Happy Wednesday,
Post-Dispatch sports columnist Ben Frederickson here.
Each week, after hosting my sports chat at STLToday.com, we send a newsletter with a quick-hit analysis of the local sports landscape. I also highlight questions from the chat itself. Join the chat at 11 a.m. STL time Tuesdays.
All due respect to Riley O'Brien, the new reliever the Cardinals scooped up in a trade with Seattle, the biggest news in Cardinal Nation so far this offseason is the surprise strike made by the rival Cubs.
Craig Counsell leaving the Brewers not for the New York Mets but for a stunning pivot to the Cubs was seismic news for the industry at large. Managers are going to be getting paid more now moving forward because of the big contract Counsell landed. He's getting $8 million per year for five years. That's big-time college football coach money, and MLB manager salaries that have lagged before this will start speeding up to keep pace. (If not, MLB managers need to find new agents.)
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Locally, the impact is rivalry-based. Cardinals fans just realized that Counsell, who used modest-payroll Brewers team to often crank out a better baseball product than the Cardinals (and the Cubs), is now going to have a bigger spotlight and higher payrolls to play with. Counsell's Brewers didn't always beat the Cardinals in head-to-head fashion, but his run in Milwaukee, especially in recent seasons, showed the Brewers were ahead of both the Cubs and the Cardinals in terms of getting the most out of what the roster offered. I'm not sure many Cardinal fans realized it. Or Cubs fans, for that matter. It's easy to ignore the Brewers, and they played into that thinking by never doing any real playoff damage during Counsell's time in Milwaukee. But the Cardinals and Cubs can never ignore one another, and now the Cubs have arguably the sharpest manager managing.
Not to be too dramatic but ... this could be worst-case scenario for the Cardinals. Managers matter. The postseason just proved it, again. Counsell is crazy smart. He will be a significant upgrade from nice guy but unproven Cubs manager David Ross. He is going to make the Cubs better, just watch, and the Cubs surprising the baseball world by landing him is a sign the Cubs are once again getting serious about trying to reclaim the division. The good news for the Cardinals is they have an offseason to counteract this Cubs dugout splash with pitching additions. Even more reason to push it.
Here are the highlights from this week's chat ...
Q: At the GM meetings, Cardinals president of baseball operations John Mozeliak said "we" knew the starting pitching going into 2023 had some volatility to it and rolled the dice. Who is the "we" he's referencing? And isn't this changed stance from what was said at the time?
BenFred: It's the standard Mo playbook. Here's how it goes . . . Offseason actions produce a roster with legitimate weak spot. The weak spot is pointed out. Mo defends weak spot, takes the pointing out of weak spot various degrees of personally, mentions buzzwords like "media agenda" an so on. The season starts and weak spot is legitimate. It hurts the team. Mo then acknowledges said weak spot and tries to fix at trade deadline — if the team isn't too far out of the race. Better late than never? Then another offseason starts and Mo talks as if the weak spot the team said it didn't have was understood all along — because it probably was, and they were just not acknowledging it at first. Right now, in the crossover between seasons, is about as close as the Cardinals get to admitting they tend to bake in too much hope into their offseason roster builds. You have to read between the lines, but it's right there in that quote you referenced. The Cardinals can and should change their approach to add more certainty. It wouldn't stop injuries from happening and it wouldn't mean everything signing and trade is a smash success. But it would decrease the risk of derailment.
Q: So, are the Cardinals adding three starters, or two?
BF: Man, if they don't add three starters after repeating that's what they needed time and time again during this past season, that's another preventable public relations blunder from this front office, and it would have been a lot more avoidable than last year's bickering about the payroll increase. That payroll comment was open to discussion of percentage increases and always-fuzzy payroll math. Saying you need three starting pitchers and not adding three starting pitchers is a lot harder to shrug off. Now, they didn't say three impact starters. They said three starters. The assumption here has always been two top-end ones and one lower-in-the-rotation wildcard who is a bounce-back guy, via signing or trade. I've said from the jump, and dmentioned often here in The Chat, that I think the move is to sign two bigger guns and then sign or trade for a third who has upside the Cardinals see as a bounce-back or fixer-upper type. That guy can be thrown in with the depth that already exists to compete for a rotation spot. And trading for him while signing the more proven arms would protect the offensive firepower the Cardinals aren't keen on trading away. Bullpen gets better as a result if you add three. If the Cardinals fall significantly short of that, their offseason actions will not match their strong claims as last season went down the drain.
Q: Listening to City SC coaches and players talk after the postseason fizzle against Sporting KC, it seemed like the team valued the regular season success more than the postseason fade. Is that how things are in soccer? Is that something City SC fans are going to have to get used to and get on board with?
BF: There hasn't been much to be critical of with City SC this season, but I was a little disappointed by the initial commentary after the postseason trapdoor opened. Players, coach and team messaging all seemed to prioritize speeding past the dud of a performance against Sporting KC and instead focusing on the regular season. It should have gone in two stages. One: Postseason performance was deflating and disappointing. The team's decline since its clinch of Western Conference has to be a learning experience. And then, two: Still, wow, what a great season all in all. I think it's a little off-putting to fans to see a buffet of ice cream and candy comments following a first-round elimination by a rival who had to sneak its way into the bracket. Fans didn't want heads to roll. They probably did want, at least some of them, to get the sense no one was happy about this. I don't know if they got that. Maybe I'm wrong? And no, I have not forgotten the so-called soccer experts didn't think this team had a chance of making the postseason. It did, won its conference, set all kinds of records for an expansion team, debuted one of the coolest home-field advantages in all of pro sports, proved it has more talent coming with City2 play, deepened its grassroots ties to promoting the game and helping future talent get its start, and more. It was a smash success, with a disappointing ending. But every postseason ending is disappointing unless you win the championship. Ignoring that doesn't make it not true.
Q: Was there ever a moment when you thought, whoa, Mizzou is going to beat Georgia?
BF: I never got there. Georgia is too strong of a second-half team, and the Bulldogs have started slow too often this season only to finish strong. When Georgia went up 24-13, I thought it was over, and I found myself thinking, well, this is going to be one of those games that was closer than the final score indicates. I was impressed Mizzou rallied to score after that. That nine play, 75-yard TD drive showed some real onions. I'm not sure previous Mizzou teams come up with that TD drive. I think Georgia will go on to win its third consecutive national championship. I've been impressed with Kirby Smart since he showed up at UGA. I think that loss is going to look even more impressive at the end of the season than it does now. Especially if Mizzou eliminates some mistakes and plays as well moving forward as it did for lots of the game in Athens. The Tigers can beat Tennessee at home. They should. They have been clobbered in that series lately. It should be personal.Â
Q: No question, but thanks for the column on Bob Knight and Ron Zetcher. Zetch is a local legend!Â
µþ¹ó:ÌýThanks! We had some good laughs on the phone during the interview. His Knight stories were more newsworthy than my two. First was when I was at The Missourian as a Mizzou student and approached him at a Mizzou-Kansas game he was broadcasting. I think he growled. Second was when I was an intern at the Post-Dispatch, and I walked into TLR's office to find Knight sitting on the desk, bemoaning the existence of sportswriters. I remember Joe Strauss giving him the business about how good his VCU Rams were. Good times.