Opinion: Future of Cardinals’ roster hinges on remaining player opportunities
There’s no more tiresome cliche around the St. Louis Cardinals these days than the endless search for more and more runway. However the plane metaphors are deployed, there has surely been limited takeoff in a season that’s spiraling toward the middle of the standings. That puts a premium on the time left, and the things that can be meaningfully learned over a 50-game sample.
Those limitations put the Cardinals in roughly the same dilemma they’ve faced all season, albeit for different reasons. Whereas a clogged roster may have interfered with some of their evaluations to this point, that is less of a concern with half the bullpen traded away and Nolan Arenado on the shelf indefinitely. There are opportunities to learn about the players still in house, even if there’s not quite enough time.
Some of those pieces have been sorted out even in the few days since the deadline passed. Iván Herrera has worked his way firmly into the rotation in left field, and Oli Marmol told reporters in Los Angeles on Monday that he views Alec Burleson as an every day player. That sorts Lars Nootbaar, Victor Scott II and Jordan Walker into a situation where there are one or two spots available on a given day for the three of them, with Scott’s skills in center weighing heavily on the scale.
Similarly, Nolan Gorman and Thomas Saggese appear earmarked for sharing time at third base, with Gorman’s left-handedness leaving him on the long side of a platoon. Whether that changes in the coming 10 days — JJ Wetherholt can be called up on Aug. 15 and still maintain rookie status for next season — may be outside of their control, but performance on both sides of the ball will to some extent bear out how that availability unfolds.
That leaves the bullpen with its many openings and its equal number of constituent parts striving to secure their own spots. A waiver move on Monday brought in lefty Anthony Veneziano as organizational depth, largely because JoJo Romero is the only healthy lefty in the bullpen following the trade of Steven Matz and John King’s oblique injury.
Romero also scarcely counts as a pure lefty at this point. The Cardinals clearly intend to use him as a closer in much the same way they did after Ryan Helsley’s season ended due to injury in 2023. That Romero has had success in that role is a credit to him and to the team’s benefit. With only one more year of team control following this season, he’ll certainly be a hot trade candidate over the winter and headed into next year, barring an unexpectedly sudden bounce back to contention.
The downside to using him in that role, though, is in the opportunity it necessarily takes away from others. Gordon Graceffo, Riley O’Brien and Matt Svanson have all ridden the Memphis shuttle up and down throughout the season. O’Brien and Svanson in particular have put up strong big league results. Graceffo’s stat line is a touch more uneven, but a large amount of the damage done against him this season has come in blow out situations where he’s been tasked with eating innings in bulk rather than deployed to use his repertoire to his best advantage.
Relievers generally have so much variance in performance year over year that it’s fair to wonder whether any useful knowledge can be gained by running out high leverage options over such a limited sample size. It’s not as though pitching with a two-run lead in the seventh inning should be all that different from inheriting the same situation in the ninth, but a stubborn baseball aphorism would assert that the last three outs are always the hardest to secure.
Whether any or all of those three relievers — along with Ryan Fernandez, who rocketed his strikeout rate back to desired levels over a long season in the minors — can contribute in meaningful ways to next year’s team is something they should endeavor to learn over the remaining games. Romero, for all his skill in the roles to which he’s been assigned, is unlikely to be a long term piece for these Cardinals simply by virtue of his contractual status.
That, ultimately, unlocks the central friction which the Cardinals will be facing over the next two months. There is development value in winning. There is a serious detraction that comes with playing in a losing environment. The 2023 Cardinals, the only other recent St. Louis-based example of a team which fully sold off its expected pieces, had to turn to journeymen hanging on to the ends of their careers in order to even scrape by to the end of the schedule.
This team should not have that problem, at least at the same scale. There are real options with real skills who are really ready to contribute, or so the team believes. The most important thing they can do with the games remaining is find out for sure, and sometimes that means embracing the deep water at the end of games without so comfortable a life vest.
