***Official 2024 STL Cardinals Thread ***

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Marcellus

Come on man, lets not get too revisionist history here. His health didn't suddenly decline he had 1 outlier year he played in 141 games.

The Marmol incident was last year correct?

TON games played in STL he averaged 81 games a year with Shildt as his manager. He averaged 80 games a season his entire 5 year stint in STL.

2018 - 61 - Matheny fired Schildt interim
2019- 60 Shildt manger
2020- 51 - Shildt Manager
2021-141 ( amazing) Shildt manager
2022 - 90 Marmol
2023- 71 Marmol

Nobody's saying he's Lou Gehrig but you're also not being entirely fair here.

2018 was a partial season - he wasn't hurt, he started the season in the minors and earned his call-up. I think maybe he had a little injury in there that cost him a couple weeks but I honestly don't care about those that much. He was mostly healthy that year.

2020 was the COVID year - they played 58 games.

2019 was a little of A and a little of B. He was bad, got demoted, got himself back to the bigs, started for a bit, got hurt and missed most of August before he came back in a bench role.

22 was undeniably a cluster**** of injuries which led to changes in his training regimen. He even talked about how he was changing the way he ran the bases to avoid those sort of soft tissue injuries. Then on a play where he did precisely what he said he'd do (throttle down and tighten his turn) and in the process actually ran a BETTER 2nd to home time than his average, he got bawled out by his manager and screwed by his GM.

And he quit on the team.

O'Neill will probably get hurt again this season. It's what he do. But I think a motivated O'Neill gives you All-Star caliber production when he's on the field and can probably give you 120-130 games.

And we traded him for nothing. Now he's killing it. And if he does repeat his 2019 season it will be the same excuse making from folks that it was for every other guy Mozeliak traded away for nothing to see excel elsewhere.

Because there's ALWAYS an excuse. After the first half dozen examples, maybe stop making them.