Just going to bump this post again, because it does a really good job illustrating the difference between this upcoming off season and previous off seasons.
Mo gets a well deserved mulligan for this season.
But if 2024 is anything like 2023, BDW won't have any choice but to fire Mo. So Mo's urgency has just skyrocketed big time. How he conducted previous off seasons is in now way how he will conduct this upcoming off season.
He will be very aggressive, more so than he's ever been. His job depends on it.
Mulligans are for people whose misfortune comes from bad luck. That's not what happened here. He barely skirted them in recent years, but Mo's bad habits (arrogance? laziness?) finally came home to roost this season in a very visible way.
So yeah, he's got some urgency, but his ills aren't because of simple bad luck.
I suppose we can dissect the word mulligan like we did reset earlier in this thread. I believe mulligan can be used both due to bad luck, and a blunder.
Fwiw, I think the cardinals have been very unlucky this year. Still not a playoff team, but we should be around .500.
A lot of talk about three rotation spots to fill. The Cardinals will more likely fill two and let a cluster of guys occupy the fifth spot. Until someone gets hurt and they’re short. We’ve seen this show before.
Replace "getting hurt" with "sick call" and this sounds like my workplace!
What we should do:
-Sign someone like Nola/Snell, trade for someone like Gilbert, then sign a 5th starter reclamation project type guy like Syndergaard to compete with our mediocre internal depth options (Liberatore, Rom, Thomas, Hudson, Graceffo, etc).
What we will do:
-Sign two 5th starter reclamation projects
-Claim we have tremendous internal depth (Liberatore, Rom, Thomas, Hudson, Graceffo, etc)
-call it an offseason
This front office makes 1 big move every offseason and then they all go on vacation. I could see their 1 big move this year being signing some pitcher to a big contract to be their ace and that will probably be it. They could make some smaller moves to band aid some additional holes but none that requires much money or risk.
I’m pretty confident they’ll do one big ticket free agent signing. Then do a consolidation trade where they give up enough that it really hurts, but also helps.
Cardinals will be drafting high and it would be nice to not lose a pick. This could be an argument for signing Montgomery as well.
Scouts to whom Sherman spoke raved about Yamamoto’s potential in the big leagues, touting a heater that sits mid-90s and reaches the upper-90s, a “plus-plus” (i.e. 70-grade) splitter, a “world class” curveball, a quick delivery to the plate and the athleticism to field his position well. One evaluator speaking to Sherman tabbed him a “full [scouting] grade” (on the 20-80 scale) ahead of right-hander Kodai Senga, who signed a five-year, $75MM deal with the Mets this offseason.
