payroll from $131 million to, say, $200 million, the caterwauling will split the eardrums. And if the Cardinals manage to offload salaries because Nolan Arenado, Sonny Gray and Willson Contreras agree to lighten their no-trade veto and accept a trade to a new team …
Well, welcome to St. Louis Chaim Bloom. Sir, there’s an extreme payroll fetish here, and it makes Red Sox fans appear dignified by comparison.
But when Bloom and DeWitt started talking about increased payroll spending, all they did is set off a wave of unrealistic hopes that will turn into another round of hard-hitting condemnation.
If there’s extra money to spend this winter, it should be pumped into the rebuild/revival of the player-development system. It is the most important task the Cardinals have on their agenda these days. Continue to fund and modernize the player-development operation so that it can thrive and prosper again.
The worst thing the Cardinals can do is toss some money around to score cheap points with the payroll obsessives. The type of money that won’t improve the team in a meaningful way. Better for Bloom to put his best skill to use by making low-key – but potentially high-ceiling – moves to add overlooked talent out there.
And even if the Cardinals do raise payroll for 2026, it won’t matter because the outrage troopers will be ready for battle because DeWitt didn’t go out and sign, say, Kyle Tucker.
DeWitt will grow the payroll when the timing is right.
“The Cardinals have always had star players,” DeWitt told me. “And I believe the Cardinals should have big stars.”
DeWitt is returning to leaning hard on an effective player-development system – which is a traditional Cardinals strength. But as he told me when he hired Bloom as the front office leader in waiting, the Tampa Bay Rays draft-develop and international-talent model is successful, and something that he covets … but only to a point.
The difference, he explained, is developing those stars internally but keeping them in place with contract extensions. He did that with Albert Pujols, Adam Wainwright, Matt Holliday and Yadier Molina. And when some stars begin to rise from the St. Louis minor-league system, it will be time to take action.
A person would have to be insane to push back on the idea that DeWitt has always had stars on his team. The list of players brought in from the outside over the years – to supplement the internally developed talent – is exceptional.
This includes future stars as well. This also includes major contributors on playoff teams that came here through trades or free-agent signings. Some weren’t stars in the traditional sense, but they were important to the team’s success.
Jim Edmonds, Scott Rolen, Edgar Renteria, Matt Holliday, Mark McGwire, Carlos Beltran, David Freese, Chris Carpenter, Nolan Arenado, Paul Goldschmidt, Mike Matheny, Dennis Eckersley, Jason Isringhausen, Ryan Ludwick, Fernando Vina, Steve Kline, So Taguchi, Troy Glaus, Fernando Tatis Sr., Jason Heyward, Scott Spiezio, Marcell Ozuna (2019), Jeff Suppan, Jeff Weaver, David Eckstein, Larry Walker, Lance Berkman, Will Clark, Johnny Peralta, Rafael Furcal, Gary Gaetti, Ron Gant, Reggie Sanders, Sonny Gray, Willson Contreras, Kyle Lohse, Tony Womack, Mark Grudzielanek, Woody Williams, Andy Benes, Mark Mulder, John Lackey, Edwin Jackson, Miles Mikolas, Chuck Finley, Mark Rzepcynski, Octavio Dotel, Pat Hentgen, Joel Pineiro, Jordan Montgomery, Jon Lester, Jose Quintana, John Smoltz, Jake Westbrook … and many more. Sorry if I forgot anyone.
There will be money spent when the money spent is money that will make a real difference. How do I know this? Because I’ve seen DeWitt and his baseball people do it countless times. If you disagree, well, it’s not my fault that you didn’t (or can’t) pay attention.
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.