St. Louis and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Season

The Cardinals began the year with the best playoff odds of the NL Central. It didn’t take long for that to change.

With less than a week until the MLB trade deadline, it’s time to analyze some of the most frustrating teams of the season.

After covering the Mets and Padres, it’s time for the Cardinals.

What’s their deal?

Just about everything that could go wrong here has gone wrong. The Cardinals had a historically bad start to the year. They’ve been plagued by dramatic stretches that seem wholly uncharacteristic for a franchise as traditionally straitlaced and imperturbable as this one. (Remember the back-and-forth over Willson Contreras’s catching duties? Or the process of promoting, demoting and repromoting top prospect Jordan Walker?) They’ve been horrible defensively. It doesn’t particularly matter which metric you choose: St. Louis is dead last in fielding runs above average and 27th out of 30 in defensive runs saved. The pitching has been a disaster. (Only the hapless Nationals, Royals and A’s have an ERA+ worse than the Cardinals.) The baserunning is subpar, with the lowest stolen base percentage in the National League, and the bench is thin. In short? They’re a mess. Outside of a brief stretch of hope in May—which, in retrospect, appears hallucinatory as much as anything—their season has been bleak the whole way through. 

How far have they fallen?

Courtesy of FanGraphs

St. Louis began the year with the best playoff odds of the NL Central. It didn’t take long for that to change. By mid-April, Milwaukee had better odds, and that hasn’t changed all summer. The Cardinals have been above .500 for exactly one day this year. (Behold the glory of April 2, when a win over the Blue Jays improved the Cardinals’ record to 2–1.) They’ve spent the rest of the time unsuccessfully playing catchup.

That makes them a natural candidate to sell at the deadline. (Yes, St. Louis has performed surprisingly well so far in July; no, that’s nowhere near enough to change the strategy here.) Impending free agent Jordan Montgomery has been the team’s best pitcher by far this year—meaning he’s their only starter with an ERA under 4.00—and should be able to net a promising return in a seller’s market for pitching. Jack Flaherty and flamethrower Jordan Hicks are also set to hit free agency this winter, and they should be prime candidates for teams seeking rental options, too. As far as trade candidates under contract for longer than this year? Keep an eye on former Rookie of the Year finalist Dylan Carlson, whose spot in the outfield looks somewhat redundant now that Tyler O’Neill is healthy again for the Cardinals.

Wainwright, who remained productive in 2021 and ’22, is struggling this season :: Jeff Curry/USA TODAY Sports

What’s their most emblematic loss?

Of all the weird, tragic arcs this season in St. Louis, there is perhaps none sadder than that of Adam Wainwright. He’d spent the last few years in seeming defiance of the aging curve—pitching with craftiness and durability to earn Cy Young votes as a 39-year-old in 2021 and remain a productive, consistent piece of the rotation as a 40-year-old in ‘22. But this season has seemed wholly unconnected from all of that. As Wainwright has struggled and agonized and scuffled, so, too, have the Cardinals.

So for the team’s most emblematic loss of the season? Let’s go with Wainwright’s last start before a trip to the injured list for a reset. Against the Marlins on July 4, Wainwright could not make it out of the fourth inning on 81 pitches. He was relieved by JoJo Romero, who promptly made a costly error. (Again—those defensive woes!) The rest of the bullpen did little to help the cause, and the offense never got going, ultimately resulting in a 15–2 loss. Just a miserable game! Which makes it a sadly apt reflection of their season.