Cardinals’ whiplash week ends with shutout sweep against lowly Pirates
Despite whatever protestations and appeals might be imagined to wash a debacle of a series in Pittsburgh away from the St. Louis Cardinals, those games will in fact count in the standings. They will, if the Cardinals are lucky, be marked as the low point, and an inevitable consequence of a challenging schedule that was certain to take its toll at some point or another.
That is the most charitable way to describe the sequence of events that included being shut out in a three-game series in Pittsburgh for the first time since 1976, and the first time held scoreless in a full three-game set of any kind since not bothering to post a run during the final games of the 2015 season in Atlanta, a series in which St. Louis had nothing to play for and time to nurse what was surely a robust set of celebration hangovers.
An early Wednesday flight to Chicago ahead of a Thursday off day should provide the team with as many as 42 consecutive hours away from a ballpark, perhaps giving body and mind the right amount of time to flush the week’s failures. A sweep in Cleveland over the weekend provided a bit of cushion, lifting the club to a season-best nine games over .500. The debacle in Pittsburgh used that cushion entirely, sinking them back down to a mere six over and forcing a series win in Chicago to come away with a winning road trip.
That the week can whiplash so quickly and thoroughly from unqualified success to pending debacle is more revelatory about the state of the 2025 Cardinals than they would prefer. The league’s truly good teams, its dominant teams, can sustain a couple days of a couple players being unavailable. When a starting pitcher hits the wall following a complete game shutout, as Sonny Gray seemingly did in Wednesday’s seventh inning, a strong set of chase relievers can stop the game from getting out of hand.
And, perhaps most importantly, three games won or lost don’t have the feel of swinging the standings in any sort of definitive amount. That is the sort of gravitational pull that the Cardinals have not yet reached sufficient velocity to escape.
Whatever phase of roster development the Cardinals are currently in – and whether that assessment is consistent across individual people and individual days – there can be no excuse for not putting a best foot forward with a shot at the playoffs so firmly within reach. Some around the team, steeling themselves for a season of taking on water in the loss column, have seen reason to hope in recent weeks that there won’t be a necessity to throttle back as the July 31 trade deadline looms.
There is value, the theory goes, in developing winning habits in young players, and seeing those habits actually translate into wins. For a young player to be told they’re executing the right way and measuring up to expected growth is all fine and dandy, but there is no visceral learning experience like the roar of the crowd that comes from an important spot in an important game.
That experience is exceedingly difficult to quantify, however, and baseball is in the throes of a period in which the ability for a front office to show its work is oftentimes judged to be more important than the answer at which they arrive. The Cardinals are no strangers to that sort of assessment; indeed, it could be argued that Bill DeWitt, Jr.’s turn to the consultant class for advice in the early aughts was the instigating event which pushed the Moneyball rolling down the hill.
The push and pull surrounding decisions for the Cardinals in the coming weeks will be fascinating, and high-gravity events like a total flop in Pittsburgh will weigh more heavily than perhaps they should on the scale simply due the force of velocity at which they arrive. John Mozeliak doesn’t want to go out surrendering in his last year at the helm of baseball operations. Whatever opinions are held of him, it would be impossible to have his job for as long as he’s had it and not be more competitive than that.
These Cardinals will have to demonstrate to ownership and incoming leadership in the approaching days and weeks that they are close enough to being Grade-A competitive that there is value in allowing them to try. They will have to fight for their collective rights to party. A week in which the lack of team depth shown through this brightly can either prove that a team is not good enough to win, or can prove that a team would be good enough to win with a little help.
There has to be a method of scoring runs against divisional teams that doesn’t include a rival outfielder forgetting the number of outs. That’s step one. Whatever steps follow behind will depend on how forcefully they’re able to mark their chosen path.
This story was originally published July 2, 2025 at 2:59 PM.
