The St. Louis Cardinals are approaching the point of no return on their competitive aspirations for the 2025 season, and a series in Denver this week could tip the scales right over the edge for the local nine.
Over the next three days, the Cardinals face the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field, a team also teetering on the edge of something: historical incompetence. The Rockies enter the series on pace to win fewer than 40 games this season.
Although the Cardinals couldn’t be lower after their weekend faceplant in Arizona, the general direction of their season should come down to the club’s ability to flip the switch and rack up wins over one of the worst teams we’ve ever seen in Major League Baseball.
Simply, the Cardinals must sweep the Rockies—or trigger a sell-off of the short-term expiring assets of relevance before the July 31 trade deadline.
As the division rival Brewers have rattled off 10 straight wins to pull even with the Cubs in the NL Central, the Cardinals have faded to 8.5 games back of the division lead. The Reds have surpassed the Cardinals in the standings, relegating St. Louis to fourth in the Central. Though the Cardinals remain within striking distance of the Padres in the wild card chase, it’s difficult to project the Cardinals taking advantage of this coming weekend’s head-to-head matchup with San Diego at Busch Stadium if they can’t manage to dispatch the Rockies.
The Cardinals will send Michael McGreevy to the mound Monday for a spot start in Matthew Liberatore’s spot, a necessity to manage Liberatore’s workload amid his first full season as a big-league starter. Liberatore has already eclipsed his innings count from 2024, so the Cardinals buying him rest coming out of the All-Star break was probably the right recipe for Libby’s long-term durability regardless of the state of the standings.
Erick Fedde pitches Tuesday, a deflating reality given his recent performances. In Fedde’s last start before the All-Star break, he produced 4.2 innings of three-run baseball. The outing kept the Cardinals in the mix against the Braves, but that it felt like an upper-percentile outcome for what the team could have reasonably expected from Fedde at this point in time does not portend well for his upcoming date in Denver.
When Andre Pallante goes Wednesday in the series finale in Colorado, he’ll be looking to shake off the stink of consecutive poor outings after allowing a dozen earned runs over his previous two starts.
So, again, on paper, it doesn’t look great. But it doesn’t matter.
As the Cardinals fade fast in the postseason conversation, burying the Rockies in straight sets this week becomes a prerequisite for any consideration of contention.
If you can’t do it, you owe it to the next guy’s regime to extract value from the likes of Ryan Helsley, Phil Maton and any other expiring contract that contending teams might find attractive. Given that most of these names come from the relief corps, there’s a case to be made that the Cardinals wouldn’t materially impact their chances in the remaining games by making these moves.
Sure, thrusting Gordon Graceffo, Chris Roycroft or Ryan Fernandez into meaningful bullpen roles down the stretch projects to make you less competitive than keeping Helsley and Maton in their roles.
But relievers can be fickle and stranger things have happened—the 2024 Detroit Tigers serve as a recent example of a team that sold at the deadline but managed to coalesce around their internal options to make a push into the playoffs. Would we expect it after a deadline sell-off? No, but the players that remain would undergo valuable evaluation down the stretch, win or lose.
After the weekend against the D-backs, the Cardinals are banged up and underperforming in just about every area of the roster. The chance to produce a strong push in July was bungled by a Cardinals front office that settled for an underwhelming status quo of a beleaguered roster.
Whether this month would have played out similarly with more aggressive management from the baseball operations executives, we’ll never know. But the path that the Cardinals took has led them to the cliff for the 2025 season.
Anything less than dominating the Rockies should effectively send the Cardinals over the edge.