What Is This Season?
Checking in with the surprising Cardinals at the one-third mark.
May has been a busy month, but with a day off for the Memorial Day holiday I thought I’d come here into the Substack shop and putter around, looking at a few things about the Cardinals that have been interesting to me this season.
You know, like the fact that things are terrible. That’s kinda interesting, right?
Heading into Baltimore this afternoon, the Cardinals sit at 30-23. They are two games behind the Chicago Cubs (always a terrible position to be in, looking up at the North Siders, but given the circumstances, acceptable) and tied for the last wild card spot. Nobody’s printing playoff tickets yet, but it’s not completely crazy to start daydreaming about a return to October baseball.
Last year after 53 games, the Cardinals were in the midst of their best run of the season and had pulled to within one game of .500. They wouldn’t get there until game 68 and they never got to seven games over like this squad did.
Two years ago, the club was the exact inverse, sitting 23-30 in a smoking crater of a season. May was their best month, winning two more games than they lost there, but that was just a mirage of hope.
Three years ago, though, the club was right at 30-23 at this time in the season after losing the first game of a double header against the Cubs. They were 1.5 games out of first place, trailing a Brewers team that they would eventually run down. That was a team that looked better than its final October results.
This year’s team is probably playing over its head a little bit. Fangraphs predicts them to play a game under .500 for the rest of the season, which would still leave them in a better position than many of us expected this season. Yet every time this club has had an reasonable opportunity to wilt, they’ve not taken it. They are 14-11 against teams over .500, a number that is only improving. In May they took two of three from the Mets, Phillies, and Royals while sweeping a Diamondbacks team that was over .500 when they came to St. Louis. The only series they’ve lost in the last five weeks was against the Tigers, who have the best record in baseball and still almost fell victim.
So at what point do we start to think this is really who they are? When they lost to Atlanta on April 23, they were last in the NL Central, five games under .500. Since then, they are 20-8. They’ve been good (28 games) longer than they were bad (23 games).
John Mozeliak said during the winter that he thought this team was going to surprise some people. Many of us thought that the offense could be a lot of fun but the pitching would be what holds them back. Apparently, we underestimated what Dusty Blake could do.
The Cards are 13th in overall ERA, 11th in WHIP, and 14th in batting average against. Those aren’t dominant numbers (and they are 29th in strikeouts, so some things really haven’t changed) but they are enough to make sure this offense is supported. Many of us would have expected a pitching staff in the bottom third of baseball, so even being around the midpoint is a huge boost.
It’s not bullpen driven either, as we might have thought before the season started. Cardinals starters are eighth in ERA, which speaks to a lot of things. It shows just how remarkable Matthew Liberatore has been this year. It reflects the adjustments Miles Mikolas has made since his terrible outing in Boston. However, it probably most is due to the fact that the Cardinals defense has been outstanding this season. Nolan Arenado keeps trying to emulate Derek Jeter. Victor Scott II has made everyone, including the Cardinals front office, forget Michael Siani. Jordan Walker is a net positive in the field. The club has gotten back to its brand of bringing Gold Glove defense every night and it’s added a lot to the excitement of everything.
The bullpen was outstanding in 2024 and the front office brought most of the same pieces back, which was always going to be a pretty big gamble since bullpens are notoriously erratic. Ryan Helsley has been good at the end of games but he’s taken a step back in 2025. In only four of his 18 appearances (all of which have been only one inning) has he gone 1-2-3. Granted, he’s only been scored on in four of those outings, but when your closer starts putting runners on, things get a little scary. (For comparison, he’d had nine perfect outings in his first 18 last year and only allowed one earned run in the span.)
Even with that, though, we’ve seen an improvement in the bullpen over the last month. You don’t want to say it was all Ryan Fernandez’s fault (though he certainly played a role) but it feels like things have improved since he went down to Memphis (where, sadly, things haven’t gotten much better). Since the end of that Atlanta series, the bullpen has posted a 2.92 ERA. The xFIP is 4.02, which shows the impact of the defense I think, but you still feel pretty good when Oli Marmol makes the call to the pen. (Mo’s only bullpen move, signing Phil Maton late in spring, has worked out wonderfully. Which is not something you can always say about Mo’s bullpen moves.)
All of this success, though, does complicate the message that the team was putting out there this winter. When you are in the playoff hunt, even in May, what does that mean for the development and “runway” of young players? The idea was that some of these guys would get to play without looking over their shoulders or worrying about their results getting them benched or sent to Memphis. That’s harder to do when playoff baseball is still reasonably in the picture.
Obviously, some of these young guys have made the decision moot. Victor Scott II has taken full advantage of his opportunity and has shown how much work he put in this winter to get better. Ivan Herrera got dropped by the knee injury but has hit at a rate that the club seems to be accelerating his transition away from behind the dish. Alec Burleson apparently should hold out every year so that he doesn’t have to play in April because for the second straight year he’s heated up in May. The only question about Lars Nootbaar was health and that’s not been an issue up until now. Similarly, you knew what you probably had in Masyn Winn and Brendan Donovan, even if both of those guys have found another level.
The poster children for runway, though, were Jordan Walker and Nolan Gorman. There’s been some significant differences in how those two have been approached this season.
Jordan Walker has played in 44 games and has 159 plate appearances, which would project out to be just shy of 500 PA for the season. A little short of the 600-650 that seemed to be the expectation for him, but it’s still a full season worth of work. He’s struggled on the season, putting up a 60 OPS+. He’s had his moments, such as the home run against the Royals that won a 1-0 game or his big hits against Arizona on Saturday, but the overall results have been a disappointment, especially after he talked so glowingly about the adjustments he was making at Winter Warmup.
His bat speed and exit velocity are still elite but nothing else on his Baseball Savant page is standing out in a good way. While the Cardinals have been winning over the past month-plus, he’s been scuffling with a .233/.277/.333 line and, even more concerning, just three walks to 22 strikeouts. If you are looking for positives, the small sample that starts with his homer in Kansas City has him hitting .412 with a 1.118 OPS in 17 plate appearances (no walks, though). Maybe we are starting to see the season turn for him, but it’s too early to tell. After all, he had a 1.172 OPS in his first 17 PA of the season and we see how that’s turned out for him.
However, Walker’s season has been a triumph when compared with Gorman’s.
Gorman did have a short stay on the IL this season but he currently has 98 PA on the season. That works out to about 300 PA for the entirety of 2025, about half of what we expected. In this winning stretch we’ve been talking about, Gorman is hitting .116/.245/.140. His only home run of the year came in his first game of the season against the Twins. He’s hitting .111 on fastballs this season, which is 90 points less than last year. In 2023, his good season (27 HR, 116 OPS+) he hit .282 against fastballs. It would seem to this uneducated observer that if he’s not going to be able to hit fastballs, he’s going to have a significant problem staying in the league.
I’m not advocating for Gorman to get more playing time. In fact, I think the biggest part of the Cardinals winning over the last month has probably been their active decision to keep Gorman and Walker from starting the same games. Having one weak spot in your lineup is manageable, two less so when you are fighting for every advantage. (The Cards have played 18 one-run games so far, which at a glance seems to be a little above the average MLB team.)
However, if they don’t play him, what can they do with him? He does have two options left and while the club has gone on record as saying they didn’t really want to send folks to Memphis this year, he’s not going to get any better sitting on the Cardinals bench. Does it make sense to send him down and perhaps promote Thomas Saggese? That’s assuming you can get Saggese enough playing time to make it worth it, something that’s questionable if you want to leave Donovan at second and the outfield the way it is. Still, Gorman languishing in the bigs doesn’t seem to help him or the team.
It’s a conundrum the front office never expected to have to deal with. They thought Gorman would be playing every day with Nolan Arenado somewhere else. Aren’t we glad that didn’t happen? Arenado may not be at the levels that he’s been in the past—and he seems concerned he’ll never get there—but his defense has been completely up to his legendary standards and his 91 OPS+ is light years ahead of where Gorman is now. Even if he’d had regular playing time, it’s hard to imagine Gorman would be as good as Arenado has been.
(And before I finish this the lineup for the Memorial Day game comes out with both Walker and Gorman, but that’s because Arenado probably is still feeling the effects of his crash into the stands yesterday.)
The Cardinals, who thankfully have figured out how to win on the road, have a disappointing Baltimore team to deal with starting today. After that, it’s the Rangers who, while dangerous, are a sub-.500 team, then the Royals and Dodgers at Busch. That set with LA could be a really interesting measuring stick and it happens to be the series that will contain this year’s Blogger Day, so I’ll be able to see it first hand. St. Louis doesn’t seem to have a real extended tough stretch until the start of August when they go to San Diego and LA and then host the Cubs, with a trip to the Yankees after a Colorado series.
We’ll see if that all matters or not. After all, even last year’s team had a good run before tailing off. In any case, it’s been a lot of fun to watch this team so far and that’s not something we’ve always been able to say.
I’ve not been writing but I’ve been podcasting. The run of guests has continued over at Musial (and I look forward to my friend Alex Crisafulli joining me this week before Allen returns in June) and David and I will record a new Gateway tonight.
I still haven’t found the time to watch the last three episodes of Andor. The rest of the series was quite good and I know the last group will be excellent as well. It’s hard to believe that’s the end of our Star Wars on TV content for the year (unless you count the third series of Visions in October, I believe, but I never watched the second one). Will we have anything before The Mandalorian and Grogu next year?
I’ve been dipping in and out of different books over the last month. I loved the Thursday Murder Club series and Richard Osman’s We Solve Murders is written in the same breezy, funny style. I tore through that in about a day last week and look forward to the sequel of it coming at some point. I also read Magpie Murders, which had a unique framing and was enjoyable as well, though I’m not sure if I’ll get into the two sequels.
There have been some Star Wars books that have come out lately, mainly in The High Republic era, either in the timeline of the other books or more tied to The Acolyte. I have them downloaded but I’ve not gotten a chance to read them. I had to reread the first book in the Thrawn “Chaos Ascending” trilogy for the Star Wars book club I am involved in. Any Thrawn book is a good book, of course.
Hopefully it won’t be a month before I write again!
It seems like the Gorman issue will work its way out in due time.
If the Cards are still contending in late July and he’s not performing with limited ABs, it’s worth limiting him while they play meaningful baseball.
If they aren’t, they can trade Arenado and get him more frequent reps at third.
I hope it’s the former option, of course!
The deadline will be interesting. I think they have the potential to make some changes at the margins where they have surplus — e.g., trading Siani for a middle relief pitcher.
Maybe it's just because it's a rainy dreary day in my part of the world, but this seems like a let down series. But I did pick the Cards to win this series in Cardsix.. So maybe check with me tomorrow, I might feel differently.