St. Louis Cardinals Hope to Save Season as Underdogs

Oliver Marmol wanted a bagel on Saturday morning. This is New York, so it should have been easy to get one. But this is also 2023, and Marmol manages the St. Louis Cardinals. Nothing comes easily.

“It didn’t work out,” Marmol said. “The line was outrageous. The door guy at the hotel said to just skip the line and walk in. I thought about it, maybe that’s a thing. I saw the line and I didn’t think that was the play.”

The way things are going, Marmol said, he might have provoked another customer and ended up in a fight. He didn’t get a black eye, but he didn’t get a bagel, either. Just another slice of satisfaction missing from a season gone sideways.

The afternoon was better for Marmol, whose Cardinals snapped a six-game losing streak with a 5-3 victory over the Mets at Citi Field. But it was only the third win for the Cardinals in June, and their 28-43 record was the worst for the franchise through 71 games since 1978.

It was also the second worst record in the National League, percentage points better than the Washington Nationals — a dizzying fall for a Tiffany brand. The Cardinals — second to the Yankees in overall championships, with 11 — have endured just one losing season this century, in 2007, and have reached the playoffs in each of the past four years.

“You see where we’re at and we’re like, ‘Whoa,’ you know?” said Nolan Arenado, the star third baseman. “We understand the magnitude of what’s going on because no Cardinal team has lost this bad in, like, 70 years. All those things we hear about, we know them and we’re trying to find a way out of it. But it’s tough right now, for sure. The more we think about the past and all that, I think it’s hurting us.”

The past is also rejecting the Cardinals. On Saturday, the team announced that David Freese, who had won a fan vote for election to the team’s Hall of Fame, had turned down the honor. Freese, who was named the most valuable player for the Cardinals in their last World Series victory, in 2011, said he appreciated the votes but did not deserve a vaunted red jacket.

The Cardinals’ last active link to that era, Adam Wainwright (an 18-year veteran who was injured for the 2011 run), had his longest start of the season on Saturday, working six and a third innings for his 198th career victory.

Wainwright had his usual sharp-spinning curveball, which — for Cardinals fans, not Mets fans — always evokes memories of better days. He hopes more will follow.

“Usually chemistry leads to wins, and these guys in here, we couldn’t get along better,” Wainwright said. “We had an incredible dinner the other night, we’ve had great meetings, we’ve had great messages. I think we let the pressure mount on stuff a little bit too much at times, where everybody’s kind of playing stiff and afraid to make mistakes. It’s sometimes hard to get out of that when you’re in it.”

Wainwright, 41, will retire after this season, a year after two…