The sea shanty of perpetual rebuild: How Cardinals can avoid echoing Pirates
Best Podcast in Baseball
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
4.6 • 690 Ratings
🗓️ 29 August 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Throngs of Cardinals fans got accustomed to seeing successful baseball.
The Cardinals got accumstomed to seeing throngs of fans.
Now both are facing the prospects of neither.
That's how St. Louis Post-Dispatch sports columnist Jeff Gordon puts it when he joins baseball writer Derrick Goold for this brand new Best Podcast in Baseball. The two staff writers for StlToday.com discuss the stunning lack of attendance for a four-game visit from the Pittsburgh Pirates, and how the Pirates sure do have plenty of power pitching, but they also present a cautionary tale for the Cardinals about the gravitational pull of the perpetual rebuild's black hole. There are ways for the Cardinals to pull out of that outcome.
Goold likens the situation to a space launch. Sure, the Cardinals can spend time engineering and building a homegrown shuttle, but eventually it's going to take the booster rockets from spending on outside help to get it off the ground and out of low-hovering orbit.
In its 13th season as one of the first and most widely heard podcasts on baseball and the Cardinals, the Best Podcast in Baseball, sponsored weekly by Closets by Design of St. Louis, is a production of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, StlToday.com, and Derrick Goold.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's a brand new best podcast in baseball, and Jeff Gordon is back at the mic to talk about all the fans who weren't back at the ballpark, prompting him to capture it like this. You feel better after having one of those rants because it's just so exasperating to go to that park and see it in that condition. It's just sad. It's not my. I mean, I'm not a shareholder in the team or anything, |
| 0:02.3 | but it's just, you know, it was fun being around a franchise that was special. |
| 0:05.6 | It just, you know, in that condition. It's just sad. It's not my. I mean, I'm not a shareholder in the team or anything, |
| 0:20.9 | but it's just, you know, it was fun being around a franchise that was special. It's just, you know, we're lucky to be in a sports town where that happened. Yeah. You know, I'd hate to see this, you know, we've had darker times as a sports community, but I'd hate to see it go that way in baseball though because that's just you know there goes six months of your life every year |
| 0:21.2 | that's just not very much fun. |
| 0:41.7 | We also talk about what the Cardinals can learn from the pirates, how close they are to the pirates, and if on the spectrum of contending, they're closer to the Rockies and the Pirates or to the Cubs and Yankees. |
| 0:55.4 | The answer might surprise you, but how they get out of there is obvious. |
| 1:00.7 | Whether or not they do it is less so. |
| 1:03.0 | It's a brand new BPI, do the music. |
| 1:14.9 | Hello everybody and welcome to the best podcast in baseball. |
| 1:17.2 | I'm St. Louis Post Dispatch Baseball writer Derek Gould. Join this week by instant offense, my colleague, St. Louis Post Dispatch Sports |
| 1:22.7 | columnist and Tipsheet author. |
| 1:26.2 | Is that like kind of bestselling author? |
| 1:28.5 | Because you're in all the papers. |
| 1:31.1 | So right, so like it's like one of the longest running column features in the country, right? |
| 1:36.9 | Jeff Gordon? |
| 1:38.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:38.6 | And it's kind of evolved into being more of a topical item back in the day when you could just have fun with it and have a fun item. |
| 1:46.0 | That was a lot of papers were doing that, a lot of outlets. |
| 1:50.0 | But now it's more just topical, what's going on, what are people saying about each sport, |
| 1:55.0 | particularly if it, you know, involves one of the local teams. |
| 1:58.0 | So yeah, just kind of given sort of some content to supplement |
... |
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