True Treasure or Fool's Gold?

The Cardinals are off to an intriguing start to the season. How much of it is real?

After twelve games in 2023, the Cardinals were 5-7, and that was after taking two of three from the Rockies to reach that height. The warning lights were on but we were still saying, “It’s early, things will turn around. They aren’t going to be this bad.” They were, in fact, worse.

The 12th game of 2024 was a 3-0 shutout started by Sonny Gray, ended by Ryan Helsley, and bringing the club to 6-6. While being cautious after ‘23’s debacle, there was a bit of cautious optimism that things were going to be all right. While they did finish over .500, it still wasn’t anything to write home about when it was done.

Last year, the Cardinals dropped a 2-1, 13 inning marathon to the Pirates in Game 12, setting them again at a 5-7 record and, while there were some better days ahead in the near future, it was the second trade deadline of three which had players going out instead of players coming in.

So just by that standard, 7-5 after 12 games is pretty remarkable. You have to go back to 2022, when they were 8-4, to find a better record at this mark. However, this is a remarkably short period, two weeks out of six months. We have even gotten 10% of the season done yet. So how much of this can we trust and how much is a mirage?

Let’s start with the hottest name and the hottest bat. Jordan Walker is on fire, looking much more like the first round draft pick that he is than the washed up prospect that he was. After today’s game, the third in a row where he’s gone yard, he has a .295/.367/.682 line and more than half of his hits have gone for extra bases. And then there is this:

I don’t think even the most optimistic Walker fan would have thought he would be leading—OK, fine, tied for the lead—the league in home runs at any point. If that wasn’t exciting enough, there’s his Baseball Savant page.

So. Much. Red. It’s remarkable for anyone, but especially for one that struggled so much last year. For instance, look at the differences in a few categories between 2025 and 2026.

(The colors are just to differentiate, they mean nothing in particular.)

Now, even if Walker is for real, he’s not likely to keep this sort of run going. However, it feels very much like he’s figured some things out. He already has a home run against an offspeed pitch, which he didn’t do all of last season, and is hitting .600 on those few pitches that he’s seen. (Everything still is in the small sample size galaxy.)

With his home run today, he tied his total in 2024. He’s one shy of his total in 2025. At the rate he’s going, he’ll beat the total for those two combined by the end of May.

I don’t have all the fancy tools, but if you just base it on home runs, there’s a stretch at the end of August/beginning of September 2023 where he hit four homers in 12 games (again, not the five he’s done this season). In that run, he slashed .378/.400/.711 in 50 PA, a handful more than he has right now. It would be interesting to compare some of the underlying things in that stretch and this one—he’s walking more in this one, for instance, which probably means it has a better chance of continuing.

The eye test says he’s different. The stats say he’s different. The metrics say he’s different. It’s hard to trust someone that gets so good like someone flipped on a switch, but that does happen in baseball. If you ask me, I’d rate the Walker breakout as a true treasure.

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Michael McGreevy won the game today, throwing six scoreless innings at the Nationals. That was his second such outing on the young season, throwing hitless innings in his first start against the Rays, and his baseball card numbers are 1-1 with a 2.16 ERA. Put that with some of his work last year and it’s easy to think that he’s putting his first-round-draft-pick pedigree to work as well.

There’s an account over on Bluesky that puts out a graphic of each starting pitcher after their outing, using the metrics and results to paint a picture of the start. Here’s the one for McGreevy from today.

McGreevy’s hitting his spots, which admittedly is his game, but his stuff isn’t impressing anyone. He’s barely touching 90 and he’s not striking anyone out. If this was the mid-80s (which, ironically, is where many of his offerings reside), I’d think he’d be a strong candidate for an All-Star Game. The game has changed, however.

The rest of the rotation is kinda in the same boat. We’ve seen good results—everyone save Dustin May has a win and three of the five ERAs are under 3.50—but it doesn’t feel sustainable in the least. The good thing is that Richard Fitts and Hunter Dobbins are going to be ready to step in should things start to unravel and bring with them, most likely, more swing and miss. Dobbins is currently on a rehab assignment, so by the end of the month the Cardinals will have to find a place for him (or option him directly to Memphis, that’s true).

I don’t feel like we’ve seen anything in the first dozen games that make me feel any different about the starting rotation. Well, except May’s struggles, because I thought he might be the strong point among the starters and he has definitely not been. A little bad luck but a whole lot more hard contact and ugly innings. The velocity is still there, but he’s not able to strike out a lot of guys with it. He’s not this bad—his xERA is less than half his actual ERA—and it has only been two starts, but right now it’s hard to see how he recaptures that excitement we had when he was signed.

All in all, the rotation’s shiny, but I think it’s still fool’s gold.

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Let’s look at the team as a whole. 7-5, one game behind the Reds and the Brewers for the Central lead, tied with the Pirates and a game up on the Cubs. That last stirs up some feelings.

That being said, the delta of results isn’t huge. The Dodgers are the best team in baseball at 9-3, the Mariners the worst at 4-9. Lose a series and you can fall 10 spots relative to the league.

This team, though, has a certain je ne sais quoi about it. Too many times over the last few years, we’d see a Cardinals team get down two or three runs and feel like the game is over, even though there were sluggers like Nolan Arenado, Paul Goldschmidt, and Willson Contreras on the team. The offense would seem lifeless and deficits loomed larger than they should.

In 2026, though, even though the talent level of the hitters is lesser (or at least the experience level is), dadgumit if they don’t find ways to put together remarkable rallies. Opening Day is the template, of course, scoring eight runs after the Rays scored six. Then there is last night, when the Cards got down three, then took the lead on a checks notes Nathan Church—is this right—home run. Yes, they were playing the Nationals, a team with an actual gas can in the bullpen (may not be true), but it was still something.

To slightly modify something my Gateway co-host said, this team is capable of coming back from three or more runs down. They are also capable of letting the other team come back from said gap. It feels like the Cards are going to play a lot of one run games that weren’t one run games in the fifth or sixth inning.

If I had to say whether this record is true treasure or fool’s gold, I’d go with the latter. I think that they’ve got a lot of fight in them and I think they might wind up better than we expect, but it still doesn’t quite feel like this is a .500 team. However, if you are talking about the style of play, the fight in the team, I believe that’s a true treasure. I think they’ll surprise some good teams this year and they can play above their heads and still finish under .500.

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We’ve run on long enough so I don’t want to get into the bullpen too deeply, but while I don’t think they are as bad as what we’ve seen so far, there’s still some work to be done. If you can turn a game over to Riley O’Brien, hopefully through George Soriano and possibly Gordon Graceffo, you feel OK about it. I think Matt Svanson will come around, though his start has been a bit concerning. It’s almost a staple of baseball to have the rookie that was underrated come up and dominate, only to not have it the next season. I think it’s also possible we’ll see folks like Andre Pallante and Kyle Leahy shift back to the bullpen if Fitts and Dobbins come up, giving a few longer inning options out there and raising the floor of the squad as well. We’ll say the current bullpen results are fool’s gold, but it’s more debatable and depends on the player.

All in all, it’s been a pretty fun start to the season. Let’s hope the fun continues for a while. Who would have guessed that, when Sonny Gray and Willson Contreras came back to Busch, they’d come in with the last place team instead of facing one? (There’s an argument to be made that Contreras has had some sort of monkey’s paw wish to his career. His first year he wins the World Series with the Cubs, then they slowly slide into also-ran territory while the dynasty never develops. He moves to St. Louis and they have one of their worst seasons in a century and are noncompetitive while he wears the birds on the bat. Then he gets traded to Boston, who expects to contend for a title, only for them to faceplant out of the gate. If I were Willson (who was a great Cardinal, don’t get me wrong), I’d start wondering if it was me.

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So this is the stack of books next to my recliner that I am either wanting to read or have gotten a chance to start. That’s the Prospect Guide from Brian Walton and Kyle Reis on top, but the stack is less about order and more about being there. This doesn’t count the Kindle, which has intriguing books like The Last Kings of Hollywood on it that I am excited about, and it doesn’t count the Star Wars book club book, as we will be discussing Darth Plagueis tomorrow before starting the first book in the Darth Bane trilogy. It was good to revisit Plagueis and I’m interested in our discussion tomorrow night. You could keep some of this, but the appearance of Plagueis at the end of The Acolyte messes with a few things.

Anyway, I started on We Sacrifice Everything to Baseball today during my lunch hour and just a few pages in, I can tell it is going to be an outstanding read. Who doesn’t like an underdog story? I’m very interested to see how things unfold with this group of Czech players.

You’ll see on that stack a copy of The Trades That Made the Cardinals. I’ve taken a glance at this as well, as the author Rich Bray will be on Musial this week, and it looks like a fun piece of work as well. It’s not a ranking of the best trades or worst trades in the history of the club but it rather tells the story of the organization’s history through the lens of 10 trades. I look forward to talking with Rich on Friday night about how he went about writing the book and what he learned in the process.

Speaking of the podcast, Musial has been a lot of fun the last couple of weeks. Nate and Ben from Talking About Birds came by and we talked about the opener and drew so many wild conclusions from it. Then last week we went heavy into the minors with High Lord of the Prospects Kyle Reis, who negotiated that title into his MLB.com writing contract. You can sign up for Kyle’s newsletter here and as a bonus it appears you get Will Leitch as well, so that’s doubly awesome.

Also, if you want Cardinals writing in your inbox, Jeff Jones has started a subscription site to supplement his regular writing over at the Belleville News-Democrat. I have found the posts to be uniformly fun to read and Jeff has put out a lot more of them than I expected. It feels like it has been daily, though it probably hasn’t been quite that. The yearly price deal has expired, but it’s still just $6.18 a month and trust me, that’s quite the bargain. Given that The Athletic still doesn’t have a writer and that Kyle and Will are just writing once a week for MLB, you should give this a look if you are wanting to increase your Cardinals coverage.

Shifting gears, had a chance to watch the first two episodes of Maul - Shadow Lord this evening and it feels like it’s going to be a very worthy addition to Star Wars animation, which comes with a high standard. Only Star Wars Resistance hasn’t hit the mark and I wonder if they’ll at some point try to rehabilitate those characters. There were some interesting folks in there, it just wasn’t the person that was the main guy.

Anyway, Maul starts out strong, some great lightsaber wielding, and a few callbacks while not being overwhelming. Visually, it’s stunning, and it’s laying the foundation for an interesting show. Two episodes a week means it’s not a terribly slow drip, but I was wanting Ep 3 as soon as I finished the second one for this week.

If you’ve made it this far, let’s try out the new (at least to me) poll feature, shall we?