The strange Oli Marmol extension and a different way to think about Cardinal hitters this season

Here's one cause for bafflement and one cause for optimism

The Marmol extension

I’ll be candid and say I don’t have much piercing insight into the decision to commit to skipper Oli Marmol through the 2026 season. I thought Marmol was excellent in 2022 – tactically adept and a sound balance of managerial demeanors. I struggled even to conjure up a complaint about him until his handling of Ryan Helsley in the Wild Card Series loss to the Phillies. 

Last season, I was initially critical of his public reproach of Tyler O’Neill, but the more reporting I read on that incident that took place a mere five days into the season, the more I saw Marmol’s side. The 2023 season turned out to be equal measures flotsam and jetsam, but the primary culprits for what happened are, to my thinking, ownership, the front office, and simple misfortune. Marmol was handed a husk of a rotation and a complicated roster, and I struggle to think of a manager who could’ve landed on meaningfully better results with, well, a husk of a rotation and a complicated roster. 

While I find the Marmol extension to be theoretically inoffensive, I, like you, find the timing of it to be roundly bizarre. No, I don’t list Marmol among the leading villains of 2023, but nevertheless extending him coming off the worst Cardinals season since the internet was in second grade is a puzzling bit of optics. The time to extend him was probably after that impressive debut season of his. I get why you don’t extend in the immediate “afterglow” of a 91-loss season, but what changed between November and March? 

Here’s how John Mozeliak explained it, via Derrick Goold and the P-D: 

"As we got into camp, just seeing how things were working, really felt like things were being run well. And did not want to go into the year with this being a distraction for Oli, for the staff, or for the players. Ultimately we have a lot of faith in him. We believe he’s the right person for this job and we’re excited to know he’ll be here for the next few years. It was important for us to get this done. And we’re glad it’s behind us. We look forward to a future with Oli."

To hear the brass tell it, it seems to boil down to a smooth camp plus worries that Marmol’s uncertain status would lure everyone away from their unifying vision despite, you know, camp going smoothly. It’s easy to become conspiratorially minded about this – Yadier Molina’s absence from spring training hurt his standing as “manager in waiting” or Mo is doing his guy Oli a solid as he prepares for an ahead-of-schedule departure from his role atop baseball ops. But I think it makes sense to resist such lore-making. As strange as it all is from a timing perspective, I don’t think it’s especially important to dwell on that. I’m left with a couple of lasting impressions that I think are more important than the “when” of it. 

First, the strategic contributions – whether positive or negative – of baseball managers are structurally limited compared to their head-coach peers in other major team sports. It’s a “first, do no harm” kind of role, and Marmol to my thinking has mostly avoided doing harm, at least in ways that can’t be more rightly pinned on flawed payroll, personnel, and roster decisions. Put the right players in the lineup, structure the lineup so as to give the best hitters the most opportunities, and then properly leverage your best relievers while being mindful that the season is a long one. At the same time, the players should like you but perhaps not love you. When it comes to the human factors of the job, none of us know much about how such considerations influence on-field results, and the impressions we do have tend to be tailored toward the standings. Outside of glaring and chronic tactical failures, almost all big-league managers in this era of front-office homogeneity probably range from “not perceptibly cataclysmic” to “just fine.” Or, put more succinctly: I dunno, man. (Look, I told you upfront I didn’t have much piercing insight into this.) 

Second, if things go horribly awry this season, we’ll probably see roster and front-office changes that at least border on sweeping. The players on the field and the front-office execs who decide to put them there are more important to the club’s success than the manager. If Marmol survives such a purging — more on that just below — then that won’t undo any pivot toward a rebuilt or reset.

Third, if Marmol proves grossly unfit – again, unlikely, given what we know about him and the opaque and nebulous nature of the guild – he could still be pushed out. “Under contract” as you know does not mean “unfireable.” Mike Shildt was defenestrated with a year left on his pact. When the Cardinals fired Mike Matheny in July of 2018, he was under contract through 2020. While I don’t relish the idea of such dead money, particularly given the DeWitts’ eagerness to land on any old reason not to spend, Marmol won’t actually be the Cardinals’ manager through 2026 if the team’s performance doesn’t call for it. 

It’s weird, is all – this decision to commit to Marmol at this particular moment – but it’s not necessarily bad. It may not necessarily be all that important, at least relative to other, more pressing organizational matters. 

Thinking about hitter exit velocity in a different way (and why it’s potentially good news for the Cardinals)