The Rubber Band Team

Just when you think the Cardinals are about to break, they bounce back.

Right after Memorial Day in this space, I pondered the possibility that things were starting to regress to the expectations we had for this team. They’d run in to some National League teams and were just five games over .500, down from a season high nine above. It was starting to feel like, even though this club was better than we thought, that the air was slowly leaking out of the balloon.

Slump or Slide?

If it was, the club seems to have patched the hole and started reinflating that balloon. They lost the last game in Milwaukee, but then took two of three from the Cubs, one of three from the Rangers, and swept the Reds, just finishing that off a little while ago. Now the club is riding a four game winning streak and is seven games over .500, not far from their high water mark. They get a day off and then tackle a last-place New York Mets team, a Twins team that’s underwater, a Padres team that’s underperforming, and the Royals in Kansas City before getting to reunite Nolan Arenado with Busch Stadium.

Not that you want to look too far ahead, but at the end of the Royals series the club will have played 75 games and there’s a better than even chance that they’ll be on the up side of .500 when that happens. Nothing is guaranteed in baseball, of course, but the way they are playing and the upcoming schedule definitely are in their favor.

While nothing is perfect—there’s still a lot of concern around these parts about the usage of Riley O’Brien as the closer, even when it works out occasionally—there are reasons to believe that the Cards are trending in the right direction, enough so that there could be difficult decisions for Chaim Bloom in the next few weeks.

Some will point to the fact that this time last year the club was also 35-28 and things were feeling pretty good. That team, though, was five games under .500 on May 2 and then got hot for a while before cooling back off. Obviously, this team has never been under .500 at all this season, which means this sort of play is more likely who they are. It’s also probably worth considering if this team would have finished better in 2025 had they not had the losing streak around the deadline which precipitated the selloff. After all, at the early part of July there were discussions about adding to the team. The pendulum swung at the wrong time (for a competitive finish, though not for a stronger future) and things went south quickly in the last two months.

Last year’s team also didn’t have a Jordan Walker that has figured a lot of things out, a JJ Wetherholt who isn’t looking like a rookie, and a Michael McGreevy that wasn’t defying underlying analytics regularly. (McGreevy didn’t come up to stay until July 21, bouncing up and down before that.) While Nolan Gorman continues to be a disappointment overall, for the most part this team is full of players that are playing to their level or somewhat above it. There aren’t a lot of folks that are dragging things down, even if we do have trust issues with some of the bullpen.

This club also got a shot in the arm this weekend with the return of Lars Nootbaar. Noot is looking sharp with his deformed heels now back in line with factory standard guidelines. His running has been impressive and the bat has been what we hoped it would be. It’s just three games—more like 2 1/2 since he appeared in the midst of Saturday’s contest—but he’s 3 for 10, three walks, three strikeouts, a home run, a double, three RBI. It’s an extra bat in a lineup that truly needed it. Tuesday will probably be the first time we see it at full strength—with Wetherholt, Ivan Herrera, Walker, Alec Burleson, Nootbaar, and a Masyn Winn that is still searching offensively but has his moments (and has two multi-hit games in June already). Add in the occasional contributions of Bryan Torres and Victor Scott II and this can be a fun team when it all clicks.

The Reds helped that, of course—while they slipped under .500 in this series, they’ve been trending downwards for a while and is not a team that anyone is terribly concerned about, what with their porous bullpen and their less-than-gold gloves—and it’s possible that the glow from this series is overshadowing things. We saw another struggle from Matthew Liberatore, who allowed five runs (three earned) in less than five innings. Matt Svanson has been recalled as Ryan Fernandez wound up on the IL but he has not been put in a game yet. Svanson did so well in his short time in Memphis—eight strikeouts, no runs in 5.2 innings—so maybe he’s found something. If so, the bullpen gets that much stronger. If not, hopefully there won’t be too many times they have to call his name before Fernandez returns.

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We ran these numbers before, but for the Cardinals to finish with 70 wins, they have to go 35-64 the rest of the way, which is like going 57-105 over a full season. This team never was that bad, even before the breakout of Walker and the improvement of Dustin May. To finish .500, they go 46-53, a 75 win clip. That’s probably more reasonable, especially when you factor in the fact that Bloom is likely to trade off players even if the team is still in the hunt to try to bolster the future. Break even seemed like a pipe dream in March. Now it’s not exactly the floor but it’s not far from it. Even if things do spiral, this has been a successful season and one better than we could have ever imagined.

It’s still getting healthy as well. Nathan Church homered for Memphis today and while I’ve not seen any timelines, I don’t think it would be surprising if he was back on the team by the time they return home to face the Padres a week from tomorrow. What that means for the players currently on the roster is hard to say. The easiest thing, of course, would be to return Bryan Torres to Memphis. Torres did homer today, which was huge, but it also seems like whether by his own initiative or by direction from the dugout, he’s looking to bunt more often than you would think. That makes me think the organization isn’t confident in his bat. He’s doing damage on fastballs but the breaking stuff is shutting him down. Even though he can play second as well as outfield, sending him to Memphis would make some sense.

The other option, of course, is to demote Victor Scott II. Scott has struggled a lot this year, with an average under .200 and an OPS of .534. The defense has been pretty good and we’ve seen him start to steal a little more in recent days, but you have to go back to May 23rd to find a game where he got more than one hit. While his xwOBA has trended up recently, it’s still below average and his hard hit percentage is in the bottom 3% of MLB. I love me some VS2 but I can also see the argument for letting him tinker with things in Memphis for a while. I don’t imagine the team will do that—likely saying that the pitching at Triple-A isn’t conducive to some of the things he needs to work on—but when Church returns he’s probably cut into Scott’s playing time one way or another.

We should also mention Ramon Urias here, but he just hurt the other shoulder of his and won’t be back for a while. He had started his rehab assignment, but that’s on hold now and if we see him back before the end of June, I’d be surprised. That allows Nolan Gorman some breathing room, but I do wonder if we’ll see Jose Fermin take more time there. We’re seeing the Cards immediately hit for him if a lefty comes into the game, no matter the situation, and while Gorman’s glove has been strong, Fermin hits righties better than lefties (and hits lefties better than Gorman does). I don’t think Fermin will ever be the regular starting third baseman, but I could see him starting 2-3 times a week and staying in even if the handedness of the pitcher changed.

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Congrats to Oli Marmol for being named to the All-Star coaching staff by Dave Roberts. Quite the honor, especially given how things have gone the last couple of years. He’ll be joined there by Jordan Walker (one way or another) and that might be all. Maybe if he keeps this up and enough pitchers drop Michael McGreevy might get a look. JJ Wetherholt has done well but there are a lot of options in the middle infield.

Allen and I got back in the groove yesterday, recording the first Musial with just the two of us in a long while. (That said, the one with us and Alex Crisafulli right before we all went to Blogger Day was a lot of fun as well.) Allen and I are considering maybe shifting how we do the podcast, maybe going the Patreon route, but nothing has been decided yet. David and I are keeping Gateway going and we’ll record a new episode of that tonight, so be on the lookout wherever you get your podcasts.

I hadn’t necessarily planned to go out to the movies again for a while, but a friend of mine invited me to join him for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. My brother was the bigger He-Man fan when we were growing up, as he was the one that collected the toys. That said, I played with them and I’m sure watched some of the cartoons. As someone that was just acquainted with the material, shall we say, it was a lot of fun. It was goofy, a little more risqué than it probably had to be with some of its dialogue, but overall an enjoyable ride. The post-credit scenes set up a few possibilities for a sequel, so if it comes around I’m sure I’ll check that out as well. The next movie trip is probably Supergirl. (That said, I am looking forward to when The Sheep Detectives is streaming somewhere.)

I don’t think I’ve picked up a new book since we’ve talked about that, as I’m still plugging along on the many I have started. That said, I did get Nolan by Tim Brown and I’m looking forward to getting into that at some point.

My plan is to start up the Star Wars devotionals again this week. We’re picking up right before the swing across the Death Star chasm and we should have new ones twice a week from now until mid-October. That’s the goal, at least!