The Last 10 Years of the Cardinals in Three Graphs

I got my start in baseball writing as a Cardinals blogger. That’s only natural – I’m a Cardinals fan. My dad grew up in St. Louis and passed it on to me. I’m still a fan, though certainly less than I was before I started writing about the sport as my full-time job. But whether you’re looking at it through the lens of a fan or just as an analyst, the trajectory of this always-competing, never-quite-dominant team has been fascinating to watch.

I had a strange feeling while watching the Redbirds last year. I kept wondering, “Why is this team full of old guys?” Ever since the 2011 World Series win, Albert Pujols’ first finale in St. Louis, the team always seemed full of young, devil-magicky contributors. An average Cards roster had a few recognizable stars plus a bunch of young guys you’d never heard of who were way better than you initially realized. Matt Carpenter and Michael Wacha were unexpected stars in 2013. Carlos Martínez and Kolten Wong came on strong. After a few years of missing the playoffs despite interesting young contributors (Tommy Pham, Randal Grichuk, Luke Weaver), the 2019 Cards coalesced around Jack Flaherty, Tommy Edman, and Paul DeJong.

You’ve heard of all of those players, of course, but at the time, they were young up-and-comers. The Cardinals never seemed to be old despite running out Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright year after year. Those guys were a key veteran core, helping to spread the team gospel to the young horde backing them up. But even with those old hands running things, my view of the Cards as a youthful outfit was correct. From 2013 through 2018, St. Louis’ roster was younger than average every year. Then they were ever so slightly older than league average in 2019 and again in 2020.

What changed in those years? Well, one very key contributor changed in 2019: Paul Goldschmidt. He was 31 in 2019, at the tail end of his prime, and when the Cardinals acquired him from the Diamondbacks, it was rightly hailed as a coup. Goldschmidt had a down season that year, but then he was one of the 10 best hitters in baseball over the next four.

Then things changed again. Before the 2021 season, the Cardinals doubled down on their trade surplus with the NL West, dealing for Nolan Arenado. Like Goldschmidt, Arenado came to St. Louis near the peak of his powers and into his third decade on earth. He, too, has been excellent in a Cardinals uniform. But the way the team was constructed changed massively with those two as anchors. Here it is in visual form:

That sounds straightforward – add old players, get older. But the truth is, old players are a part of every roster. Wainwright and Molina were 36 and 35 in 2018, respectively, and the Cards were younger than league average that year. That’s far older than the corner infield pair who replaced them as team leaders. Yet even after Wainwright and Molina retired, the Cards ran out lineups as old as any they’ve used in the last 15 years. What gives?

The truth is, the “star” positions on every team’s roster tend to be a bit older than average. That’s just how baseball works. Players are generally at their most productive around 28-30. The best players? They’ve built their name by then, and then they continue on being stars into their 30s. Sure, you might have a young star or two on your team, but the majority of established players are older. That’s how they’re established. The average age of the top 25 hitters in baseball in 2024 was around half a year older than hitters as a whole, and that’s with great seasons from young standouts like Bobby Witt Jr. and Gunnar Henderson.

Likewise, the top pitchers in baseball are older than the average baseball player. The top 25 pitchers last season were, on average, around 0.6 years older than the entire cohort of pitchers. That’s partially because Chris Sale had a resurgent year at age 35, but stars having resurgent years isn’t a phenomenon unique to 2024. Justin Verlander cracked the top 25 in 2023 at age 40. He and Yu Darvish were in the top 15 in 2022. Star pitchers have longer careers, because they’re stars – which means that the top of the leaderboard is always going to be dotted with older types.

That’s not what changed on St. Louis’ roster, though. It’s not that Goldschmidt and Arenado made the team older. I mean, they did, but as I mentioned, the Cardinals have often built around older stars and still had young groups overall. Instead, the supporting cast changed. Here’s another way of looking at it. Below you can see the share of plate appearances (or batters faced for pitchers) taken by players age 30 or older:

To dive in even more specifically, here’s the share of playing time taken up by players 30 years or older, split into position players and pitchers:

Oh. Well then.

If there’s a throughline to St. Louis’ move from consistently young and competitive to pivoting to a rebuild, it’s this. The Cardinals churned through a great variety of young pitchers early in their most recent run of dominance. Then they turned things over to a new generation fronted by Flaherty and Weaver, with mixed results. But after that, there was no new crop of arms up from the farm system to substitute in. Andre Pallante made 20 starts last year at age 25. Flaherty made 15 starts in 2021, also at 25. Those are the only 15-start seasons from young pitchers that the Cards have produced in the 2020s.

The pipeline didn’t look that way a decade ago. Each year from 2013 through 2019, multiple young Cards starters featured into the rotation. In several of those years, three of their top five starters hadn’t even hit arbitration. The team was getting huge value out of its young pitchers even as the “Devil Magic” hitters and famous veterans got more of the press. When that changed, so too did the fortunes of the team.

In this situation, I think we can infer a cause for this shift. No team would prefer to stock their rotation with veterans acquired in free agency. If there are reasonable farm system options available, they’ll get a chance. That’s just how the game works. Teams prefer internal options where possible, and particularly young internal options. The Cardinals didn’t go out and sign Kyle Gibson because they wanted to bury their youngsters. They signed him (and players like him) because they didn’t have enough youngsters to field a viable major league rotation.

In other words, I think that pitching staff age is a decent proxy for pitching development. When that line – share of pitching done by 30-year-olds – starts to go up, it’s because there isn’t enough young pitching available. And the truth is, that’s expensive. Young players earn less. That’s just how the system works. And as long as front offices operate under budget constraints, the failure to develop young pitching is a wrench in the works.

The Cardinals clearly know this. At the 2023 trade deadline, John Mozeliak addressed it head on, saying “We’re not so stubborn or arrogant to say we’re going to keep doing our system and hoping for a better outcome” in discussing the need for more swing-and-miss in the club’s minor league system. The moves the team has made since then underscore that; development staff has changed, Chaim Bloom is the POBO-apparent, and most of the team’s forward-looking trades have focused on toolsy pitchers.

The overhaul is already in progress. Using the playing time projected by RosterResource, Cards pitchers this year would average 29.5 years of age. That’s down 1.6 years from the 2024 edition of the club. Their hitters were already young, but again per RosterResource, they’re going to get meaningfully younger this year. In all, if everything goes according to our estimates, the Red Birds will see their average team age drop by 1.2 years, from way higher than league average to slightly below.

Now, this isn’t a silver bullet. The Cardinals stopped trying to patch their pitching staff this year, and the causality doesn’t work in reverse; using younger pitchers doesn’t necessarily make your pitching staff better. We have them in the bottom third of the league in projected total WAR, and that feels right to me.

But whether you’re a Cardinals fan wondering why the last two years haven’t gone well despite the superstars on the team, or just a baseball fan trying to figure out why the most consistently competitive team in the sport just vanished into a hole all of the sudden, I think that these graphs tell the story. The Cardinals were great for a long time because they kept churning out good young players to complement the stars they acquired. Then they ran out of good young pitchers, and despite their best efforts, they couldn’t fix that problem, which brings us back to the present. A youth movement is coming – as it had to. If the team’s average pitching age stays down as the Cards get better again, it’ll be a great sign that they’ve successfully overhauled their pitching dev. If it doesn’t, it might be back to square one.

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