The Marks of the Climb

By Patrick Conreaux, Co-Founder / ECD, Sageworx

Junior year at Saint Louis University, where I played baseball for the Billikens, we had a game against Mizzou at Busch Stadium.

Before warmups I talked my teammate into tossing a few balls just over the outfield wall. On the last throw he put it high above the wall. I took a long running start, pushed off the wall itself, and caught it a full foot above the center-field fence.

For about three seconds, I felt forty thousand Cardinals fans erupt in my head. Willie McGee making that catch in the 1982 World Series. Full sprint. Full extension. Pure instinct. I knew, for a moment, what that felt like.

Then I looked up and saw it. My spikes had left a rip in the vinyl of the center-field wall.

Thrilled. Mortified. Both at the same time.

But here is what I have come to understand about that moment: I had to plant my foot on the wall to get high enough. The mark was not a mistake. It was proof of the climb. Without it, I never catch the ball.

I spent thirty years away from St. Louis, working with marketing agencies and inside the Coca-Cola Company, one of the most scrutinized legacy brands on the planet, before moving back recently to raise my kids near family. Three decades of watching brands navigate change in the corporate world has me thinking about the same question every time the Cardinals come up on the radio or around the dinner table:

How do you climb toward relevance without scuffing something people hold sacred?

It is not just a Cardinals question. It is the question every legacy brand, every organization, every leader is facing right now in the age of AI.

Two climbs happening at the same time.

The Cardinals are climbing from a beloved legacy toward something more modern and sustainable. Walk into Busch Stadium this season and you can feel it. The pageantry is familiar. The red is still red. But the emotional math has shifted.

People are no longer just asking whether this team can win. They are asking what this version of the Cardinals is supposed to be.

That is not a baseball question. It is a brand question. And right now, it is the same question every organization is asking about itself in the context of AI.

Both climbs require the same thing: letting go of the certainty that got you here in order to reach for what comes next. That process leaves marks. The question is whether you are making them deliberately, pointing upward, or simply stumbling and hoping nobody notices.

AI is not the disruption. Gripping the old way too tightly is.

That is the real conversation happening in boardrooms and brand teams everywhere right now.

AI is forcing every organization to rethink how it works, how it creates, and what it is willing to release in order to move further faster. That process will leave marks. Experiments that do not land. Tools that reveal the gaps before they fill them. Moments where the old way and the new way are both visible at the same time and neither feels quite right yet.

That discomfort is not a signal that something is wrong. It is a signal that the climb is real.

The brands that come out of this era stronger are not the ones that avoided the marks. They are the ones that made them deliberately, learned from them fast, and used them as footholds to go further. Holding too tightly to the legacy, whether that is a creative process, a production model, or a forty-year franchise identity, does not protect it. It just means you stay on the ground while everything around you climbs.

The Cardinals are showing us what deliberate marks look like.

Chaim Bloom brings the data-driven rigor the Cardinals have honestly needed. But more interesting than the analytics is the transparency. He is naming the journey publicly — the work required to modernize the farm system, the patience the process demands, the honest accounting of where things stand. That is a deliberate foothold. It says, "We are not hiding the climb."

Oli Marmol is leaving a different kind of mark. There is a quiet confidence in someone who does not need to perform authority. Connected across generations, honest with reporters, open to challenge. But the move I keep coming back to is what he did with Yadi.

Yadier Molina is Cardinals mythology in cleats. The living embodiment of everything my older brother Phil means when he says Cardinals Way. Most managers in Oli's position would have kept Yadi at a respectful distance. Marmol did the opposite. He invited Yadi into the dugout as connective tissue between what the Cardinals were and what they are climbing toward. He did the same with John Jay and Daniel Descalso.

That is a leadership pattern, not a sentimental gesture. It says: we are not asking you to abandon what you love. We are using what you love as the platform to get higher. The past is not something to move on from. It is the foothold.

This is the most sophisticated brand play the Cardinals have made in years, and it is directly applicable to every organization navigating AI-era change. The brands winning trust right now are not the ones performing transformation. They are the ones naming it honestly and carrying the people who care most forward with them.

What Phil gets right and what he might be missing.

Phil and I grew up with every Cardinals game on in every room of our house. He still quotes Whitey Herzog like scripture. He sees every departure from the Cardinals Way as a mark on something sacred, and he is not wrong to notice.

The loyalty he carries is exactly the kind that makes legacy brands worth fighting for. But the trap, for the Cardinals and for every brand navigating AI and modernization, is treating that loyalty as a reason not to climb. Gripping the legacy so tight that you cannot push off from it.

The strongest path forward requires holding three things at once:

Memory

What part of the brand myth still matters enough to protect at all costs. The culture. The philosophy. The Cardinals Way. Not just championship history. A promise about how the game should be played.

Relevance

What has to change so the experience does not feel dated. New audiences, new formats, new reasons to engage. A brand that speaks only to the people who were already here is a brand that is slowly shrinking.

Credibility

What the organization can honestly promise right now without sounding performative. Most brands fumble this one. They announce the new chapter before the foundation is set.

Lose any one of those three and the climb loses its integrity. Phil is not fully convinced yet. The marks are still fresh. But marks look different once you see how high they helped you get.

The footprints are the story.

I have been thinking about my spikes in that wall for thirty years. I planted my foot on something I loved, pushed off it, and went higher than I had any right to go. I left a mark I did not intend on a place that meant everything to me.

Now I think it was the whole point.

The Cardinals are making marks right now. So is every brand navigating the AI era. Every organization trying to evolve without losing what made it matter. Every leader trying to honor a legacy while finding new footholds for what comes next.

The ones worth following are not the brands that climb without leaving any marks. Those brands are not really climbing.

The ones worth following are the ones that make their marks with intention, point upward, and trust that the people watching understand the difference between damage and ascent.

We will not always know in the moment which marks will become the footholds. But we dig in, we push off, and we find out how high we can go.

That is not a risk. That is how the climb works.

Patrick Conreaux is co-founder of Sageworx. If this resonates with something your organization is navigating, he would love to be in the room. pat@sageworx.com