The Cardinals surprised the baseball world when they parted ways with manager Mike Shildt on Thursday, and speculation has only grown about the situation in the subsequent days. President of baseball operations John Mozeliak cited “philosophical differences” as the reason for the firing, declining to discuss specifics and instead telling reporters (including The Athletic’s Katie Woo) that “where we felt the team was going, we were struggling to get on the same page. We just decided internally that it would just be best to separate now and then take a fresh look as we enter the new season.”
According to Woo, tensions began to grow between Mozeliak and Shildt around midseason, when the Cardinals were still hanging around the NL Central race but struggling to stay above .500. Other factors contributing to the rift may have included the Cardinals’ lack of major moves at the trade deadline, the front office’s desire to incorporate more analytics into the team’s day-to-day operations, and “growing controversy between Shildt and his coaching staff over his leadership tactics and communication.”
Shildt will release his first public statement about his firing tomorrow, though he did send a text message to Woo discussing some of these reported issues. There is “no merit” to the idea of discord with the coaches, Shildt said, though as for the other factors cited, “There is merit (to those factors) but not the entire picture.”
Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch adds another possible factor to the list, perhaps based around how “The Cardinal Way” has long been a backbone of the organization’s practices. “Internally, there had been concern about the absence and ongoing leak of Cardinals-rooted presences,” Goold writes, with some internal dismay over what one source described as “losing tradition” to other clubs.
This stance does seem curious in regards to a managerial change, however, considering that Shildt was himself a longstanding member of the organization. Shildt was first hired by the Cards as a scout in 2004, and he worked his way up the ladder with various minor league managerial and coaching roles before joining the big league coaching staff in 2017, and then becoming interim manager partway through the 2018 season.
As shocking as Thursday’s firing seemed, ESPN.com’s Buster Olney tweeted that rival officials had heard around the middle of August that Shildt’s job could be in jeopardy. St. Louis was still only one game over .500 (69-68) as late as September 7, and though at that point, the Cardinals caught fire. A team-record 17-game winning streak fueled a 21-4 run over the remainder of the regular season, earning the Cards a berth in the NL wild card game. Late-season surges were a common theme in all of Shildt’s three-plus seasons as manager, beginning when the Cardinals went 41-28 after his hiring in 2018.
Coaches and veteran Cardinals players declined comment to Goold about the Shildt firing, though Yadier Molina did speak to reporters in Puerto Rico yesterday, saying the news “took me by surprise…We had very good communication. We went to the playoffs three times in four years. Maybe there was some problem between him and the management. I can’t give you reasons, but from what I know inside the clubhouse, there wasn’t any kind of problem.”
How come no one from analytics has ever been fired?
They get fired all the time. No one cares when a guy in R&D gets fired though, so there is no press release.
Exactly. If the employee is not on the field or isn’t in the public eye like some front office folks, then those hirings and firings aren’t publicized.
I knew a guy years ago on a Red Sox forum who got hired by their analytics department. It didn’t last long and didn’t end well.
Not sure…but I doubt Herzog and LaRussa used analytics; and were competitive. (World Series competitive).
Because of Mozeliak’s poor history in talent assessment, has he failed to adopt or understand analytics?
Would take a baseball mind 100% of the time (ie., Jockety, Herzog, LaRussa, Duncan etc)
Actually, both men made substantial use of analytics as they existed in the day. Herzog had a log, using colored pencils, of every ball hit in every game. No one played match ups more. On several occasions, he had relief pitchers play the OF after pitching so he could bring them back in. Players like Dane Iorg were in the lineup against teams they wore out (Iorg was a known Expos killer). His make over of the Cardinals in 1980-81 was largely data driven.
LaRussa and Duncan (Duncan actually) had volumes of notebooks. LaRussa’s use of the BP in 2011 open the way to how they’re used today.
Tbear, of course you’re 100% correct … but they don’t want to hear about baseball history, they only want to hear about numbers and complex formulas.
They still think Billy Beane was the Founding Father of analytics.
They still think Moneyball was the first time stats such as OBP were valued.
Who is they? Your arguments are vacuous.
Thoughts and prayers.
“Ah you think analytics is your ally? You merely adopted the analysis. I was born in it, molded by it.” – Fever Pitch Guy
I gave you a thumbs up for T&P.
They is a myriad of people, some of which you can easily find in the comments sections of recent columns about Billy Beane on this very site.
Steve – I gave you a thumbs up for making me laugh with that one. Well done sir!
You let the veil fall.
I could go for a Veal Parmigiana right about now.
Steve that was a great comment 😀 thank you for making my day.
Fever Pitch, stop commenting about things you know nothing about. Leave your strawman arguments at the door,.
markakis – Do you always enter conversations in such a poor manner?
I’ve typed a heck of a lot in this thread to support my points.
Now why don’t you tell me what specifically you view as a “strawman argument”.
I’m sure you didn’t come here just to hurl baseless insults, right?
Ted Williams kept a book on umpires.
Didn’t an analytics guy go from Houston to Cardinals and take data with them, then get fired?
They want to incorporate more analytics, they may try to fill the position from within the organization and hope to announce a new manager by mid-November? I’m curious who this is going to be. Any guesses?
Unfortunately I think it will just be a “Yes man” for Mo. If that is the case and the team fails again he won’t have anyone to hide behind. Outside of Oquendo, I don’t know who would be a good fit. I like the analytics being used but, a veteran baseball mind that can make a gut decision over numbers is sometimes what is needed.
Proven Fact!!!!
Mo and La Russa clashed in 2011 over trade deadline deals. Tony wanted certain players and Mo wanted different players. We will never know if there was a compromise or if Mo said you take what i give you but that’s why the next manager was a guy who had never even managed in little league over hiring Terry Francona. Then we get a guy who never managed at the Major League level.. Now Matheny pretty much bombed out in a 3 year span and the fans were restless. This thing with Schildt just seems to stink but I do agree with you. A third “yes” man is coming as the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals.
Stubby Clapp and Oliver Marmol are probably the top 2 internal candidates. I’d venture to guess that Skip Schumaker is on their radar looking outside of the organization.
Stubby Clapp, jeesh there’s gotta be some kind of meds to clear that up.
Bill was just released from the UCI Medical Center.
Skip won’t take the job if he has to accept coaches leftover. Their basically saying you’re the manager, but you will just do what they say.
I doubt Marmol gets it since he was Shildt’s right hand and I’m sure headbutting would commence again quickly.
The Cardinal Way: better to burn out than fade away.
*this season at least
The Cardinal Way: Corporate Espionage for the win.
And who was the GM when that happened?
Nerds have taken over baseball. That’s not a good thing! We see what happened with ” “oh boy! Spin Rates makes baseballs move! Let’s cheat and make some sticky stuff so it will spin more!
Just let them play baseball!
You think it took nerds to figure out that spinning the ball more made it move? The spitball was a thing a hundred years ago.
The physics of spitballs (and splitters) are that they spin very little. That’s why they sink. The craze for high spin rate fastballs at the top of the zone is brand new (or no more than a few years old). You can tell that because the technology to measure it didn’t exist before the teens.
John Montgomery Ward and Honus Wagner disagree.
Like there wasn’t any cheating before analytics?
There was. But cheating before analytics was done by players and coaches, which is who fans buy tickets to watch. Cheating with analytics is by nerds in the back room with laptops, and they’re very much NOT who fans pay to see decide athletic competitions. The nerds with laptops who have forced their way into sports so they can feel like they belong to something athletic are interesting only to themselves (and their families, presumably).
Are you implying that analytics = cheating?
Imagine thinking analytics and too much of them is why your team is losing. Good lord you people are dense. Analytics works that’s why every god damn team is using them all. Making decisions based on gut is how teams lost for years and people want your team to make them based on gut? Downright stupid.
Iverbure – Nothing personal but I’m gonna side with people like John Henry and Theo Epstein, both of whom have said an over-reliance on analytics is a bad thing.
funny how the teams that rely so much on analytics get destroyed in the playoffs every year
I may be wrong, but i truly believe that a big part of his dismissal had to do with his foul mouth. Every time he came out of the dugout to question an umpire you could read his lips and all the F Bombs coming out of his mouth.
I think that rubbed several players the wrong way like Goldschmidt, Arenado, etc. Goldy has been the speaker at the Fellowship of Christian Athletes as has Rick Horton. I believe Shild’s constant colorful choice of words began to create a lot of tension among the players. Just my opinion
Kind of a pedantic deity, then?
Yeah that’s definitely not the reason he was fired because he uses bad words.
Not much to this article. Vague
They may want to “analyze” all the players that the GM gave away that turned into good players. The list is long.
I have no objection to analytics or advanced metrics in general. But I would be very curious as to how they could have been used by Shildt to get better results out of this team. After all the injuries the Major League roster was just very thin. They didn’t have a bench or bullpen full of talented players that could be used to exploit specific matchups. I guess the pattern of bullpen usage could be questioned at times, but basically it was always going to come down to Cabrera, Gallegos, and Reyes plus a bunch of waiver pick ups. Maybe Mo got his feelings hurt because Shildt didn’t utilize the waiver pick ups in way that glamourized Mo’s genius? This article is still pretty vague. I hope Shildt’s statement adds some clarity, but I believe Jeff Albert and Matt Carpenter are at the crux of this break. Mo’s still a d-bag, so whatever.
The Cards did not have an unusually bad injury year. Yes, what they had was concentrated in the pitching rotation, and that’s not good, but everyone has injuries and the Cards also managed to get 32 all-star level starts out of a near-40 year old, and a bunch of solid starts out of a couple mid-30’s scrap heap dudes they picked up at teh deadline. Arenado, Goldy, and Yadi stayed healthy all year too, and are all 30 somethings.
I never said they had an unusual amount of injuries. I’m just saying that after the injuries they had, the roster was very thin. In truth it was very thin any way. My larger point being that I don’t see where a greater reliance on analytics would have produced better results for this team. I think based on the available talent, they were lucky to win 90 games.
VP/GM aren’t gong to fire themselves, Shildt is in the last year of his deal entering 2022 and the options at hand were lame duck, extension or part ways and the front office thought the latter was the best course. It’s one thing to hire someone, it’s another to extend them and it just doesn’t seem like he was their guy. I do think the success that’s happened in MIL is a driving factor here as well.
September saved Shildt’s job, an alternative Sept and maybe he doesn’t survive the season. Same result, just different timing.
I’m more confused after reading this than I was when he got fired.
Me too. Seems like there’s a lot going on here, and it may not originate with the front office (may be the players). I’ll just mention that Nolan Arenado got himself out of Colorado under pretty much the same (reported) allegation of “not agreeing with the front office about the state of the organization.” And he was egged on by Goldschmidt, who is his close friend. Just sayin.
It’s ok Curly, we still respect the majority of your posts
OK, looks like they wiped out our insanity, but I feel better venting.
Spot on Fever. what we really need is all the ball players bitching back & forth on social media against each other . Ughhhh. Bowling, darts, cornhole & crossword puzzles are looking pretty good right now.
WarkMohlers – Ironically the demographic that is pushing against modern baseball is … the younger folks!!
Average age of a baseball viewer is 57, which is 5 years older than what it was 11 years prior.
Baseball has by far the oldest following of the four major team sports.
Just 7% of baseball viewers are below the age of 18.
So OBVIOUSLY something has changed to turn younger folks off of baseball, because back in the day kids LOVED watching baseball more than any other sport. Certainly all the mid-inning pitching changes that are now happening because of analytics-driven data hasn’t helped keep younger folks engaged in the game.
And why do you think that is? Hmmmmm …. perhaps the countless number of people who have been saying for years that the stats-obsessed crowd has taken the fun out of baseball?
Did you ever see The Simpsons episode where Bill James said “I’m the guy that made baseball less fun than doing your taxes”.
I’ve been to some games where launch angle and exit velocity were heavily promoted on the big scoreboards. The overwhelming response from the people around us was “Who the hell cares”.
Is it any coincidence that the sport which is declining the most in the under-30 demographic also happens to be the ONLY major team sport where analytics is so prevalent?
Young people aren’t avoiding baseball because of analytics. They aren’t watching baseball because baseball has horrible marketing strategies towards a younger demographic. In fact, your argument tells me that baseball isn’t changing fast enough.
When is the last time there was a twitter beef between Mike Trout and Cody Bellinger? You want to target a younger crowd, you have to give baseball players more room to build a social media brand and create drama to keep up with the NFL and NBA.
MLB needs to be WWE on Twitter…?
Try…TTO is boring. It’s really boring. Takes longer and has less action than ever.
I’d look there first.
Steve – The vast majority of those under 30 who don’t follow baseball all say the same thing, they find it boring. They talk about basketball and football all the time, and hockey to a lesser extent. Almost NEVER does advanced statistics enter the conversation with those sports.
And baseball games dragging on is another issue. It’s gotten better with the 3-batter-minimum rule and some other changes, but still to many it’s boring watching 7 relievers enter a ballgame from a 9-man bullpen and throw their hardest for 12 pitches or less before leaving the game.
The running joke is that baseball is now for just autists and old people. Nobody was saying that prior to the 2000’s, I wonder why?
I don’t know anyone under 30 that cares about football (maybe if I lived in Alabama, I dunno). That’s about as pure a middle-age-and-up sport as it gets. Little league baseball is booming, and I see plenty of young ones at games. The problem baseball is facing is on TV, not live. Young people don’t watch much on live TV anyway, but they especially don’t watch 3.5 hour shows announced by fossils. Analytics is another big part of it. No one wants to watch a game decided by nerds in back rooms … they want to watch the athletes. And going 15 minutes of “game” time without a single ball in play is just catatonic.
The great thing about baseball has always been the combination of action and tension. Modern baseball is basically all tension and no action.
“I don’t know anyone under 30 that cares about football.”
That’s a joke right? Do you ever go outside?
seamaholic – Top Two sports leagues for Gen Z are NBA and NFL.
Hockey is obviously more a Canadian thing.
ypulse.com/article/2021/07/22/these-are-gen-z-mill…
The Voice of Reason is back! Thanks Steve.
Steve Nebraska- You’re a serial poster and you’re asking others if they ever go outside? You strike me as someone who always thinks they’re the smartest guy in the room. Don’t take yourself so seriously. And you don’t always have to have the last word. It’s a sign of insecurity. Last word coming in 3…2…1…
You read an article telling you this and decided to make it your opinion. Your comments are like talking to my 80 year uncle.
Analytics are prevalent in everything you’ve ever done in this millennia. In fact market analysts can predict your behavior quite easily (that’s me). Everything you think about most things has been dictated to you without you even realizing it
Wark – Now you’re straying waaay offtopic.
Do I really need to spell out Sabermetrics so as to help you realize we are talking about advanced baseball metrics?
I will engage you in legitimate discourse when you stop instantly liking your own comments.
And I’ve never been off topic, ever.
That’s not me liking my posts.
I do have a hype man though, Fever Feve.
Yeah, good idea, if we can’t get Mariah Carey & Beyonce, maybe Trout & Bellinger can exchange vows & create that drama baseball needs.
From a business perspective; DeWitt has to take accountability for Mozeliak’s failures….
5 years of poor contracts
Inconsistent starters
No bench strength in 5 years
Failure to get deep into the playoffs and
Terminating managers that he previously hired.
Bottom line, this is simply…terrible management
finally someone getting to the “REAL” Issue. Mozeliak’s incompetence.
He is the one that needs to be fired.
You forgot the spring training espionage, certainly hurt the organization.
Could just be me. But I think there was a difference between the two parties of where the cardinals actually were.
I think FO thought they are good enough to win and compete for division this year. While Shildt wanted some more pieces and realistic. Then when they cardinals put their strong run together at the end of seasons, FO is said where’s this been all year? You’re out!
@fan i agree with you advanced metrics needs to be used as a tool not the end all be all. i’ll admit i’m not very hip on the advanced numbers but i’m not going to discredit them because i’m not hip to them, not to mention some of them are flawed and the kinks haven’t been ironed out yet. tbh as a whole we need to embrace both the advanced metrics and the traditional stat line. both stats paint a better picture of a player then just solely using one or the other, also there is a 3rd category that you can’t put into numbers and that’s the “it” factor.
The thing with analytics is that smart players will either adjust to beat them or use opponents’ analytics against them.
As a Mets fan, I think that’s exactly what teams did against us. Think about it. Every team should essentially have the same data. They all know what players are pull hitters, who can’t hit a slider or pitch above the belt. They all know what pitchers throw and in what count. SMART players beat their own trends just by switching it up. I mean, who can’t figure out Stanton can’t hit the pitch after an up and in fastball. Or where Gallo’s holes are. Or that McNeil is going to pull every pitch to the second baseman. SMART players adjust. Players who won’t or can’t will get chewed up as soon as other teams get enough data on them.
Jim – That’s an excellent point! Element of surprise is always beneficial.
In order to watch baseball you need a bigger attention span, and you need to understand a few rules, that is why there aren’t many younger people following the game. Furthermore, most have their heads stuck in social media or some other things where you don’t need an attention span longer than a minute.
“These kids today don’t wanna take the horse and buggy anymore. They all want to ride in automobiles, dagnabbit…”
Entertainment isn’t supposed to be a slog.
Interesting with the Cardinals how it’s always the manager’s fault… never a roster problem, or a GM issue
Never the less——- differences of Opinions is no reason to fire a proven MLB winning manager who stuck up for his players!!
There’s got to be more!!! If not—— then why wasn’t the right guy (John Mozeliak) Fired??
IMO, Mike Schildt doesn’t manage a pitching staff very well.