After disastrous road trip, Cardinals are destined to sell at trade deadline
Seeing itself clearly in the season’s opening months can be a daunting challenge for any team, especially when the picture inevitably evolves and changes shape the way that baseball almost always forces it to do.
Unless a team is the Colorado Rockies – historically inept and the winners of two of three against the St. Louis Cardinals this week – there is always hope that endures.
Most teams will have a stretch in which they win seven or eight games of 10, or perhaps 15 of 20, and suddenly a year that was meant to be based around development and determining the state of the roster before it’s rebuilt moving forward can start to look like something else.
If the rocket is lit and takes off, then it’s on everyone involved to keep it flying. If it starts to plummet back to earth, though, there’s real danger in landing too hard.
A disastrous 1-5 road trip out of the all-star break left the Cardinals just a game above the .500 mark and leaves no doubt about the path forward. This is a team that is destined to sell its pending free agents and play out the string.
Those games in August and September that might in some scenarios have been an essential part of jockeying for playoff position are instead going to be evaluative tools at full speed, and the biggest challenge remaining for coaches and players is to make them productive.
The ebbs and flows of a long baseball season can be difficult to navigate without much hope waiting at the end of the road. In a perfect world, the significant financial economy which powers the baseball ecosystem would be enough of a driving force to cover any potential lapses, and in some cases it is.
Players, though, are wildly competitive; it’s impossible to get to the big leagues without a certain internal demand that can only be satisfied through winning. A team which waves the white flag has to be prepared to deal with the fallout from that, up to and including the reaction of a clubhouse which is finely attuned to realizing when the front office is giving up.
That’s not to say a sell off isn’t the right decision or that the Cardinals can’t handle it, but there is something delicate about the coming days and weeks. Some of the causality around the disastrous road trip to Arizona and Colorado cuts both ways. The team knew it had to come out of the gate with its hair on fire to avoid a sell off, it instead came out of the break with everything else on fire, and now the sale is ongoing.
The only other unabashed sell off deadline the Cardinals have endured under John Mozeliak’s leadership came in the midst of a lost 2023 season, and even that was a different circumstance. That team was so deeply underwater so early that the inevitability had long since sunk in before the moves started to be made.
Even still, those Cardinals went 23-31 over the season’s last two months, including 11-16 in August. There were some extenuating circumstances; Adam Wainwright, for instance, posted an 0-5 record that month while pitching through a blown out shoulder in pursuit of a personal milestone, which is a circumstance these current Cardinals won’t allow.
But the innings have to be covered all the same, and for a team which has had a great deal of stability in its rotation thus far this season, there is now a sense of operating without a safety net.
A waning season without wins at the end of the rainbow is also one in which it can be prudent for veterans to step back to take care of lingering ailments, or for marginally skilled players to be passed over in favor of raw prospects in need of a first taste of the big leagues.
Masyn Winn’s first promotion came in the midst of that lost August, exactly 45 days before the end of the season so as to preserve his eligibility for rookie of the year – and the team’s eligibility for a prospect promotion incentive draft pick – for the following season.
Top prospect JJ Wetherholt’s two homers on Wednesday night and rollicking start at the plate for Triple-A Memphis raises questions about whether he could follow the same path. Paul Goldschmidt’s New York Yankees arrive on Friday, August 15, 45 days before the end of the season. Winn, for those who enjoy symmetry, made his debut on a Friday night against the Mets.
The debuts, however, won’t be all Wetherholt. That stretch also saw the Cardinals turn to Irving Lopez, Juniel Querecuto, Casey Lawrence, Andrew Suárez and Jacob Barnes, among others, simply to fill out a team and get on the field. That season’s final lineup is one which acts as a stark reminder of how the season looks when the lights are shut off while there’s still action on the field.
Much to their chagrin, the Cardinals have been in this spot before. They navigated it acceptably, even if the final months of the 2023 season were far from the team’s most productive.
The task now is to find more, be better, and convince themselves that playing up to the high bar they flashed at times in this season’s early months is still within their grasp.
