Cardinals looking for upgrade over Brendan Ryan at shortstop

Brendan Ryan is one of the elite defensive shortstops in baseball, but he followed up a solid 2009 season at the plate by hitting just .223 with a lowly .573 OPS this year and general manager John Mozeliak told Joe Strauss of the St. Louis Post Dispatch that the Cardinals will look to upgrade the position this offseason.

Mozeliak indicated that they may also look to upgrade over Skip Schumaker at second base, but shortstop is a higher priority because there’s more optimism about Schumaker bouncing back from his poor 2010:

The basic agenda is how can we get more offense out of those positions or both. There is a school of thought that Skip will produce more than he did last year. There’s a comfort level of that being probable. In Brendan’s case you would hope there would be some improvement, too. But if there were a way to address one of those positions in a positive way, we would pursue it. We probably have more of an emphasis on short than second at this point.

Buster Olney of ESPN.com reported yesterday that the Cardinals “will likely be aggressive in pursuit of Juan Uribe” and Strauss has written previously that manager Tony La Russa would like to bring in Miguel Tejada.” Uribe and and especially Tejada would be a clear downgrade from Ryan defensively, but based on Mozeliak’s comments the Cardinals are focused on improving the offense even if it means sacrificing some glove work.