When I was listening to the radio yesterday, something that has long fascinated me came to my attention. You see, they were not talking about the Cardinals, they were talking about the Blues. The Blues had
recently called up a prospect, a former top 10 pick who recently turned 20. They called up Dalibor Dovorsky. This by all accounts should not have interested me.
You see, I’m a fairweather Blues fan. I am invested in the Blues winning, but I have learned despite my best efforts, a regular season hockey game bores me. I’m on a baseball blog so I’m sure there are people who agree with me, but it is hard to believe a hockey game could be more boring than a baseball game to most people I know. Nonetheless, I have tried and I have tried, and I just can’t get into it. For the playoffs, I am locked in. I don’t know if you can get more fairweather than that.
Because of this, I don’t know the sport that well. I have picked up on things, but I would never in my life write about hockey as if I knew anything. So anything I say regarding the Blues is based on my impression of them, not actual knowledge of the team. For diehard hockey fans who know the sport well, I may reveal my ignorance. I feel the need to put out that disclaimer in case anyone mistakes me for someone who is knowledgable about hockey.
To get back to the first paragraph, the reason this call-up interested me was because of how Brandon Kiley and Alex Ferrario responded to the call-up. Apparently president and GM Doug Armstrong does not rush prospects, and this is a very out of character move. Kiley in particular worried that this signals that the Blues don’t know what else to do, that calling up a prospect earlier than they normally would is a worrying sign. The Blues, if you didn’t know, have lost five straight and are 3-6-1 to start their season.
The reason this is interesting to me as a Cardinals fan is because from my standpoint, the Blues and Cardinals have occupied extremely similar spots in their respective leagues for a while. They had good, not great teams that failed to advance in the playoffs followed by missing the playoffs two years in a row. The Blues did make the playoffs last year, because of an absurd run that actually reminds me a lot of the 2021 Cardinals team. If this current team, off to an awful start, doesn’t turn the season around, it’s sure going to feel like that 12-game winning streak was fluky and the team overall is still mediocre who can’t quite get better than that.
And perhaps most importantly, the Blues are very much in the business of trying to still be a playoff team while rebuilding. They seem to have the exact same philosophy as the Cardinals, where they think they can get back to where they were without being a losing team in the present. Or at least, that’s the goal. From radio interviews, some comments here actually, and some osmosis, this is my impression of the Blues rightly or wrongly.
And yet…. the fan response has been radically differently. I am cut from the same cloth regarding fandom as my dad, and he listens to the radio more than me, and he complains how the Blues always get the benefit of the doubt and the Cardinals never do. And it’s a pretty simple explanation honestly: the Blues won, the Cardinals didn’t. I honestly think it’s as simple as that.
Except I think the “championship honeymoon” is ending for the Blues. There’s a certain amount of grace period after a team wins it all where it doesn’t really matter what the team does, the fans are on your side. “Well you won it and it’s incredibly hard to win it, so I certainly am not going to complain if they don’t win it all for x amount of years.” This is only more true for a team like the Blues who have never won it before 2019. How long do you think it’s going to take for a Mariners fan to be unhappy with the direction of the team the minute they win it? It will be a while. That’s kind of where the Blues were.
I feel like the tide is turning, which caused me to wonder another question. How long exactly of a leash does a fanbase give a team following a championship and when did it end for the Cardinals? If you go by the Blues, let’s for the sake of argument say the Blues have another losing season this year. I feel pretty confident the honeymoon is over. I don’t think it’s quite over yet. If the Blues are a reference point, that means it takes seven seasons, during which the team wins one playoff series win, and has two losing seasons. But of course, the Blues had never won it so I think they will get more grace than the Cardinals will.
So when did the Cardinals end? Well I’ve only been alive for the 2006 and 2011 championships, but I don’t remember the honeymoon ever ending the first time. I think 2011 probably saved them. If 2011 didn’t go the way it went, I think the grumbling would have started. The attitude towards the team and organization was not particularly positive before September of that year and here certainly, people weren’t happy about the Colby Rasmus trade. But after they won, well obviously, the clock went back to zero.
And then they were actually good the next four years. In two of the next four seasons, they won at least 97 games, they made it to at least the NLCS three straight seasons, and the official end of that run came with a 100 win season in 2015. Sometime in the next three seasons after that, the Cardinals reputation among the fanbase was that they sought to be a team just good enough to get into the playoffs and no better.
There is some evidence it was as early as 2016. Towards the end of the 2016 season, Viva El Birdos had an article saying the season felt like an obligation more than a privilege. Apparently a common sentiment as suggested from an article a week later, which was arguing the success of the Cardinals spoiled the fanbase onto what a bad season actually looks like.
“Most fans surely wouldn’t find a 86 win performance so abhorrent, right? In one comment thread here at VEB, I saw a comment to the affect that the Cardinals obviously didn’t have a good season, and didn’t deserve to be in the playoffs.”
After some more digging, I think I pinpointed the exact moment it happened. When the Cardinals didn’t sign Luis Robert. Outrage that, in hindsight, looks a little silly now. The White Sox gave him a signing bonus of $26 million, including a near 100% tax on it, so they spent more than $50 million to sign him. The Cardinals would have had to pay more than that, for sure, because part of the appeal of the White Sox was Jose Abreu, who is also Cuban. Robert later signed a team-friendly $50 million deal. Robert has delivered 13.7 fWAR in his MLB career, which is still good value for $100+ million, but the Cardinals would have had to pay more and it’s just not quite the steal that people acted like it was. Robert has been too inconsistent and injury-prone to be a true game changer.
But broadly speaking, it reflects what really turned the fans against the Cardinals: they didn’t spend money and when they did, it was mid-tier contracts. They passed on Max Scherzer (100 percent justified I would argue and have argued), Robert, Bryce Harper, even someone like Kevin Gausman. They instead signed players like Mike Leake, and Dexter Fowler.
So how long was the 2011 championship honeymoon? Well, to bring it back to the Blues comparison, the 2016 season revealed some signs, but I think 2017 was officially when it was over. The Cardinals from 2012 to 2017 were arguably better than the Blues have been since 2019, but like I said before, I think the Cardinals were always going to get less leeway than a first-time winner.
Perhaps no greater sign in my personal opinion, and someone can tell me I’m wrong, that the two fanbases have responded vastly different to similar situations is that the Blues have an eerily similar succession plan for Doug Armstrong to leave as the Cardinals had for John Mozeliak. They have already announced who is replacing Armstrong who is still going to be GM for this season. Someone explain why this is different than Chaim Bloom being named the successor, I would love to know.
And the Blues haven’t gotten anywhere near the amount of pushback for doing this as the Cardinals. Not to mention – I mean I know hockey is a different sport and thus the person in charge of acquiring the roster won’t be a 1:1 comparison, but boy the baseball equivalent of announcing Alex Steen is the one taking over would not be news I wanted to hear. Yeah if you told me Adam Wainwright was in line to be the next GM, I would take that as a bad sign. I don’t think the Buster Posey move is going to work out, so I am consistent on this. But I’ve been told this is not equivalent, so I’ll just throw up my hands on this one and trust those who know better.
Anyway, none of the response to the Cardinals transition has actually been transferred to Chaim Bloom himself, which is good at least. People just wanted John Mozeliak gone and they don’t want Doug Armstrong gone. I acknowledge that plays a role here. Maybe they want him gone now I don’t know. But I will point out part of the criticism was how weird it was to do this, so I find it funny that the Blues essentially copied them.
Anyway, you could argue and I know some will that this discrepancy is because the Blues are better run (and they may be). But I would argue, generally speaking, fans care about results. If a team makes what is considered a smart move and it backfires, most fans care that it backfired not that it was originally smart. So whether or not the Blues are better run, I think the reason fans have been more lenient on the Blues is simply that they won it all in 2019.
So I am very interested to see if what happened in the first 10 games is at all indicative of how their season will turn out and if the fanbase will start to become more negative. I sense it already starting. I also would love if a St. Louis team could win the championship again so I could have another example of this phenomenon! It’s weirdly interesting to me. Since this is a Cardinals blog, let’s hope we have a Cardinals example in the near future.
