With 232 wins over the last three seasons, the St. Louis Cardinals are coming off their worst non-pandemic shortened three-year stretch since the 1997-1999 gap between Tony LaRussa’s first season in St. Louis and the beginning of a proper run of franchise glory in the twenty-first century. It marks their lousiest run that didn’t include a once-in-a-century pandemic, a once-in-a-century spectacle of Mark McGwire’s dinger-socking glory, nor a more-than-once-a-century-but-let’s-not-think-about-the-probable-2027-lockout-just-yet labor-related work stoppage since 1988 through 1990, a stretch that was as bad as 2023-2025 by total games won, not worse. The last worse stretch was 1978-1980. There are players on the 2026 St. Louis Cardinals whose parents weren’t alive for that stretch.

The ineptitude of the 2023-2025 Cardinals ought not be oversold, though I fully reject the notion that because the Chicago White Sox and Colorado Rockies were worse, or because the St. Louis Cardinals won a bunch of World Series titles before most of us were actually alive to witness them, that we are not allowed to feel dissatisfied. 77 1/3 wins per season, while not great, nor good, nor average, is not abjectly terrible. But what felt truly abysmal about the last three seasons was not so much that the Cardinals were mediocre, but because they organizationally did not seem to understand their own mediocrity. John Mozeliak would publicly present as though the Cardinals were One Weird Trick away from glory, a break or two away from being able to truly compete with the premier teams in Major League Baseball. He may not have believed it–in fact, I outright don’t believe that he did–but it inevitably felt patronizing to those of us who knew the Cardinals were going in the wrong direction. It was impossible to imagine that the Cardinals could solve a problem that they did not fully understand existed.

By Wins Above Replacement, the two best players on the 2025 Cardinals are gone–traded to the Seattle Mariners (Brendan Donovan) and Boston Red Sox (Willson Contreras). Contreras will be joined in Boston by Sonny Gray, the team’s de facto ace of the last two seasons, and while Nolan Arenado was oft-rumored to be heading to Fenway Park himself at various points throughout the last few seasons, he will instead be playing third base for the Arizona Diamondbacks. And yet, because the last few years of Cardinals have been defined by relentless mediocrity, none represented anything exceptional in terms of tangible production for the team–last season, they combined for 7.9 WAR. The 2025 Cardinals won 78 games; FanGraphs projects the 2026 Cardinals to win 75 games.

At the risk of having the excruciatingly boring take on the matter, this feels…about right. I would say that the most likely scenario is probably slightly below that, but that the odds of a significant deviation (say, 10 games in either direction) would lean towards winning 85 games rather than winning 65. But a playoff spot, even in a division that figures to be rather unexceptional, seems unlikely. I wouldn’t want this to last forever–for the Cardinals to routinely run sub-$50 million payrolls while winking at the camera about what goofy little losers they are–but this is a necessary step in the process. The Cardinals cannot simply Ship of Theseus themselves from the early-to-mid-2010s teams and expect similar results. This is going to have to be a whole different thing. And for as much as we’ve yelled and screamed about OPENING DEWALLET, a step back for a year or two is totally logical and strategically defensible as long as it is followed up with a genuine effort to spend competitively once the team turns a corner. I’m happy to yell at the DeWitt family in a few years if they are still running middling payrolls for ostensibly competitive teams, but I’m willing to hold my fire until then.

But for now, I’m excited not because I think there’s a reasonable chance of a parade down Clark Street (or wherever they’d schedule a championship parade these days) at the end of the season but because there are dumb little things to experience along the way.

• I am excited for JJ Wetherholt. This is the big one. And I say this knowing full well how miserably certain can’t-miss prospects have missed in recent years for the Cardinals (more on one of them later). But while there is an innate pessimism that makes me think that Dylan Carlson is the upside for St. Louis Cardinals prospects, Wetherholt is tangibly different from the steady stream of bat-first prospects who joined the Cardinals as teenagers–JJ Wetherholt spent three years playing high-level college baseball and hit the ground running in organized Cardinals baseball immediately. Normally, when it comes to prospects, the temptation is to tell fans of teams to not overrate them and that they are not guaranteed to succeed, but with the Cardinals, it almost requires the opposite, a reminder that previous prospect busts are not an inherent indicator of future ones. And I’m excited to see what happens.
• I am excited to see what Masyn Winn becomes. Can he bounce back offensively to simply league-average play while staying healthy and maintaining his superlative defense? Wetherholt has still played more shortstop than any other position in the minors, and it’s not like Winn has received some massive extension–his future is up in the air. But in the meantime, I fully expect that Winn will continue to be the team’s human highlight reel, an especially significant task with Nolan Arenado, who clearly took a step back in the field but was still capable of occasional moments of his peak performance, gone.
• I am excited to watch Victor Scott II do his thing. This deviates slightly from Masyn Winn, where to some extent I’m mostly looking to see a really strong FanGraphs page. For Scott…that would be great, but mostly I want to see the extremely fast guy steal a bunch of bases and make some cool defensive plays in center field. He was already one of the better players on the Cardinals last year with a relatively lousy 76 wRC+. I was pretty skeptical of Scott during his prospect days, and I still don’t think he’s ever going to become a truly superior MLB player, but he can be entertaining in the meantime.
• I am excited to find out, once and for all, what Jordan Walker is. Jordan Walker has been a massive disappointment for the St. Louis Cardinals–when he arrived, he was a decent hitter with an absolutely abysmal glove, and while his fielding has progressed to “look, it’s not good, but if he’s raking, we can live with it”, his offense has fallen off a cliff. He has crossed the one thousand plate appearance threshold in his MLB career and his career WAR sits at -2.6. Had Jordan Walker made this kind of first impression a decade ago, he would probably already be gone. But the upside of the Cardinals not being very good is that there’s no reason not to be patient with him–I know there are a lot of Cardinals fans who are bummed that Nelson Velázquez didn’t get the nod over Walker on the roster, but I love it. I’m reasonably sure that Nelson Velázquez, who is 27 years old and spent his 2025 being relatively unexceptional in AAA, is never going to be more than a passable roster player for the Cardinals. Jordan Walker could be worse than that, but it wasn’t Cardinals fan homerism that made Jordan Walker one of the top prospects in baseball. If I put five bucks on a number of Roulette, it’s probably not going to be hit, but you better believe I’m going to be excited watching the wheel spin before I find out the result.
• I am excited to see who become the sidekicks to Liam Doyle’s starting rotation. Matthew Liberatore, partially as a result of endless comparisons to Randy Arozarena, a pretty good player who happens to turn into Aaron Judge whenever casual fans are actually watching the games, is probably never going to become a true ace, but he was a perfectly competent middle of the rotation guy last year. He is certainly not an Opening Day Starter in anything but today’s literal sense, but he’s young and solid enough that he could absolutely be the equivalent to, say, Kyle Lohse on the next contending Cardinals team. I am excited to watch Dustin May, the once extremely exciting young pitcher who has as much motivation as anybody to have a strong 2026; if he’s good, he’s likely going to be traded to a better team in July, but I enjoyed watching Jordan Montgomery win a World Series in 2023. I am excited to see if Michael McGreevy can take a step forward, and I’m excited to see if Kyle Leahy can make the relief-to-starter transition that the club has continually hoped would happen with Andre Pallante.
• I am excited to pay $10 for random weeknight tickets. Don’t let anybody try to shame you for low resale ticket prices–the Cardinals’ Opening Day roster is going to have a combined salary lower than what Zach LaVine is making for the 19-54 Sacramento Kings. They can afford it. Go watch the Cardinals play the Cleveland Guardians on April 14th. They still have José Ramírez and Steven Kwan and those guys do cool baseball things a lot of the time.
• I am excited to pay slightly more money to eat and drink unlimited ballpark food in the Big Mac Land section. This is going to start sounding like an ad–while I’m pretty sure I never stripped the current Cardinals social media guy who used to write for this website of his credentials, I promise this is being written fully by the guy who doesn’t get a paycheck from them. This is a take that has virtually nothing to do with the St. Louis Cardinals–attending decently high-level sports events is fun. Last year, I took a trip to Chicago by myself. I attended a Fever/Sky WNBA game and a Phillies/White Sox MLB game. I did not particularly care who won either game, but I got to see cool athletes do cool things. And this year you can do so while getting unlimited ballpark food and (non-alcoholic) drink for thirty bucks.

There’s something different about this year. This is going to be a team where you don’t feel obliged to watch every game, which is a liberating feeling with a 162 game season. This is the kind of season where whether you have a defining memory of it is almost certainly going to be personal–attending a game with a child or a parent, or having fun with your friends on a nice summer night. And these are the moments that matter more than anything else.

Anyway, I’ll say 72-90.