Cardinals pin future on youth and patience. But hope is on the horizon
It has been a long time since the St. Louis Cardinals have entered a season with the type of outlook that awaits them in 2026.
However they choose to frame it, and however many concessions they decline to make, this is a team at the outset of a full-on rebuild, with a primary goal that is not making the postseason.
As much as that may have been true in 2025, the vestiges of a competitive roster still existed among the fringes, with high-priced veterans. No more. Not if they have their way.
It is a difficult sell for a fan base that prides itself on showing up for competitive baseball played deep into October. It is a sobering reality for a team that saw the number of those fans in its stadium dwindle in 2025. There are reasons to be excited on the horizon—or perhaps just over it.
The challenge comes in identifying them.
JJ Wetherholt vanguards the future
There is a fair discussion to be had about how much pressure is too much to put on a young position player arriving at the outset of a lengthy developmental process. Wetherholt is a Cardinal by sheer providence of an injury at the precise right time, knocking him out of the presumed first overall slot in the draft and into the Cardinals’ waiting arms. They were thrilled on draft night, and what they have seen since has not tempered that excitement.
It is not an overstatement to say he is the club’s most important position player since Yadier Molina. While he might have arrived and started his professional career under the previous developmental apparatus, he will open his major league career under this administration. His success or failure will play a large part in carrying the team through the coming lean years. It’s a lot to place on him. It’s also the plain truth.
One tempting comparison: Jose Altuve’s rookie year in Houston came in 2011, at the outset of a stretch of uncompetitive baseball that saw the Astros lose 100 games for three straight years and slip below the mantle of respectability. All the while, Altuve hit and hit, and when Houston emerged in 2015, he was a superstar. That is an outrageously high bar to clear, but not totally unrealistic.
The pitching process will reveal itself
Consider Chris Roycroft. As a pure reliever who turns 29 next season and does not have any significant prospect pedigree, his disastrous major league numbers in 2025 may have been enough for a team—or at least the Cardinals—to judge his roster spot as more valuable than his potential future contributions.
Roycroft, though, will remain part of the bullpen picture in 2026 because he has an outlier ability. You cannot teach being 6-foot-8, and if he finds the three and a half inches of vertical movement he lost on his sinker year over year, he will have a weapon that is hard to describe.
In some ways, he embodies what the team describes about pitchers in whom they have great excitement: a big body, to be sure, but also at least one absolute outlier ability—arm angle, velocity, spin, whatever it is in a given pitcher’s context. The Cardinals want one skill they cannot teach, allowing them to fill in the gaps with skills they can.
It is not a novel approach in the age of pitch tracking and data saturation, but it is an advancement for this franchise. How it plays out in the majors—and, crucially, among pitchers advancing through the upper minors—will be a watchword for the years ahead. Pitching remains the currency of the realm. The Cardinals believe they have found the best way to mine it.
The ground floor is available
For all the discontent about the current competitive state of the Cardinals, it is hardly the first time in club history they have endured a fallow period. The 1970s and most of the 1990s were stretches of major struggles, but out of each sprang something just short of a dynastic run, enough to capture the hearts of a generation of fans.
It has been 25 years since the team was as irrelevant to the overall competitive picture in Major League Baseball as it is today. In an era when every voice is amplified, the chorus of discontent seems louder than ever. There are endless competitors vying for attention, money and devotion, and what the Cardinals must navigate now at the start of what is likely to be a long process is unlike anything they have managed before.
The game moves in cycles. Nothing is guaranteed. But starting with a direction is better than lacking one, and there has been enough progress made to warrant at least some optimism for the future. For the fan who is fully committed to making sure others know they are dialed in—a brand of fan plentiful in St. Louis—there is an opportunity to arrive at the start of something and flourish in its light once it unfurls.
That, at least, is what Cardinals fans must convince themselves of to shoulder the shadows around the corner.
