ST. LOUIS -- Within days of the Chicago Cubs snapping a 108-year title drought and upsetting the applecart in baseball’s grand old heartland rivalry, general manager John Mozeliak stated the St. Louis Cardinals’ agenda for the months and, quite possibly, years to come.

“If they’re the rabbit, we’ve got to find a way to catch it,” Mozeliak said.

That was a nice, tidy sound bite at the time. Yet here we are a couple of months later at the start of baseball’s annual hibernation period, January, and the sum of Mozeliak’s offseason moves have been adding a highly competent center fielder and a highly competent left-handed reliever. Combine Dexter Fowler’s 2016 fWAR (4.7) with Brett Cecil’s 2016 fWAR (0.4) and, at least on paper, the Cardinals fall a tad shy of the 17½ games the Cubs outpaced them by last season. That’s the case even if you subtract the sum of Fowler’s contributions to the Cubs.

Actions speak louder than words, and it doesn’t look like the Cardinals have worked all that hard to catch the rabbit.

Cardinals general manager John Mozeliak stayed away from big moves this offseason, sticking with better value choices, such as Dexter Fowler. Jeff Roberson/AP Photo

Mozeliak’s group has come in for a bit of criticism from a fan base that wanted to see it make a more spirited pursuit of slugger Edwin Encarnacion. But even had the Cardinals added Encarnacion (3.9 fWAR), they probably wouldn’t have been the equal, on paper, to the Cubs. The move also would have hampered their prime directive, to get more athletic and better defensively. Encarnacion is not a good first baseman and he would have forced the Cardinals to shift Matt Carpenter to second or third base, where his shaky glove could have done more damage. They could have spent $60 million or more on Encarnacion for a marginal upgrade, all things considered, and the Cardinals’ front office has built its reputation around financial efficiency, not gluttony. Encarnacion will be 36 in the final year of the deal he signed with the Cleveland Indians.

So, either the Cardinals really aren’t intent on bridging the gap with the Cubs or they’re viewing the chase in terms of miles rather than furlongs. Over a period of several years, the Cardinals’ ripening farm system and the Cubs’ challenge of staying on top could do the trick all by itself. The fans might not like it, but for now, it appears the Cardinals have set their sights on more easily attainable goals. History hints that that is, in fact, the right approach. Almost every winter there is a team that tries to change its course via an expensive rebuild and flames out spectacularly in the regular season. The Cardinals didn’t want to be that team.

Besides, you don’t have to win 94 to 100 games anymore to reach the ultimate goal. Of the 10 National League teams to qualify for wild cards in the past five years, four of them won 88 games in the regular season and two of them won 87 games. The Cardinals won 86 games last season. So, they weren’t 17 wins short. They were one win short. Two teams from the double-wild-card era already have qualified for the World Series and one of them, the 2014 San Francisco Giants, has won it. Two postseasons ago, the Cubs won the wild-card game and then knocked the Cardinals out of the playoffs. The Cardinals did the same thing to the Washington Nationals just three years earlier.

The regular season and postseason are different types of struggle. Spending tens of millions of dollars or draining the farm system in pursuit of a possibly ill-fated quest to avoid a wild-card elimination game isn’t necessarily savvy.

Yet have the Cardinals even done enough this offseason to reach the 87-92 win goal that seems like the safe zone for postseason qualification? They insist their upgrades go deeper than they might appear. The impact of the team’s poor 2016 fielding on its pitching appears to be the hinge. The Cardinals were 13th in the majors with plus-4 defensive runs saved (DRS) and 24th in defensive efficiency ratio. The impact on a pitch-to-contact staff was immediate and devastating. Cardinals pitchers ranked 13th in ERA (4.33), but sixth in FanGraphs’ fielding independent pitching (3.92).

Fowler was a good-not-great center fielder last season, but the notion is that Randal Grichuk will go from being an average center fielder to an elite left fielder. Both Mozeliak and manager Mike Matheny sound committed to sticking with Kolten Wong at second base and they are hopeful Aledmys Diaz’s fielding will improve in his sophomore season. Carpenter’s career DRS (minus-1) at first base is significantly better than at any other infield position. Jhonny Peralta and Jedd Gyorko are good enough to play competent third base.

The Cardinals finished third in the NL in runs last season, but they were held back by the second-worst baserunning in the majors, per FanGraphs. They reduced the number of base cloggers in their lineup by letting Matt Holliday and Brandon Moss walk. Of course, they also lost 48 combined home runs in those two batters, so one could reasonably ask whether the cure did more harm than the disease.

Barring a late acquisition, which seems unlikely, the Cardinals can’t match up to the combination of athleticism, fielding prowess and power the Cubs displayed last season, but neither could 28 other teams. When the measuring stick doesn’t work, it’s time to get a new measuring stick.