So this is how it ends for the St. Louis Cardinals: Not with a bang, but with a series loss at the hands of the historically awful Colorado Rockies. Sure, the Cardinals' playoff hopes are technically still alive; despite a shutout loss at Coors Field on Wednesday, they remain just 3.5 games back of the San Diego Padres for the third and final NL Wild Card spot, and they happen to host the Friars for four games at Busch Stadium starting on Thursday.
But come on: Even the team itself is finally beginning to admit that the 2025 season feels well and truly cooked. St. Louis came out of the All-Star break knowing that its performance for the rest of July would go a long way toward deciding whether John Mozeliak would sell at the trade deadline, and they've responded by getting swept by the Arizona Diamondbacks and dropping two of three to quite possibly the worst team in baseball history.
Really, though, the argument for finally letting this era of Cardinals baseball die isn't even that involved. If you'd like the abridged version, consider this: With their loss on Wednesday, St. Louis became just the second team in the league to lose a series to both the 2024 Chicago White Sox and the 2025 Rockies.
With today’s loss, the Cardinals join the Washington Nationals as the only two teams to have dropped series to both the 24 White Sox and 25 Rockies.
— Jeff Jones (@jmjones) July 23, 2025
For those keeping score at home, that's the fifth-worst team of the modern era — and the worst since the expansion New York Mets in 1962 — and the team currently on pace to match that record this season. And it's only fitting that one of those losses in Colorado came courtesy of Erick Fedde, the man who embodies so much of the last few years of the Mozeliak era in St. Louis. At this point, it's an era that can't end soon enough for most fans.
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Rockies debacle is final proof that John Mozeliak isn't the man to lead the Cardinals
Of course, Mozeliak has overseen more than his share of success since taking over in St. Louis ahead of the 2007 season (and even more if you include his time in the front office under Walt Jocketty before then). But in recent years, it's become increasingly obvious that he'd lost the touch that had made him successful for much of the past two decades.
Rather than drafting and developing and supplementing with shrewd moves via free agency and trade, the Cardinals' farm system slowly declined, forcing Mozeliak to spend in increasingly desperate ways to try and paper over holes on his roster. That bill eventually came due, and the result is a team that is frustratingly stuck in the purgatory of mediocrity. St. Louis has plenty of talent to try and build around moving forward, but they also have plenty of dead weight as well, and it'll be interesting to see how Mozeliak's replacement, Chaim Bloom, charts a course forward.
Until now, this team has been too competent to bottom out entirely, offering just enough to convince the front office to keep pushing and hoping for the best. Losing a series to this year's Rockies, in addition to last year's White Sox, however, should leave no doubt: St. Louis simply isn't good enough. And Mozeliak wasn't the man who was going to change that any time soon.