These 5 players are looking to prove they belong in Cards' future plans

However things turn out for the 2026 Cardinals, it’s obvious to everyone involved, from fans to the team itself, that wins and losses are not really the point here right now. (Though my official stance is that they’re going to be better than a lot of people think, albeit probably still a bit short of what could be reasonably classified as “good.”)

What matters most is how the 2026 team helps lead to the next great Cardinals team, whether that’s in 2027 or (more likely) 2028. Which means there are clear improvements that players on this roster, right now, will need to make in 2026 to prove that, whenever that next great team arrives in St. Louis, they’re a part of it.

Here’s a look at five players who are 1) Likely to be big parts of the 2026 roster, and 2) Under team control through at least the 2028 season. We’ll look at what they need to do to secure their spots with the Cardinals for years to come.

C Jimmy Crooks
Objective: Hit the slow stuff well enough to let the defense play

One year ago, Crooks just missed out on the MLB Pipeline Top 100 Prospects list, and you certainly could have made a terrific case for him as an excellent defensive catcher who hit well enough to be the Texas League MVP. However, 2025 wasn’t quite as sterling for Crooks. He had a just-fine .778 OPS in 98 games at Triple-A Memphis, and in 46 big league plate appearances, he hit just .133 with zero walks. Crooks, the Cardinals’ No. 8 prospect, has above-average exit velocity numbers, though, so it may simply be a matter of approach; he particularly struggled with breaking stuff.

The Cardinals have a chaotic catching situation at present, with four catchers on the 40-man roster other than Crooks, and that’s not even counting fast-rising slugger Rainiel Rodriguez (No. 37 on Pipeline’s Top 100 list). Crooks certainly has the defensive acumen and good-enough power to stick as a backup, at the bare minimum. There is also the potential for more, though, even with all the prospects rising behind him. But if he ends up being the odd catcher out on the 2026 roster, at the age of 24 (and he’ll turn 25 right after the All-Star break), he will have likely missed his window in this organization moving forward.

3B Nolan Gorman
Objective: Finally cut down on the strikeouts

June 2025 was an excellent month for Gorman. He hit six homers in 78 at-bats, got on base at a .341 clip and slugged .526. It looked like, finally, he had turned a corner. He hadn’t. After the All-Star break, Gorman struggled as mightily as he ever has as a Cardinal, hitting .187 and homering just five times in 176 plate appearances. He struck out 38.6% of the time, an untenable rate, especially considering his increasing defensive struggles.

Gorman has had four full seasons with the Cardinals, with 2023’s .805 OPS and 27 homers as the pinnacle, with him slowly (and then quickly) backsliding since then. Gorman’s walk rate has actually been better -- his 11.7% in 2025 was the best of his career -- but if he’s going to strike out at the rate he did in the second half, it doesn’t matter how much power he theoretically has.

Gorman has thunder in his bat, but that requires the bat actually hitting the ball. Going the opposite way more would help tremendously, which is why his first at-bat of the spring, an opposite-field homer, was so encouraging. The Cardinals still have three more years of team control over Gorman, but if he regresses for a third straight year, they will likely be out of patience.

RHP Andre Pallante
Objective: Make his four-seamer a workable pitch

Pallante has been around a while for the Cardinals, starting out as a reliever, and then a swingman, before entering the rotation in 2024 and putting up 121 1/3 innings of a 3.78 ERA -- absolutely workable. But boy did it go sideways on him in 2025, even as he made 31 starts and logged 162 2/3 innings. Among pitchers with at least 150 innings, Pallante had the fifth-highest ERA (5.31), seventh-highest FIP (4.68) and third-lowest K-rate (15.5%). He even led the Majors with 12 wild pitches.

The main issue was his four-seam fastball: Hitters put up a .330 batting average and .528 slugging percentage against it, with 12 home runs. The issue is more location than anything else; Pallante has decent offspeed stuff, but hitters just laid off it and waited to smash a fastball.

The Cardinals may try a six-man rotation this year, and Pallante will surely still be a part of it initially; he is, after all, currently the fourth-highest-paid player on the roster. (Seriously: Only Dustin May, Lars Nootbaar and JoJo Romero make more.) Pallante, 27, is not as old as it seems -- he’s only one year older than Matthew Liberatore, and younger than Kyle Leahy -- but if he wants to be anything more than a placeholder until more electrifying pitchers show up behind him, he likely has about a month or so to prove it.

CF Victor Scott II
Objective: Just try to get the ball in play, on the ground

When the Cardinals announced, right before the 2025 season began, that Scott was going to be their starting center fielder rather than the expected Michael Siani (who’s now in the Dodgers organization, by the way), the stated reason was that he had made a change in his swing that had unlocked some power. This supposed power would be enough to keep him afloat while he continued to be a brilliant center fielder and unparalleled base stealer (he stole 94 bases in the Minors in 2023).

That power didn’t materialize in 2025. Scott hit just five homers and, tellingly, just one triple, an unacceptable number for a player with 100th-percentile sprint speed. (His hard-hit rate dropped 7 percentage points from 2024, ranking in just the second percentile.) But the major problem was the strikeouts and the pop-ups. Scott struck out in 24% of his at-bats, and hit a fly ball or pop-up on 32% of his balls in play. Those are mostly at-bats when his game-changing speed never came into play. (Scott hit .129 on fly balls and pop-ups.)

This is one of the fastest human beings to ever play baseball, and it sure does come in handy in center field. But it could be pretty handy at the plate, too, as long as Scott can make some contact and get the ball on the ground. He doesn’t have to be even an average hitter to make his defense well, well worth it. But he has to be better than this.

RF Jordan Walker
Objective: Launch the ball in the air

Walker, even during a nightmare season in 2025, still was in the 91st percentile of average exit velocity, 87th percentile of hard-hit rate and 99th percentile of bat speed. Which makes it all the more frustrating that he slugged just .306 -- only 10 points higher than Scott.

Walker has always hit the ball hard, as witnessed by the 117.2 mph screamer he hit in a Spring Training game just last week. The problem, as always, is that the hit was a single. Walker’s inability to make the right kind of contact ate him up last year, as did the fact that he seemed to be down 0-2 in every count.

Walker is still so young, and still so obviously talented, that the Cardinals are going to give him every opportunity to figure it out; it would be malpractice not to. But seriously, he has to start hitting the ball in the air, and he has to figure out his approach, particularly with No. 87 prospect Joshua Baez starting to push him in the “physical specimen” prospect department. There have been multiple reports out of Spring Training that Walker has been more amenable to coaching fixes than he was last year. He had better be. He won’t be this young forever, and the Cardinals patience won’t last forever, either.