Welcome to this week’s edition of The Bernie Bits, a staple of my writing that I save for the paid subscribers to the STL Sports Central “Insiders” membership program.
THE LEDE
I know it’s easy to rip Cardinals ownership for the downsizing of payroll. But I’m more tolerant than many because I realize that a reduced payroll almost always comes with a serious rebuilding project. And the Cardinals are in that place right now.
At this moment the Cardinals have $100 million on the payroll sheet for 2026. Will that go down? I think there’s a chance. It depends on how many trades are made and what those trades will do to the payroll. Lower costs? Probably so. Will any new, higher-end salaries be coming to the Cards 2026 payroll? Probably not.
To put lightly, the Cardinals are highly unlikely to contend for the postseason in 2026. They are unlikely to compete for a playoff spot in 2027. By 2028 the picture will be sharper and better, but there’s no point in speculating what that season will look like. So many changes will have been made by then, the only rational thing to do is just wait it out and see what the STL roster looks like going into the ‘28 season.
But I’m going to repeat a couple of things I’ve pointed out more than a few times…
The Cardinals biggest problem over the past three seasons is making poor decisions on how to spend money. And one of the reasons the team wandered into a lapse in payroll efficiency was attributable to a player-development system that utterly failed to draft and develop a sufficient and sustainable supply of talented young pitching.
Instead the Cardinals had to go to the store for pitching. They had to attend a swap meet to look for pitching. And they didn’t have much to show for the signings of Lance Lynn, Kyle Gibson, Sonny Gray, and Steven Matz. They did not benefit from yet another contract extension for Miles Mikolas.
It can be said that the Cardinals went a year too long with Adam Wainwright – but I understood the reasons why it mattered to Waino and the team to have a farewell season for him in 2023. The Cardinals made a 2024 deadline trade for Erick Fedde that looked fine at the time before turning into a disaster.
From the start of 2023 through the end of 2025, the Cardinals’ winning percentage was a lowly 22nd in the majors. As a group, their starting pitchers wobbled to the sixth-worst ERA in MLB over that time in addition to ranking 23rd in Wins Above Replacement, 26th in Win Probability Added, and 29th in strikeout rate.
And what was the cost of that mostly terrible starting pitching? I have the answer ….
In 2023 the Cardinals spent 34 percent of their payroll on starting pitching at a cost of $63.7 million.
In 2024, the Cardinals used 36.4% of the payroll on starting pitchers with an outlay of $74.1 million in salaries.
In 2025, the team allocated 37% of the payroll in starting pitchers; the investment came to $55.2 million.
That’s $193 million in starting pitching for the three seasons – an average of $64.3 million per year. And over the three seasons starting pitching took up 36% of their payroll over that time. And an extensive percentage of that money went to the starters I mentioned earlier: Wainwright, Mikolas, Matz, Gibson, Lynn, Fedde and Gray. (Source: the Spotrac salary-tracking site.)
They weren’t all bad. Of course not. Gray pitched well in his two seasons here, ranking 6th among qualifying MLB starters in strikeout rate, seventh in fielding independent ERA (3.26) and 10th in WAR. But there were too many misses and too much mediocrity. The facts are clear on that.
And that’s what I’m talking about when I fuss about the awful spending decisions made by the previous front office from 2023-2025. And actually these harmful payroll mistakes started long before that. In that context I don’t care about how the little the Cardinals spent overall.
That huge pile of wasted money eliminated any reason to debate payroll size. If your front office doesn’t know how to make the best use of its financial resources, then why in the dickens would anyone want the Cardinals to spend more money? That’s cuckoo.
Here’s another point about the payroll …
Over the past three seasons the Cardinals outspent 11 of the teams that made the playoffs. Cleveland (twice), Baltimore (twice), Detroit (twice) plus Miami, Tampa Bay, Arizona, Milwaukee and Cincinnati.
Once again: how you spend can be more important than your place in the 30-team payroll rankings. I’ll wrap this up by offering one recent example.
Last season the Cardinals outspent the Reds by 16 million dollars. St. Louis ranked 19th among the 30 teams in payroll size; Cincinnati was 23rd.
The Reds managed to do enough to make their way into the tournament. And they did that with the strength of their starting pitching. In 2025 the Reds’ starters ranked in the top 10 in MLB for standard ERA and fielding-independent ERA. They were even better, 4th overall, in league-and-park adjusted ERA. The Cincinnati starters were 3rd in Win Probability Added and 7th in strikeout rate.
The Cincinnati roster featured 22 homegrown players drafted-developed by the organization. And that list included four of their starters. As the Reds prepare for 2026, their projected starting rotation has four drafted-developed Reds: Hunter Greene, Andrew Abbott, Nick Lodolo and Chase Burns. The other starter, Brady Singer, was acquired in a trade with the Royals before last season.
The 2025 Reds were hardly a great team. But they drafted well, and developed well, and they had enough starting-pitching firepower to push into the playoffs with only 83 victories.
Yes, payroll efficiency matters. Having homegrown pitchers instead of store-bought pitchers can really make a difference.
In 2025, the Cardinals ranked 7th in the majors with a starting-pitcher payroll expenditure of $46.3 million.
The 2025 Reds ranked 22nd in the majors with a starting-pitcher outlay of $23.5 million.
And with that, I’ll rest my case.
(MOSTLY) FUN FACTS
1. A profound sequence of frantic head-coaching changes in the SEC over the last several years has elevated Mizzou football coach Eli Drinkwitz in a surprising position: in the revised SEC head-coaching lineup for 2026, only Georgia’s Kirby Smart has more seniority in his current SEC job than Drinkwitz.
2. Since Drinkwitz took over the MIZ program in 2020, a total of 12 SEC head coaches have been sacked over the last six seasons. That doesn’t include interims. In addition, Nick Saban (Alabama) retired, Lane Kiffin just hopped from Ole Miss to LSU, and Mike Leach (Mississippi State) sadly passed away on Dec. 12, 2022.
3. Here’s the complete list of SEC head-coach sackings during Coach Drink’s time in CoMo.
Florida: Dan Mullen, Billy Napier.
Kentucky: Mark Stoops.
Tennessee: Jeremy Pruitt.
South Carolina: Will Muschamp.
Vanderbilt: Derek Mason.
Auburn: Guz Malzahn, Bryan Harsin, Hugh Freeze.
Mississippi State: Zack Arnett.
Texas A&M: Jimbo Fisher.
LSU: Ed Orgeron, Brian Kelly.
Arkansas: Sam Pittman.
Notes: Oklahoma and Texas joined the SEC before the 2024 season. But Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian (2021) and OU coach Brent Venables (2022) were each hired by those programs after Drinkwitz moved in at Mizzou … in case you were wondering (probably not) Shane Beamer (South Carolina), Clark Lea (Vandy) and Josh Heupel (Tennessee) were hired in 2021, the year after Drinkwitz made his SEC head-coach debut.
Best of luck to the brand new SEC head coaches for 2026: Ryan Silverfield (Arkansas), Alex Golesh (Auburn), Jon Sumrall (Florida), Will Stein (Kentucky) and Pete Golding (Ole Miss.) Given how so many SEC head coaches disappear, it won’t be long before some of the new hires head for the hot seat.
Drinkwitz will still be only 43 years old when Mizzou kicks off the 2026 season. That’s really young to be second in seniority among SEC head coaches.
RANDOM THOUGHTS
– Has the Penn State athletic director Pat Kraft been fired yet? For gosh sake, he fired James Franklin on Oct. 12. He’s had some time to look around. Does Kraft plan to hire a football coach? At this point, the Nittany Lions might have to hire Butch Jones, or perhaps Chad Morris. The Penn State program is in decline, and it might get a lot worse. With the athletic director scrounging around after getting the brush-off from multiple candidates, retired Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger put the name of Steelers coach Mike Tomlin into nomination.
– Not that anyone gives a damn, but here are my favorite Little Feat songs: (1) Fat Man in the Bathtub (2) Willin’ (3) Time Loves a Hero (4) Trouble (5) Sailin’ Shoes (6) Spanish Moon (7) Two Trains (8) Feats Don’t Fail Me Now (9) Dixie Chicken (10) Tripe Face Boogie. I could have extended this list to 25. Or more. By the way, take me back to Lisner Auditorium in Washington D.C. So many cherished memories of attending Little Feat concerts there. The venue is on the campus of George Washington University. But when I’d go to see Little Feat, I called it Lowell George University.
– I wasn’t here at the time, but I know Little Feat played in St. Louis a number of times in the 1970s; the sites included the classic Ambassador Theater downtown on multiple occasions – as well as a show at Washington University. One weird note: a former friend and colleague of mine in Baltimore, music critic David McQuay, was the last journalist to interview Lowell George. It took place after a show at George Mason University, and a few hours later George died in his sleep at a nearby hotel.
– With my retro love of Little Feat and my experiences of seeing a bunch of their concerts in the 1970s, I believe I must add an 11th song to my list of favorites: Old Folks Boogie. I think I qualify.
– Outfielder Nathan Church will have a more prominent role with the 2026 Cardinals than expected.
– An underrated leftover from Thanksgiving: take the remaining meat, as well as some of the bones that were put aside including the neck (for flavor) and then make a pot of turkey soup.
– Nope, you can’t make me watch the 5th and (thankfully) final season of the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” Not gonna happen. No how, no way.
– FanGraphs looked at Fenway Park and Busch Stadium to get some knowledge of how the change in home venue might impact Sonny Gray. That’s because Gray thrived in his home starts in St. Louis. So the Park Factors could be meaningful. Last season Busch Stadium was the second-toughest ballpark in the majors for suppressing home runs. And it was similar to that in 2024. That’s why the Cardinals tried to limit Gray’s road starts and set him up to make two-thirds of his starts as a Cardinal at home.
Sayeth FanGraphs:
“Yikes, if the three year factors looked ominous for Gray, the one year factors (2025) look even worse! … Obviously, no matter how you spin it or what range of years you use to compare park factors, the switch is a negative for Gray’s ratio projections.”
And:
“Furthermore, Fenway lost half its strikeout factor advantage, the only advantage it had. All these changes in 2025 led to increased runs scored and Park Factor gaps, with Fenway looking even more hitter friendly relative to Busch.”
I’ll stop typing now …
Thanks for reading The Bits…
And thanks for being an “Insider” subscriber.
–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. Before that Bernie spent a year at the Dallas Morning News, covering the Dallas Cowboys during Tom Landry’s final season (1988) plus the sale of the team to Jerry Jones and the hiring of Jimmy Johnson as coach.
Bernie has covered several Baseball Hall of Fame managers during his media career including Tony La Russa, Whitey Herzog, Earl Weaver, Joe Torre and (as an interim) Red Schoendienst. Bernie covered every baseball Cardinals’ postseason game from 1996 through 2014 and was there to chronicle teams that won four NL pennants and two World Series. He provided extensive coverage on the “Greatest Show” St. Louis Rams and has written extensively on the St. Louis Blues and Mizzou football and basketball. Bernie was/is a longtime voter for the Baseball Hall of Fame, Pro Football Hall of Fame, Heisman Trophy and the St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame.
You can access his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him regularly on KMOX (AM or FM) as part of the Gashouse Gang, Sports Rush Hour, Sports Open Line or Sports On a Sunday Morning shows. And you can catch weekly “reunion” segments here at STL Sports Central featuring Bernie and his longtime friend Randy Karraker.