Cardinals continue to muddle, stuck in the muck of the middle

The proverbial turtle on a fencepost that clearly did not get there by itself is also an apt metaphor for the trouble a Major League Baseball club finds itself in when trying to balance between the hedge-fund tycoons and the heavy tankers. Stuck in the middle is a tough place to be as the Cardinals have shown -- and, as with the turtle, it can take looking beyond the shell for a way out of it. The Best Podcast in Baseball hosted by baseball writer Derrick Goold returns with guest Kevin Wheeler of KMOX/1120 AM to discuss the Cardinals as they emerge from a disastrous series in Cincinnati and begin the most grueling stretch of their season. They are, once again, balanced around .500 -- waiting for the wind of change to knock this turtle into one direction or the other. And that becomes the crux of the conversation. If the Cardinals are able to put together a 41-game sprint for October and a playoff berth, does such a run risk masking or misleading the direction the franchise is really headed. Look to the most recent World Series championship teams for examples. Will the 2024 Cardinals be like the surprise 83-win team of 2006 that won a World Series but prefaced a signficiant shift for the franchise when it tried to repeat that flawed roster in 2007, or are the 2024 Cardinals the Happy Flight-era 2011 Cardinals who buzzsawed to a World Series title and hinted at a successful run of pennant-contenders that even withstood the departure of a Hall of Fame manager and a three-time MVP and Hall of Fame player? One team gave off a false impression of the future. The other hinted at a future fueled by pitching development and some savvy outside additions. The '24 Cardinals have to overcome their run differential and an offensive deficit to contend, and even if they do what they had to overcome and how far they had to go should offer a lesson, even a reckoning, on where the franchise is going. Thanks to all the listeners of BPIB for the patience as the podcast experienced one planned break as the host took some time off and another unplanned pause as the host had a few episodes experience hiccups of various types. The BPIB is back, ready to regain some of those lost episodes and sprint to the finish of the regular season. The Best Podcast in Baseball, brought to you by Closets by Design of St. Louis, is a production of the Post-Dispatch, StlToday.com, and Derrick Goold.