Myth-busting 5 narratives surrounding the St. Louis Cardinals

The St. Louis Cardinals are getting dunked on by fans, media, and especially platforms like Facebook and Twitter for the dreadful season they had in 2023 and all of the success stories from former players in new organizations.

Any time Adolis Garcia makes a game-changing play in the postseason, the broadcast and everyone else in the world is quick to remind us that he used to be a Cardinal. Same goes with Zac Gallen, Randy Arozarena, and Sandy Alcantara. People point to the lack of success this year, the terrible state their pitching is in, and all sorts of other issues as reasons why the Cardinals will be a basement dweller in the NL Central for the foreseeable future.

The Cardinals deserve most of what is coming to them. They've dug themselves a major hole, trading for the wrong guys, betting on the wrong talent internally, falling behind the league in pitching development, not spending the money that they should be, and a host of other reasons. Real change needs to happen with the way the Cardinals do business this offseason.

But it's also fair to say that there are a number of narratives that are just straight-up myths or have become myths because fans or media are ignoring the full context and story. While it feels much better to just be angry at the Cardinals and say whatever we feel about them, it's much harder to do the work of understanding the real story, which has now led to these false narratives.

I discussed these myths and more on the "Noot News Podcast", which I host weekly alongside contributors Sandy McMillian and Andrew Wang (link here if you want to listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts). We were able to have extended dialogue about these myths, including how they came to be and why they are false.

Before you think this is a defense piece for the Cardinals organization, it's not. My objective here, and my hope, is that the Cardinals learn from their mistakes and truly change their ways this offseason. I believe they are going to, reports surrounding the team and some public statements point in this direction as well. But in order for them to "do better", we need to be accurate in what the problems are. Creating myths, even if they have some truth to them, doesn't help the situation at all.

I've narrowed this article down to 5 of the different myths we discussed on the podcast surrounding the Cardinals that I'd like to "bust" today, so we can all go into the offseason knowing exactly what the Cardinals need to do in order to get back to their winning ways.