ST. LOUIS – Pressure is mounting on the St. Louis Cardinals as the 2024 campaign winds down, though the team has slipped back to .500 for the first time in nearly two months.
After two consecutive losses to the Cincinnati Reds, the Cardinals now stand at an even 60-60 record, nearly three-quarters deep into the season.
As of Wednesday, St. Louis stands at the .500 mark, a spot where their total number of wins equals their total number of losses. Historically, teams at .500 or slightly above it at the season’s end are usually among the last to miss the cutoff for postseason.
That’s the challenge facing this year’s St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals reached a season-best six games above .500 with a 48-42 record on July 8, holding the second of three NL Wild Card seeds at that point. Since then, the Cardinals have fallen out of the Wild Card picture and four contenders have surpassed them in winning percentage.
There was once a time in recent Cardinals history, according to ownership comments, when the Cardinals sputtered around .500 earlier in a season and sought a drastic change. On July 14, 2018, the Cardinals (then 47-46) fired manager Mike Matheny and promoted Mike Shildt on an interim basis.
On the night of the manager change, Bill DeWitt Jr., who still serves as Cardinals chairman, justified the decision with the following remarks, according to Bally Sports Midwest digital archives:
“In some places, winning is just a winning record, or even .500 is acceptable. Players have a nice season, go home, get back to their families and so forth. But not in this city, not with this franchise, not with its history, and not with our great fans.”
How have things transpired since then? It’s fair to say with a mixed bag of results, sometimes in validation of DeWitt’s remarks, but more recently, not as much.
The manager change from Matheny to Shildt nearly helped St. Louis salvage the season, finishing 88-74, but missing postseason by just a small handful of games.
After the 2018 season, the Cardinals clinched four straight postseason berths and finished around 20 wins above .500 in each of their non-pandemic-shortened seasons. That said, the last two seasons of that stretch were helped largely by a surprise late-season 17-game winning streak in 2021 and an Albert Pujols retirement tour in 2022, otherwise could have ended with teams near .500.
The 2023 season fell short of the bar set with four straight October bids, as the Cardinals finished below the .500 mark for the first time since 2007 with a final record of 71-91. On the heels of a rough 2023 campaign, the Cardinals were still below .500 through mid-June and haven’t found much momentum to surge well above it.
DeWitt Jr.’s son, Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III, previously addressed fan frustrations that came with a slow start in a one-on-one chat with FOX 2 Sports Director Martin Kilcoyne in May. Kilcoyne asked him “What’s your sense of fan frustration as we sit here now?”
To which DeWitt III offered the following reply, in part:
“It’s definitely high. … We all believe, and even I think our fans believe, that this is a better team than this. … We’ve lost some close games and weird games. I remain optimistic, but concerned. It wouldn’t be fair to say, you know, I don’t think it’s panic button right now, but it’s like ‘Come on guys. We’re better than this.’” We should be able to climb into this race.”
The Cardinals will either be one game above or below .500 as a daunting homestand awaits. St. Louis will host the NL West-leading Los Angeles Dodgers and NL-Central leading Milwaukee Brewers for three games each. That’s then followed by series against several October hopefuls in the Minnesota Twins, San Diego Padres and New York Yankees.
Entering Wednesday, the Cardinals are 3.5 games back of a Wild Card spot and 7.5 games back of the NL Central lead.
NOTE: The video attached to this article is from FOX 2’s coverage around Matheny’s managerial exit in 2018. Around the 1-minute mark, the video features the aforementioned “.500” comments from Bill DeWitt Jr.
