What will Cardinals do at the trade deadline? Series in Chicago may help decide
With 15 wins in June, the St. Louis Cardinals would have entered July ten games above .500 and there would have been no doubt that they were firmly ensconced in the postseason race. Despite starting the month 4-10, they entered their game on June 30 at 14-13, with that entirely arbitrary distinction fully within their collective reach.
Perhaps 14-14 is close enough. Perhaps not. That will be what the coming weeks will decide – if a definite decision is made at all.
The surging Milwaukee Brewers have overtaken the Cardinals by a game in the race for the NL Central, with the Chicago Cubs still three games ahead. A holiday weekend matchup at Wrigley Field might further help define the race, though the Cardinals played the Cubs to a stalemate in St. Louis last week.
That series was the first real warning sign of the trouble ahead for St. Louis as they slog through a stretch without Iván Herrera, as well as another brief interruption to Jordan Walker’s season and the in-and-out presence of Lars Nootbaar as the Cardinals fight to keep him off the injured list with an intercostal injury that could go weeks without being fully healed.
That weakness is glaring – a lack of bats to neutralize lefty starters, as the Cardinals were wiped out by Matthew Boyd and Shota Imanaga of the Cubs before Pittsburgh’s Andrew Heaney carried a no-hitter into Monday’s sixth inning. Imanaga is clearly the best of the three and was making his first start after having missed six weeks with a hamstring strain, and still the Cardinals got nothing going, other than perhaps some attention upstairs.
A winter is coming in which a decision will have to be made around some of the young bats in the system. There simply aren’t enough available slots for all of Alec Burleson, Brendan Donovan, Nolan Gorman, Thomas Saggese, and both Nootbaar and Walker, to say nothing of top prospect JJ Wetherholt accelerating north through the minor league system.
Saggese and Walker are the only two of that group, though, who hit right-handed, which builds in redundancy as well as a backlog. It is perhaps not so simple to find similarly situated righty hitters on a team which needs lefties, but doing so would help to clarify some of the positional battles and opportunities which Oli Marmol has had to balance throughout his lineup all season long.
“I think that’s something that there should be a real conversation around,” Marmol said recently about the possibility of Herrera picking up an outfielder’s glove this winter, while acknowledging that he “[wasn’t] there yet” in terms of exhausting his opportunities behind the plate. Still, that glimpse into one possible future for the team’s best hitter – largely a DH who touches the corners – is yet another variable that plays into these conversations.
Perhaps the deadline is not the best time for a resetting team to meddle with uncertain pieces of its future, but it may well be the time to add more and open up opportunities for those already in house. The Cardinals are extremely unlikely to bring back both Erick Fedde and Miles Mikolas in 2026, and there may only be space for one if the team sheds another significant salary – Sonny Gray, in this case – over the winter.
Of the two, Fedde is the one without any control over his potential destinations, as well as the one with the significantly smaller salary, and so he becomes the player most likely to be traded. There is always a need for pitching at the deadline, even pitching that comes with Fedde’s obvious red flags and poor recent results. Most playoff teams would face a tough decision regarding whether he would be one of their starters in a short series, but he’s more than capable of turning in valuable innings along the path to get there.
For the Cardinals, perhaps the biggest surprise of the year has been the enduring health of their largely-over-30 starting rotation, which has created a surprising roadblock in the path of Michael McGreevy. The team freely acknowledges that their internal modeling expected McGreevy to have made far more than his three starts to date, simply by way of attrition. But as health has sustained, he has instead been peppered into spot starts, turning in three strong outings and a clunker among his four big league games this season.
Trading Fedde for assets, whether future or present, prevents the Cardinals from allowing him to walk away without offsetting any of his acquisition cost and opens an opportunity for McGreevy at the same time. For a team in the middle that seems content to let the players determine their short term path, that would be a compromise move that follows through on pre-set plans without reading as a total white flag.
There are, of course, multiple possibilities. Steven Matz will have suitors. So too will Ryan Helsley. The latter could well receive a qualifying offer from the Cardinals this winter and therefore at least leave them with draft pick compensation should he depart, which would soften some of the blow of holding on. With Matz, the decision might be as simple as leaning on the value charts; if a team overpays, then a move is justified, but a scramble to ship him out for anything at all seems shortsighted.
The middle is an uncomfortable path for any club, and certainly so for a Cardinals team that was fully prepared to be strapped in to coast to the bottom of the hill once this point in the season arrived. That’s not what happened. The game has other plans. It’s now incumbent on their leadership to adjust and execute the sort of flexible strategy which has largely eluded them – electric, not static. The clock ticks louder every day.
This story was originally published July 3, 2025 at 4:00 AM.
