The St. Louis Cardinals have Bolstered their roster as they Gear-up for 2024, but have they gone far Enough?

Very few children get everything they want for Christmas every year. Kids writing to Santa often get a little too far over their skis, and for a variety of reasons, parents may not fulfill everything that’s asked for. Generally, this is a positive for building character. Or, at least, that’s a way to find a useful life lesson in bitter disappointment. Increasingly it seems that the Cardinals opened their biggest gifts before most teams had even started their shopping.

The addition of three starting pitchers in November certainly raised the floor on the 2024 season, but whether it also correspondingly raised the ceiling remains an open question. With focus on fortifying the bullpen in recent weeks, the depth additions brought in so far are tantalizing, but in a way that more closely resembles a scratch off in the stocking than the gift they’ve always wanted.

Reports originating in Japan on Tuesday and confirmed by MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand said that the Padres are circling a deal with lefty reliever Yuki Matsui, who visited potential destinations (including St. Louis) in the United States last week. Matsui had long been coveted by the Cardinals and was first linked to them in overseas reports in October, and the team has not hidden its desire to comb the market for international free agents who they believe would offer them superior value to what’s available among established Major Leaguers.

Their history helps to inform that choice, given the successes they had with Seung-hwan Oh and Kwang Hyun Kim and the struggles to find performance they found with veteran relievers signed to multi-year contracts. Matsui, slight in stature and without top-level velocity, represented another opportunity to take advantage of a perceived market inefficiency.

The Cardinals are not about to throw up their hands and run out to buy gift cards instead. They maintain interest in Korean reliever Go Woo-suk, though his posting window closes in early January. They have also been linked to former Astros relievers Hector Neris and Chatham native Phil Maton, though the two combined for three saves in 139 appearances last season. Both would help. Neither would necessarily be the kind of back-end additions for which the club has advertised. Either could thrive in a larger role, but volatility attaches to relievers as a matter of course.

That’s the inescapable nature of the position and the uncertain health of pitching. If the Cardinals, then, have already finished their most impactful winter additions, what kind of offseason has it been? Does raising the floor of a 90-loss team as the rest of the division continues to run in place portend success? That much is certainly possible, but far from guaranteed. As far back as August, it was clear that the Cardinals intended to pursue Sonny Gray as a free agent.

The questions about Gray have never been about his ability or desire to lead a rotation, but instead whether he represents a substantial enough upgrade over what the Cardinals put on the field last season to make the offseason a success.

Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn should be enhancements over what St. Louis got from Jack Flaherty and Adam Wainwright in 2023, and Gray could well be at least a marginal improvement over Jordan Montgomery, though FanGraphs’ Steamer projection tool (which does trend conservative) seems to suggest last year’s Montgomery would beat out next year’s Gray. With health and without the World Baseball Classic, perhaps some normalcy will bring the record closer to where it ought to be.

Still, the Cardinals ended up in 2023 exactly where their Pythagorean record implied they would be – 71-91, beaten down by a poor run differential. The last two months of the season were spent in surrender and heavily dragged those numbers down (the team ERA jumped over five in August, September and October), so perhaps without a dreadful start they’d look different.

But the start happened, and so did the results. The Texas Rangers lost 94 games in 2022 and won 90 games and the World Series in 2023. They did it by rebuilding their rotation in one winter, even without having Jacob deGrom available for the majority of the season.

There is recent precedent that suggests that aggressive turnarounds are possible, even in the modern free agent market. The Rangers, though, seemingly got everyone they chased. When the season arrived, they added even more aggressively, and did not stop until they’d built pitching redundancy upon redundancy, and then were able to barnstorm their way through the postseason.

It’s not that sort of Christmas in St. Louis. They’ve gotten what they needed to get things back to where they believe they should be, but it would be hard to argue that they’ve exceeded expectations or blown anyone away. Doing just enough isn’t always enough. Pitchers and catchers will report to Jupiter in approximately eight weeks, and even when they do, the work won’t be done.

As November’s frenzy gives way to a December freeze, though, it’s more than fair to wonder whether they’ve quite done their part to fill a baseball season’s stockings.