Birdos in Brief: The 2010s were a golden era for the St. Louis Cardinals

A quick look at the Mo tenure, based on winning %

I am going to make this quick — a classic Birdos in Brief. The Duke posted a tweet in the comments of Gabe’s post from earlier this week, Three-team trade proposals with Bohm and Arenado, and I thought it was interesting and fun. Interesting and fun enough that I wanted to share it with you all! For anyone that has trouble seeing the tweet, it contains a table of MLB Division standings since 2010. In the National League Central, the St. Louis Cardinals are at the top with 1266 wins and 1060 losses for a .544 winning percentage. This winning percentage is the third highest in the league after the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees.

I extended it a little bit more to include all of John Mozeliak’s tenure as General Manger/President of Baseball Operations.

(The Houston Astros were part of the NL Central during that time as well, but I did not include them in the table.)

There isn’t really a point to the exercise other than to acknowledge just how good the St. Louis Cardinals have been and that in last 18 seasons, the central has been pretty evenly matched between the Cardinals, Brewers, and Cubs. Looking back through the division winners in the last 30 years, the Cardinals have never gone more than three seasons without winning the Central. The Cardinals are also the only team besides the Houston Astros from 1997 though 1999 to three-peat the NL Central. The Milwaukee Brewers have a chance to do that this season. The Cardinals have won the division as recently as 2022, so if history is any indication, they at most have one more year before they are back on top. Hopefully the historical pattern holds up!