Baseball is back! Spring training opening day has arrived for the Cardinals, which is the perfect time to suspend reality and indulge ourselves in some good old-fashioned optimism. Expectations for the team are at an all-time (or at least this century) low. It is easy for national media types and casual fans to look at the Brendan Donovan, Sonny Gray, and Willson Contreras trades and mentally bucket the Cardinals into a rebuilding tier with the Nationals and Angels, or even the White Sox and Rockies
as teams that aren’t trying this year. The Cardinals do not belong in that group. This perception of the team has the Cardinals perfectly positioned to shock the baseball world with a few lucky breaks in 2026.
What would constitute shocking the baseball world? Let’s keep it simple and set our eyes on making the playoffs. For a refresher, here are the wins required to make the playoffs since the three-team wild card era began in 2022.
Every team to win 90+ games over the last four seasons has wound up playing October baseball. Arizona won 89 games in 2024 but lost the tiebreaker to the 89-win Braves and Mets. Cincinnati last year is the lone 83-win team to win a wild card spot since 2022. Ten of the 14 teams to win between 84 and 88 games have made the playoffs. Most projections have the Cardinals win total close to the mid-70s (PECOTA notwithstanding), so let’s keep it simple and say that overachieving by about 10 wins will put the Cardinals in a prime position to grab a spot in the postseason tournament.
What Does a Lucky Cardinals Team Look Like?
Before we get into the fantasy portion of today’s proceedings, I wanted to look at how much hope we should have just based on luck. As we are all acutely aware, random variance, unquantifiable dynamics, and supernatural intervention play a huge role every season. The best high-level statistic we have to understand team quality is Wins Above Replacement (WAR). WAR is set to 1,000 across baseball each year, so a .500 team would be expected to accrue 33.3 WAR. Conveniently enough, last season, the Cardinals team WAR was 30.4, three less than an average team, which tied out exactly to their 78-win total.
The table below outlines how often, since 2001, teams have over and underperformed their “deserved” win total based on team WAR.
*2020 excluded
68% of the time, a team’s win total has been within five wins in either direction of their expected win total based on WAR. The Cubs have had the single biggest underperforming season winning 67 games in 2002 with a roster led by Sammy Sosa, Matt Clement, and Kerry Wood that produced WAR to support an 82-win team. On the other end of the spectrum, the 2016 Rangers overperformed by 18 wins on the way to a 95-win season.
If the Cardinals are a true talent 75-win team, they should have around a 3% chance of winning 85+ games just based on normal baseball chaos. If you think they are closer to an 80-win team, the chances of random variance increase their odds of winning 85+ games to 16%. As a quick aside, here are the Cardinals over/underperformances over the last 25 years.
The Cardinals’ 50-win overperformance is second in baseball to the Angels at 71 over this timeframe. The Cubs are tied for last at 57 actual wins less than their deserved WAR wins.
What Does a Good Cardinals Team Look Like?
What do the Cardinals look like if they are a legitimately good team in 2026? Every player overperforming or improving by 15% would do the trick… So would Jordan Walker and Nolan Gorman combining for 80 home runs and getting MVP votes. These scenarios are too boring and too unlikely, respectively, to spend too much time thinking about. What are some slightly more plausible scenarios that could lead to a summer of competitive baseball? The following aren’t predictions but my best guesses as to what the primary catalyst will be if we find the Cardinals competing for the postseason this September.
In each scenario, I am assuming the rest of the team plays generally as expected.
Scenario 1 – Starting Rotation has the Right Stuff+
Stuff+, a metric that measures a pitcher’s effectiveness based on velocity, movement, release point, etc., ranked the Cardinals starters second to last in baseball at 93 in 2025. Chaim Bloom’s general approach to the pitching staff seems to be geared specifically toward improving this metric. In 2026, Dustin May puts it all together and has a true breakout season. His career Stuff+ is 111, which would have ranked tied for fourth among qualified starters last season. Kyle Leahy continues his trend of improving every year and bursts onto the scene with above average stuff and command to take over as the undisputed number 2 starter behind May. Richard Fitts (103 Stuff+) and Hunter Dobbins (98) replace the abysmal Miles Mikolas (89) and Erick Fedde (91) innings with breakout seasons, combining for 5-6 WAR between them. Michael McGreevy and Matthew Liberatore build on solid 2025 seasons and complete one of the deepest rotations in baseball.
Scenario 2 – Mini MV3
Masyn Winn, JJ Wetherholt, and Ivan Herrera are the best projected players on the position player side of things with a combined 8.5 projected WAR (ZiPS). That is not going to cut it in this version of reality. Winn combines his 2025 defense with a mini offensive breakout to put up 5.5 WAR. Ivan Herrera sticks at catcher while getting plenty of DH at-bats and delivers a 5 WAR season. JJ Wetherholt hits his stride early and often, getting to 4.5 WAR en route to the NL Rookie of the Year award.
Scenario 3 – The Outfield is Really Good
Even the most optimistic current projection system sees the Cardinals as having a bottom 5-10 outfield in baseball. Lars Nootbaar comes back more quickly than expected with his fresh heels and makes his dwindling believers look smart with a 4.5 WAR season. Victor Scott II quietly makes incremental gains in every aspect of his game while getting 600 plate appearances and puts up 3.5 WAR in center field. In right field, Jordan Walker improves to closer to replacement level, but with the Cardinals off to an excellent start, he is replaced as the primary right fielder by Joshua Baez. Baez goes on to hit 26 home runs and challenges Wetherholt for the Rookie of the Year award.
Scenario 4 – Prospects Arrive Early and Often
Quinn Mathews and Joshua Baez make their big league debuts surprisingly early and help keep the Cardinals within shouting distance of the wild card through June. As the deadline approaches and the Cardinals are a few games under .500, Chaim Bloom stays true to his steely-eyed vision and trades Dustin May, Lars Nootbaar, and Jojo Romero. Tink Hence and Cooper Hjerpe are called up to fill innings and immediately supercharge the pitching staff with strikeouts. As September approaches and the Cardinals climb to ten games over .500, the gloves come off with a series of prospect promotions starting with Liam Doyle and finishing with Brandon Clarke and Jurrangelo Cijntje. This scenario sounds the craziest when you try to pick the actual names, but swap any of them out for Blaze Jordan, Chen-Wei Lin, Leonardo Bernal, Ixan Henderson, Luis Gastelum, or any of the deep list of prospects expected to start in Double-A or Triple-A.
Which of these scenarios, or combination of scenarios, do you think is most likely? Is there another you could see being the catalyst to a surprising season? Let’s play ball.
