It is a testament to the strength of the recent run of the St. Louis Cardinals that last season’s 83-79 record was the organization’s worst in a decade, when the 2007 club, not radically different from the 83-78 Cardinals team which faded in the second half and then got inexplicably hot in October to win the franchise’s 10th World Series, played more like the second-half 2006 Cardinals than the first-half version.
Following 2007, general manager Walt Jocketty was fired, assistant GM John Mozeliak was hired, and the organization, which had spent the better part of a decade incrementally extending its competitive window through trading parts of its often-thin farm system for big-league talent (Mark McGwire, Jim Edmonds, and Scott Rolen being the most successful examples of this strategy), re-committed to building from within.