The Case For Selling

The Cardinals are going to be buyers at the deadline. But should they be?

First off, I want to make something clear. The Cardinals are going to be buying in the next couple of days, making a trade that adds to the major league roster in hopes that it will pay off in a playoff spot.

There are a lot of reasons—good reasons—for that. The Cards are in the playoff race, though their position is of lesser quality than it was even a week ago. John Mozeliak has only truly sold once in his career, last season, and it’s not likely that he’ll spend his next-to-last (or even last, depending when he wants to walk away) deadline zagging where he usually zigs. The front office has already stated they will be buyers and they aren’t a front office that pivots on a dime. They’ll be buying.

But should they be?

I don’t know how much I am invested in the idea that the club should perhaps change its perspective on the deadline. Honestly, until a couple of days ago, I hadn’t really given in a thought. It was a given that the club was going to add some sort of modest piece or maybe two and try to stay October bound.

This last week, though, has seen the Cards go from a couple of games behind Atlanta for the first wild card to a couple of games out of the playoffs entirely. It’s fair to take a minute to try to assess exactly what this team is after a series loss to the Pirates and a couple of really ugly losses to the Nationals.

As we know, this season started horribly. From March 28 to May 11, the club went 15-24. In the next 39 games, they flipped the script and went 25-14, putting them two games over .500 going into the second game of a double-header with the Braves. They won that one as well, but they have only been 13-13 in last 26 games that make up the season. It feels like that team, the one that is just good enough to break even, might be closer to the true talent level of this team.

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Let’s take a look at run differential, one of those handy numbers that gives a feel for what the club is. After last night’s implosion against the Nats, that number stands at -49. To give you an indication of where that stands, the only two teams that have a worse number in the National League are the Marlins and the Rockies, not unrelatedly the worst two teams in the NL. There are five teams with worse in the American League but none of them are over fourth in their division.

Expected win-loss gets derived from run differential, telling you what the record “should be” based on the runs scored and runs allowed. The Cardinals “should be” 47-57, which would put them 13 games behind a Brewers team that should be 60-44 (and, in reality, is 59-45). If reality matched expectations even a little bit more, this wouldn’t be a discussion.

However, maybe a lot of that run differential hole was dug in that first part of the season, skewing everything else. There’s something to that! After games of May 11, the Cards had a run differential of -52. So in the 65 games since then, they are a +3. Which is better than nothing, of course, but would translate out to, roughly, a .500 team.

It’s also a team that’s treading water. At the All-Star Break, the Cards were -38 in run differential. Before last night’s debacle, St. Louis was…also -38 in run differential. A week of games had come off the schedule and the Redbirds had broken even on runs scored and runs given up. After dropping a game by 11 last night, it’ll probably take a while to even get back to that -38 mark.

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All this seems to indicate that the Cards aren’t one fix away from being a top notch team. Getting a starting pitcher better than the ones they have not named Sonny Gray (the Sonny Gray of before the last few starts) would be excellent, but it’s not a cure all. The offense needs help against lefties in particular. The bullpen probably could use another arm to lighten the load. There’s no silver bullet that fixes this team.

There’s also an argument to be made that there aren’t a lot of trade chips to use. Ivan Herrera is a possibility, given that he’s in Memphis and not St. Louis as the club seems comfortable with Willson Contreras and Pedro Pages, plus catchers like Jimmy Crooks III are making noise on the way up the minor league latter. Dylan Carlson’s value is rock-bottom and Giovanny Gallegos’s isn’t much higher. Many of the arms that the Cardinals have in the minors they just acquired last year and, honestly, almost all of those are on the injured list right now anyway. Derrick Goold referenced other teams watching Tommy Edman’s rehab, so maybe there’s an option there even though he won’t come off the IL until after the deadline.

So they need a lot, don’t have a lot to give up, and have a mediocre team unless the talent already there starts living up to their billing. You can see why being a buyer at this stage is going to have its difficulties.

When you look down the line, the future has some gray clouds as well. Dan Szymborski wrote about the Cardinals back in May, right after that miserable spot, and took a look at not only this season but coming years. While the club shook off things this year more than expected, a lot of the future questions are still there. Paul Goldschmidt looks to be gone after this year. While Nolan Arenado is starting to revive and I believe still could have another couple of good seasons in him, it’s fair to say he’s starting on the downward side of his career. There’s a strong possibility, depending on what happens at the deadline, that the starting rotation for next year is the same as the starting rotation for this year, just with another year on the odometer.

Prospects aren’t developing. Jordan Walker has been in Memphis almost all season and is still struggling. The prospect gurus can point out players here and there that are making gains and are intriguing (and I hope to have some of them on a podcast in a couple of weeks to dig into it) but save for Quinn Matthews there doesn’t seem to be anyone that could be expected to help this team as early as next year. I guess we’ll see how fast J.J. Wetherholt advances and where they place him to start his career should give us a clue on how the club views him. However, most rankings have the Cards' system closer to the bottom than the top.

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Now, in fairness, if there are player development issues in the organization, perhaps selling for prospects isn’t the best way of going about things. With that caveat, though, let’s look at who might be interesting if, in some alternate universe, the Cards looked to capitalize on a market and a fading team.

The top name, of course, would be Ryan Helsley. The Cardinals’ only All-Star, Helsley has been a dominant force at the back end of games. If there’s one thing that teams will pay for at the deadline if they are in contention, it’s end of game security. Helsley doesn’t become a free agent until after the 2025 season, so teams are buying some control as well. If they put Helsley on the market, he would immediately rocket to the top tier of players available. There’s even a theoretical way that the club could still contend while moving Helsley, though the shot to team morale would probably be enough to impact those chances.

If you were doing a dismantling, you could also move Andrew Kittredge. A free agent at the end of the year, Kittredge wouldn’t return nearly as much as a Helsley, but he’s a reliable arm that has had a good year. A team that needed to shore up their bullpen would be glad to have him.

I do think players like Carlson and Gallegos are likely gone anyway, but they aren’t bringing back anything by themselves other than a lottery ticket or cash considerations. The fall of Carlson has been tough to watch and I have no doubt he will be somewhere else next year. He may be able to bounce back with a change of scenery, who knows.

Traditionally you’d think of a Goldschmidt if you were selling off and I guess that’s still a possibility in this scenario, but Goldy’s season (and 2023 wasn’t ideal either) has taken a lot of the luster off of acquiring him. I don’t think you get enough for him for an organization that likes legacy players to move him unless he really wanted to go, something there’s no indication he wants to do.

If you wanted to gamble, a name to put on the market would be Alec Burleson. Now, I don’t think they will or should do this, but we just talked about how Carlson went from a Rookie of the Year finalist to someone nobody wants. I think because of how Burly’s starting to live up to those underlying metrics that we’ve talked about for a while that he’s not really going to go down that path, but you have to admit his value would be really high right now.

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We’ve spent a lot of time talking about something that’s not going to happen. The Cardinals are going to make a modest investment in this team, hope whatever Sonny Gray has to do to get back to form he does, cross their fingers for a good month or two from Goldschmidt and Arenado, and see if they can sneak into the playoffs.

And this time next year, we’re likely in the same situation. Or maybe not.

It’s interesting that the club is having Chaim Bloom do an evaluation of many facets of the organization for his thoughts on changes that could be done. It could be that he would have a different approach to the various strengths and weaknesses of the team. Perhaps he’d bring a little more creativity or aggressiveness to the situation. Maybe one day we’ll find out. For right now, though, it feels like a very familiar wait for the deadline.

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The Acolyte has finished up and now we wait for more Star Wars television content. Many people seemed to be disappointed by The Acolyte and are considering it the worst ever. I wouldn’t go that far—though, to be fair, there’s not really a Star Wars I don’t at least somewhat like—but it did seem a little flat to me. When you are ranking Star Wars Disney+ shows, it’s going to be closer to The Book of Boba Fett than The Mandalorian. There’s fun stuff in there—you have to be excited about a Wookiee Jedi going nuts during a lightsaber battle—and there’s enough intrigue for a second season, but I don’t know if it’s a show you sit around and think a lot about.

San Diego Comic-Con is going on this weekend. A lot of Marvel news—Robert Downey Jr. as Doctor Doom in an Avengers movie is definitely different—and it’s nice to see that side of things start to ramp up. I’m not one that cares for the crudity of Deadpool so this is a year without a Marvel movie for me and I look forward to getting back into the theater in February for the new Captain America one. There’s not much Star Wars news—some book and comic announcements, along with some new toys—but there probably will be some at the D23 convention in a couple of weeks.