PITTSBURGH -- The 2026 Cardinals are in unfamiliar territory with respect to the day-to-day competitiveness that the franchise has enjoyed as something of a given in recent memory.
Since the start of the 2011 season, the Cardinals have played 2,454 out of a possible 2,488 regular-season games (98.6%) with postseason eligibility still a mathematical possibility.
Wednesday’s 5-1 win over the Pirates at PNC Park wasn’t one of those such games. But in all reality, it was never supposed to have been.
Before the game, a reporter looked to soften the blow as he prefaced a big-picture question to Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol.
The Cardinals don’t have present expectations, this season, of championship contention. So, when winning isn’t the primary goal, how do you evaluate success? What is the importance of still having success and what does it look like? All reasonable questions.
Marmol was asked about it, with the reporter submitting a qualifier.
“I know it wasn’t a rebuild, per se…”
Marmol interjected.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Marmol said. “It’s a rebuild.”
That’s the lens through which one can come to understand how the Cardinals can see their situation with such clarity and in a light that is emphatically positive about the progress that has been made.
In a year where 90 wins might end up as a requirement to earn a postseason spot in the National League, the Cardinals fell short. Some have pointed to the team’s bullpen, with the league’s 23rd-ranked reliever ERA, as a culprit -- and they’re not necessarily wrong. But what else was going to happen?
What’s most likely to happen for a bullpen in a rebuilding year is a deficiency. That’s particularly true when you subtract from its strengths at the Trade Deadline, as the Cardinals did in flipping JoJo Romero (and Dustin May) to the Brewers for intriguing prospects -- again, to serve the larger focus.
For the Cardinals, internally, there’s no cognitive dissonance at play. All indications suggest a steadfast group, on the same page about what 2026 needed to look like for the benefit of what lies ahead.
“I think, obviously, you want to win as many games as possible, but you can win games without making progress in the areas you want to make progress in,” Marmol said. “What’s more important is that the areas that we were hoping to take some real strides in, we did, and we found out a lot about what we currently have and what we don’t have.
“In the process of developing our guys and getting them better, we were also able to win more games than people thought -- which makes 162 a little bit more fun.”
Inevitably, people will hear this description of winning as merely a whimsical alternative to losing and morph it to assert that the Cardinals don’t care about winning. In reality, though, it’s the organization’s intense desire to win -- and to make winning sustainable -- that drives the commitment not to focus on winning at all costs just yet.
Winning games this year? Good. The Cardinals like wins. They prefer them to the alternative. But winning, as Marmol described it Wednesday, isn’t the sole indicator of progress.
The progress comes from who they’re using to post similar results to last year’s 78-84 record. Regardless of whether the club exceeds that win total, Marmol views it as a better team than the 2025 Cardinals.
“It’s not even close,” Marmol said.
Projectability is a big reason why. No longer are the Cardinals the team falling frustratingly short while swimming upstream with a veteran, highly-paid roster. The 77-81 record may not show the difference yet -- but the difference is in the direction.
“You have a ton of young guys that are outperforming expectations,” Marmol said. “None of these guys are at their ceilings. So, there’s that much more room to continue to get better. You also have a good understanding of where the holes are and how you want to fill those.
“So, this team is better because you have a bunch of young dudes that are going to get better, that are going to be here for a long time. And that’s exciting.”
The future will show that the club’s approach to this season was worthwhile or it won’t. The development isn’t done, and the Cardinals haven’t yet arrived. All of it still has to happen to validate the optimism.
But as the Cardinals staved off the probability of finishing with a losing season for another day, the belief in what they’re building remains undaunted by the record.