This story was excerpted from Will Leitch’s Cardinals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
The Cardinals are not officially out of postseason contention, but despite the fun of the 2026 season, and an inspiring post-Trade Deadline run of five straight series wins, that day doesn’t seem far off.
Fangraphs Playoff Odds gives the Cardinals a 2 percent chance of making the playoffs. And if you watched the grueling series sweep in Philadelphia over the weekend, in which the Cardinals lost three games in three entirely different but equally painful ways, even that probably seems a little bit high.
You could argue that the Cardinals’ playoff hopes vanished into the trees in center field at Citizens Bank Park on Sunday afternoon just like the ball that Kyle Schwarber hit a Statcast-projected 459 feet off closer Riley O’Brien.
Even if the Cardinals had won two out of three against the Phillies, the reckoning the team has been avoiding all season was clearly right around the corner.
After going nearly two seasons without losing a starting pitcher to an arm injury, St. Louis placed two key rotation pieces on the injured list over the weekend: Andre Pallante, with elbow inflammation, and Hunter Dobbins, with a right forearm flexor injury.
While Dobbins -- whose injury history is already vast -- is thought to have a potentially more serious injury than Pallante (who will likely return when his IL stint is over), losing two starters to injury is not something many teams could handle, let alone one with the lack of pitching depth as the Cardinals have right now.
Kyle Leahy, who has arguably been the Cardinals’ best starter this season, was already on an innings restriction (he was pulled after four scoreless innings on Sunday). And Matthew Liberatore, even during a recent resurgence, has shown he consistently struggles when forced to pitch more than five innings. Michael McGreevy has been solid all season, but he has only thrown more than six innings three times (each of which he only went 6 1/3), and prospect Quinn Mathews, at this point of his career, is inefficient with his pitch counts even when he’s effective.
The bullpen is overworked -- which we seem to be seeing per the results of O’Brien’s last two appearances -- and, oh yeah, they still do not currently have a fifth starter. Just as Jordan Walker and Alec Burleson have gotten hot, and Joshua Báez has arrived to provide some more lineup thump, the pitching is imploding. It could get ugly from here on out.
It probably was always going to be. This Cardinals season has been so much more fun than anyone could have reasonably predicted. They were thought, heading into 2026, to be a potential 100-loss team: They’re currently at .500 and wouldn’t lose 100 even if they lost every single game the rest of the way. (They only need five more wins to have a better record than they did in 2023, a year they ostensibly went into trying to win a championship.)
They saw Walker disappoint Philadelphia fans in their home ballpark by defeating Schwarber in the Home Run Derby, and have seen huge steps forward from both he and Burleson; they have seen JJ Wetherholt (whom they inked to an extension) put together a Rookie of the Year-caliber first season; they have seen McGreevy, Leahy and Pallante establish themselves as potential rotation pieces moving forward, and they have done all this while adding several top prospects to their system, including five of their current top 11 in the MLB Pipeline rankings (three by trade, two by draft). There was also Báez’s historic three-homer MLB debut, and Cards fans launched the “Tarps Off” trend across MLB.
It has certainly been a more exciting year than originally thought.
But it still is the first year of president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom’s restructuring, and this cake is far from fully baked. One of the primary objectives of the Bloom front office is to stock up the minors with as many quality arms as possible to avoid the very situation the Cardinals are facing right now. It takes time to do that, and it would have been foolish for St. Louis to trade from that stock for a short-term fix.
If the Cardinals have a pitching shortage like this in, say, 2028 or 2029, then yes, that’s something Bloom and Co. will have to answer for. But for now? In year one? The coffers are not yet full and abundant as they someday will be. This year is about filling them -- not about depleting them.
The Cardinals’ pitching situation is likely going to be ugly moving forward, and it’s probably going to lead to more losses than wins. Frankly, the timing of the Phillies disaster this weekend was probably helpful: It eliminated any illusions moving forward.
St. Louis will remain an entertaining team the rest of the way, particularly with Walker and Burleson hitting the way they have been, and Báez continuing to improve. That’s what’s going to matter moving forward, not how the Cardinals muddle through the last month of the season in which they will be starving for innings. It has been a fun year, but there is still a lot of work to do in the future.