As Cardinals play catchup, can their past be a guide to future success?

Best Podcast in Baseball

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Sports, Baseball

4.8 • 673 Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2024

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

After a brief discussion about a shared fondness for a recent, deeply moving and haunting collection of linked short stories, Sequioa Nagamatsu's 'How High We Got in the Dark,' two baseball writers focus on another work of speculative fiction.

What to make of the 2025 St. Louis Cardinals.

CBS Sports baseball writer Dayn Perry joins the Best Podcast in Baseball to discuss his lifelong fondness and connection to the Cardinals, and his questions for what comes next. Along with St. Louis Post-Dispatch baseball writer and BPIB host Derrick Goold, Perry discusses if the Cardinals have reached a point where fans, like him, must "adjust their expectations."

If so, the podcast explores, are the Cardinals still stuck in the middle, not committing to an all-the-way rebuild in the same way they came shy of an all-in contender.

Perry makes the case that the future of the Cardinals may come down to Jordan Walker's bat. It is the tent pole around which a lineup and a contender could be built, Perry argues, and the young outfielder needs the opportunity to grow into that -- not seesaw between levels.
Perry counted up that he has 28 different Cardinals hats, and two of them he wrote in his Substack newsletter, Birdy Work, illustrate his connection to the Cardinals. One is the mesh hat worn by his father mowing the yard in the Mississippi heat, and the other is the winter cap Perry's son wears against the Chicago cold.

As Perry recounts the story, his father became a fan of the Cardinals during the 1940s heyday, and his son latched onto the Cardinals during their 2010s run. Perry became a fan of those charismatic WhiteyBall clubs from the 1980s, the ones built around defense and speed and the time-tested, standings-approved art of stealing outs in the field and not making outs at the plate.

That invites the question: As the Cardinals look toward the future and modernizing their farm system while financial titans load up with talent on the coasts, is the model for how the Cardinals succeed in the future actually from their past?

Perry's newsletter can be found on Substack.

The Best Podcast in Baseball is available wherever you listen to podcasts, and it's also housed right here at StlToday.com with all of the Constant Cardinals Coverage.

The Best Podcast in Baseball, sponsored by Closets by Design of St. Louis, is a production of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, StlToday.com, and baseball writer Derrick Goold.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The best podcast in baseball is brought to you by Closets by Design.
0:05.6	Update your closet, garage, office, pantry, and more.
0:09.0	Imagine your home totally organized with closets by design.
0:12.6	Call 1-800 by design.
0:14.4	That's 1-800-by-design.
0:17.0	There's something that I don't know, dissatisfying about shredding water.
0:21.6	So what then is going to distinguish you from, say, the player dev juggernauts like the Dodgers
0:27.0	who have vastly more resources and the Yankees who churn out, you know, pitch design freaks
0:32.3	and that kind of thing?
0:33.4	Does this get us back to win 87 games and see what happens?
0:37.6	You know, is there a road toward true excellence like we saw in the 2000s?
0:43.4	Yeah.
0:43.5	Or do we need to adjust, or the Cardinals now the current Nebraska football where you aspire to make a bowl game?
0:50.2	You know what I mean?
0:50.8	As opposed to aspiring to win the national championship.
1:03.7	Okay. you know what I mean, as opposed to aspiring to win the national championship. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the best podcast in baseball brought to you by Clause,
1:06.8	by Design of St. Louis.
1:08.0	I'm St. Louis Post-Dispatch baseball writer Derek Gould joined today, and I'm thrilled by this by a guy I've read for a long time.
1:14.2	A guy I hope you've read for a long time.
1:16.2	And it is, of course, baseball rider at CBS Sports, Dane Perry.
1:19.8	But you may know him better here recently by his newsletter, Bertie Work, which got to be honest, when you say it out loud totally nails it right birdie work as opposed to
1:29.9	when you read it on the thing but birdie work there at substack dane great to have you here thank
	...

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