In what is becoming an annual habit, the St. Louis Cardinals are back-sliding going into and coming out of the All-Star break. Some view it as natural regression for a team that over-achieved in the first half of the season. As we approach the two-thirds point of the season, lack of depth gets exposed. Regression can be harsh that way, no?
Of course, the obvious approaching point is the trade deadline, which will be a mere 10 days away when you read this article. I’m not going to try to predict what
will happen there or advocate for buy or sell or both. Today I’m going to try and peek under the covers at the key drivers that will guide Cardinal decision makers not only as they approach the trade deadline, but in decisions to be made in the final third of the season.
There are numerous advocates for the Cardinals to add talent for the 2026 stretch run. They are certainly positioned to compete (mathematically, anyway) and there is merit to the argument that you never know when you might be back in this position again. Next year is a long way away and a lot can go wrong, given time.
Others advocate for a more “stay the course” approach. Continue to treat 2026 as a rebuild year and continue to add more for the future, even potentially at the expense of the now. A good plan should be followed, right?
Other articles are out on VEB proposing who are candidates to be moved and discussing the pros and cons of each potential move. Interesting fodder, for which I don’t have any more names to add, but do have some sense that we might be surprised a bit. What might management be considering and what might we learn from the actions they take?
One thing that seems certain is that the Cardinals have likely narrowed down their question marks on the position player side from where they were last year at this time. In this runway year, some youngsters have emerged and some have not and a few idle.
Last year at this time, the whole outfield was a mess. Now, it seems like the problem area has really narrowed to CF (what is Nathan Church, exactly?). Do you think management would agree with this view? That said, a key outfield question revolves around Joshua Baez and where they see his development. If they think he is ready now, it seems like a Nootbaar trade at the deadline might be an action they take. If they think he needs more time, then maybe not so fast on breaking Noots lease on Arenado’s home. They have control for all of next year if they want. Seems to me that how they handle Nootbaar will tell us much about how they view Baez’ future.
Likewise, at this time last year the key question was wither Wetherholt? I’d propose that question has been answered emphatically, with the exclamation point added with that 8-year contract extension. If one wondered how they could improve the 2B position from Donovan, the answer is clear. Winn, Wetherholt and Burleson seems like a pretty solid group. Does management hold this view? It strikes me that the key question on the infield is … what do they do with third base?
Interestingly, the catcher position, for all the reputed depth that exists, is probably the most murky position right now and remains largely unchanged since this time last year. Pozo is now off the roster, but that wasn’t hard to see coming, nor was it a strategic move. Where do they go from here? Perhaps the trade deadline will bring more clarity, but this might be something that evolves through the end of the season. At some point, doesn’t Crooks need to start impressing? Maybe he is just pressing.
On the pitching side, the starting rotation has provided some surprising stability. Not necessarily the quality they need to form a contending team, but surprisingly closer than many of us would have thought coming in. As discussed in earlier articles, there is depth and some intriguing tools in the minors, but the stat lines suggest that the higher-end talent is still a bit away from MLB ready. Does management hold this view? In ways, it seems easier to envision the 2028 or 2029 rotations than the 2027 rotation. Odd in a way.
If you follow that line of thinking, one could wonder if management sees an asymmetry between the timeline of the position player core and the pitching core. If one sees an emergence of supreme pitching talent 2028 and beyond, one might recognize that some of the position player core will be nearing the end of their control years. Their actions at the trade deadline might help us understand their views on this, as well as their actions on the contract extension front.
Then there is the bullpen. Bullpens are primarily rebuilt in the off-season and get more attention when a team is ready to contend, when teams can assemble a puzzle from multiple available pieces. The current Cardinal bullpen certainly needs rebuilt, yes? There isn’t one or two deadline pieces that could fix this mess, in my view. If the Cardinals did that, it would tell me they have a very different view of things. My personal expectation is that soon, maybe not by August 3, but soon, is that we may start to see some starters migrating toward bullpen roles as a more long-term fix. What/who the Cardinals acquire (or trade away) at the deadline could tell us much about how they view this.
In the way issues have a tendency to inter-connect, I wonder how much management views the current starting pitching alignment as exposing the bullpen. I was reading a Brewer article yesterday bemoaning how it had been weeks since a starter got an out in the 8th inning and how much that exposed the bullpen. I think the Cardinals starters have gotten an out in the 8th maybe twice all season, and thought we’d be excited to see a starter get an out in the 7th. Boy, it is funny how perspectives can be so different. I wondered how much improvement in the rotation would actually help the bullpen and if management views this or is more inclined to think that 5-and-dive is the nominal strategy for starting now and deepening the reliever corps is the right direction.
Then there is the bench depth of this team. As they narrow down the main areas of concern (CF, 3B, C), one thing that has emerged this year is that the role players don’t fit very well, in the sense that they seem to not fill the obvious holes very well. My short-hand for describing this is that the role players they have are not great hitters and also not very good defenders (nor apparently are they particularly good base runners). These roles are necessary, because there are always situations where a mainstay needs a day off or a distinct platoon disadvantage arises or a pinch runner would be handy, but when the current set gets inserted, the games become clogged with poor quality PAs, extra K’s, missed fly balls, pick offs, plays not made. The result is a normally crisp team that competes every AB loses its margin for error and the play quality erodes noticeably. How does management fix this? More than proposing a deadline trade, I’m looking to see their actions to understand their view and their strategy. Might they seek to build this out with young talent or bring in vets of the type that are everyday players on 2nd-tier teams but better suited as role players on playoff-teams? Or, maybe like the bullpen, they will wait to fix this problem until all the main holes are plugged. Ergo, I see their aggressiveness in this area being a barometer of how close they think they are to contending. That they really didn’t do much with the bullpen last off-season told us a lot about how they viewed their chances at contending and by extension, how poor they saw the odds were meant little was to be invested. How much they do about the bench in the next couple months will tell use how they view 2027.
The last area of analysis is the plethora of struggling, young vets at AAA. Gorman, Scott II, Saggese, Prieto, Fernandez. All these guys occupy 40-man spots and 28-man spots on the AAA active roster. Blocking can happen at all levels. How do they view their future? I suspect the results at AAA the last couple months are not eliminating any misgivings they might have. We are all aware they don’t like giving up on guys and I’m OK with that, but the road does end at some point. It’s an uncomfortable part of this business and gets avoided in the same way we don’t like to contemplate or discuss our own mortality. But it is there and needs addressed. Likewise, and perhaps more concerning, there isn’t a lot of talent exploding up the pipeline threatening to push them off the 40-man. There is a bit of a double-edged sword here. Do they move on and bring in new pieces or …? Is now the point they start re-populating the position player side of the pipeline, similar to how they rebuilt the pitching over the last year? The 2026 Draft seemed a step in that direction. Theoretically, they could wait it out another year or two. But what would that tell us about the competitive timeline and how might that worsen the asymmetry between pitcher and position player groups?
From what I can gather, it is questions like this (and the underlying internal analysis they’ve done on this) that will guide how they will proceed this deadline and throughout the last third of the season, more so than an observation that they could use another leverage arm in the bullpen (which they could, but…). Their actions, choices and direction taken over the next weeks should help reveal more of the plan (and their expected timeline).
