Before the 2023 season, FanGraphs projected that the St. Louis Cardinals would win the National League Central. And by and large, their projection systems still believe the Cardinals to be a pretty good team, fundamentally. A cursory glance at their current rest-of-season odds show that they believe the Cardinals are a 86.34 win team over a 162 game schedule, a record which would hardly be confused for excellent but which would somewhat easily allow the Cardinals to win a lousy National League Central division. But if the Cardinals were to play at that pace for the rest of the season, the Cardinals would finish 77-85, good for third in the division and five games behind the Milwaukee Brewers for the division crown.

Projections of the future are valuable–arguably more valuable than actual year-to-date standings–but games which have already been played still count in the standings. And as of right now, the St. Louis Cardinals are 27-41, fourteen games below .500, 8.5 games behind the first-place Pittsburgh Pirates, and 7.5 games behind the Milwaukee Brewers team that was perceived before the season as posing by far the greatest threat to the Cardinals in the division. And FanGraphs aren’t exactly believers in the Brewers–for the remainder of 2023, they project for an 82-80 record. But they also have a big head start.

Unsurprisingly, the Cardinals’ playoff odds are the lowest they have been in 2023–they are as many games back as they have ever been, and unlike their previous period of being 14 games below .500, they only have 94 games left to make up the ground they have lost. In 2022, the Cardinals’ playoff odds had a minimum of 34.3%, on April 30. Today, they sit at 14.5%.

For those hoping to grasp at any good news they can find, there is precedent for the Cardinals overcoming unlikelier odds than these. In 2021, before a franchise-record 17-game winning streak catapulted the Cardinals into a relatively comfortable Wild Card spot, their playoffs odds sat at just 1.3% on August 8. In 2020, their playoffs odds barely crept below 50% (the COVID-inspired sixteen-team playoff helped–notably, their playoffs odds jumped 25.1% on the first day of the season, when the expanded playoff format was announced. 17.7% was the Cardinals’ nadir in 2019–better than now, of course, but not dramatically so. And in 2018, while the Cardinals didn’t make it to the postseason, they did jump from 7% on July 31 to 79.5% on September 23 before proceeding to free-fall over the final week of the season. And although FanGraphs playoff odds only go back as far as 2014, who can forget the 2011 comeback from 10.5 games behind the Atlanta Braves in the Wild Card race on August 24 to eventually surpassing the Braves and winning the franchise’s eleventh World Series title?

Whether one believes in the power of clutch or the power of experience fostering future successes, the point of the matter is there isn’t a single person who played for the 2011 St. Louis Cardinals who plays for the 2023 St. Louis Cardinals, and barring a highly unexpected trade for Lance Lynn or Matt Carpenter, it’s very unlikely that one ever does. Even the 2021 Cardinals are materially different than the club just two years later–between the low point of the Cardinals’ playoff odds on August 8 and the conclusion of their 17-game winning streak on September 29, of their four most impactful members of the lineup by FanGraphs Wins Above Replacement, only one (Paul Goldschmidt) is a member of the team’s active roster–one is lingering on the IL, the subject of perpetual trade rumors (Tyler O’Neill) and the other two were dealt at last year’s trade deadline (Harrison Bader, Edmundo Sosa).

Past winning streaks and massive comebacks are informative in the sense that they demonstrate that such comebacks are possible, though broadly speaking I would push back against the idea that the St. Louis Cardinals, because they won eleven championships, one of which even included one current member of the Cardinals, are inherently more likely to overcome long odds. But having one of thirty teams make a major comeback into playoff contention is not exactly improbable, even if deducing which of the thirty teams it would be is a bit trickier. The 2022 Seattle Mariners had 6% playoff odds as late as June. The 2021 Atlanta Braves, who eventually won the World Series, were in single-digits in late July. On June 16, 2019, the Oakland Athletics were standing at 5.2% to make it to October. In 2018, both the Athletics and Colorado Rockies were lingering in single digits after Independence Day.

The extremely boring answer, and I cannot stress enough how boring this answer is, is that the Cardinals’ current FanGraphs odds–12.7% to win the NL Central, 0.3% to win a first-round bye, 14.4% to make the playoffs either via division title or Wild Card, and 0.8% to win the 2023 World Series–are probably about right. On some level, the most fatalistic of Cardinals fans–the ones I saw earnestly comparing the plight of 2023 Oakland Athletics fans, a team whose highest paid player is Trevor May, a relief pitcher with a 6.61 ERA, and a team which is actively trying to relocate to Las Vegas even though Las Vegas doesn’t seem all that interested in bringing them to town–are the ones at the most peace–to believe this team is inherently flawed, that it is absolutely incapable of making a run or winning a lousy NL Central, makes the blueprint for the rest of the season very easy. The plan, then, would be to sell any pending free agent to a contender for whatever you can get, clean house in the front office and on the coaching staff, and devote your summer to something better than a baseball team that is going to frustrate you.

But there are underlying numbers to suggest that the Cardinals, while flawed and while perhaps not as well-constructed as they could be, are better and perhaps materially better than their record indicates. A run differential of -10, one which was positive until last Saturday afternoon, suggests a 33-35 team, one perfectly within striking distance to win a mediocre division. But there is something deeply aggravating about seeing a team and firmly believing, on an intellectual level, that things aren’t as bad as they seem, but also thinking that a playoff berth is still unlikely.

One big positive about baseball over the other major sports, in my opinion, is that there isn’t really any reason to root against your favorite team. Even before MLB instituted a draft lottery, draft position is not nearly as premium of a thing as the chance to draft an amateur superstar that could reasonably change the trajectory of your franchise, as two major sports have had in the last year with Victor Wembanyama and Connor Bedard and as the NFL has had semi-regularly with top quarterback prospects such as Trevor Lawrence. So I’m still going to be rooting for the Cardinals this afternoon. The Cardinals may, and probably eventually should, trade the likes of Jack Flaherty and Jordans Hicks and Montgomery, at a minimum, but there probably isn’t a huge benefit to trading those guys today rather than in a month and a half, when the buyers will only grow more motivated. For now, I’m going to try my best to enjoy what could turn into something, but which I have to remind myself, since Cardinals Devil Magic is an internet trope and not an actual, real thing, probably won’t.