As I type this, your St. Louis Cardinals have 38 games remaining on their regular-season schedule, and the season is zooming by.
The Redbirds have only 11 series left to play, it won’t be long before their 2025 performance is filed into history. This is happening fast. It hasn’t been an exciting season, having fizzled out since late June. Last 43 games, 16-27.
I’ve still enjoyed watching this team play to see if any roster-related decisions will be sorted in time for the pre-2026 offseason. We’ve had a chance to make some discoveries, but unsolved mysteries remain.
It’s been a curious season and inconsistent happiness, marked by conflicting and confusing objectives. For the team, it’s been a cycle of contender and pretender or somewhere in between. That damn near made it impossible to feel happiness for an extended period of time.
With only 38 days to go before the 162nd game is completed, I still have questions … and hope to find answers.
1. Will the Cardinals promote top prospect JJ Wetherholt from Triple A Memphis?
I very much wanted to see this happen, but I’m no longer as fired up about it. Did I flip flop? Hell, no. This is about Wetherholt’s progress in Triple A, and I’d prefer not to see it interrupted. When the Cardinals drafted Wetherholt 7th overall in 2024, independent talent evaluators loved his hit tool and contact skills but questioned his seemingly limited power potential.
I suppose JJ wanted to get to work on that – to show that he has power … abundant power … nothing to worry about power.
Wetherholt has modified his approach at Triple A, made swing alterations, and tapped into his power … real power. And that’s truly exciting.
After I offer the small-sample warning, here’s a breakdown of Wetherholt’s power indicators at each level he’s played in the minors over the last two seasons.
(The ISO reference you’ll see here stands for isolated power – which is calculated by subtracting a hitter’s batting average from his slugging percentage. An ISO of .140 is considered league average.)
Class A Palm Beach for 29 games in 2024: .400 slugging percentage, .105 ISO, two homers and an average of one home run every 52.5 at-bats.
Class AA Springfield for 62 games in 2025: .466 slugging percentage, .166 ISO, seven homers and an average of one HR every 31.8 at-bats.
Class AAA Memphis for 27 games in 2025: .638 slugging percentage, .343 ISO, nine home runs, and an average of one HR every 11.6 at-bats.
I mean, wow. Take a look at that again and see the stunning jumps in slugging, ISO and home-run ratio after he graduates to the next level. I’ll say it again: wow.
As Baseball America observed:
“The metrics strongly suggest Wetherholt is sacrificing some bat-to-ball (contact) to swing harder and try to do more damage … this reads like a player who uses his “A” swing when he targets a pitch in the zone and his “B” swing to fight off pitches that he gets fooled on. … the impression coming out of the draft was that Wetherholt was a contact-oriented hitter. That may no longer be true.”
And so: that’s my explanation for why I changed my mind after initially hollering for the Cardinals to promote Wetherholt to the show before the end of the season. I’ve also adjusted for pragmatic reasons.
I’m good with having JJ keep working on something really big at Triple A. No need to disrupt his continuity. Give him more reps to tune his power enhancements. The major-league club will still be here, with a roster spot for him, in 2026. If the Cardinals have a change of heart and call him to STL before the end of the season – that would be fabulous. But I’ll be fine if they keep him in Memphis.
2. I want to see if Alec Burleson will finish strong instead of fading over the final month.
I am not dissing Burly here. He’s having a good season. He continues to improve. In 2023, Burleson was 12 percent below league average offensively per wRC+. Last season he raised that to 8 percent above league average. Through Wednesday, the large lefty was 20 percent above average offensively.
But I also remember what happened last season. It took Burly a while to get going in 2024, but in June and July (combined) he batted .281 with a .505 slug, .821 OPS and a wRC+ that was 25 percent better than league average offensively.
In August-September combined, Burleson’s batting average dropped to .243, his slug fell to .326, his OPS decreased to .639 – and he was 16 percent below average offensively per wRC+.
This caught my attention: Burleson’s wRC+ for August (so far) is 10 percent below average offensively, and his OPS is a mediocre .673. That’s why I’m watching to see if the reduced late-season offense will pull his numbers down again for the second consecutive season.
3. Of course, Jordan Walker. Always Jordan Walker.
Can he put together a vigorous display of hitting over the team’s final five-plus weeks? Or will Walker sink lower in the batter’s box quicksand?
Heck if I know.
Through a 19-game stretch that ended on Aug. 10, Walker batted .333 with a .378 on-base percentage, .464 slug and .842 OPS. And his strikeout rate over 74 plate appearances was a reasonable 24 percent. However … in his last seven games through Wednesday, Walker went 2 for 22 (.091) with an alarming 44 percent strikeout rate.
In his last eight months of regular-season ball since the start of 2024, here are Walker’s monthly offensive performances, in order, as defined by wRC+ …
* 58 percent below league average
* 126% below avg.
* 15% above avg.
* 41% below avg.
* 25% below avg.
* 93% below avg.
* 30% above avg.
* 37% below avg.
Over the last two seasons Walker has a .218 average, .338 slug and .611 OPS in 472 plate appearances with 30.3 percent strikeout rate.
4. Nolan Gorman – because we can’t mention Jordan Walker without also citing Nolan Gorman.
Gorman is either first, second or third among St. Louis hitters in a bunch of categories since late May: on-base percentage, slugging, OPS, walk rate, home runs, and ISO. He has a nice run going – yes, even with three strikeouts in Wednesday’s loss at Miami.
The question: over the final five-plus weeks, can Gorman maintain consistency – or will he self-destruct at the plate? It’s an important stretch for Gorman, who has raised the hopes of the small percentage of people who have appreciated his clear upswing on offense over the last three months.
5. Nolan Arenado: what’s up?
The third baseman, age 34, is rehabbing his strained shoulder in Jupiter, and may or may not return before the end of the season. I make no predictions or guesses here. Does it make sense for Arenado to return to the lineup – or does it make more sense to shut him down for the rest of the season?
Let’s say Arenado returns with a strengthened shoulder and shows renewed power. Would that give him a boost in his offseason trade value? But what if Arenado comes back and looks the same? Among 185 big-league hitters that have made at least 350 plate appearances this season, Arenado ranks 164th in slugging percentage (.366) and 169th in wRC+ (17 percent below league average.)
And if Arenado sits out the rest of the season, will potential trade partners just assume he’s damaged or done or both and back away from any desire to explore a trade?
Final thought: I want to see if young starting pitchers Matthew Liberatore and Michael McGreevy can finish the season with a flourish to reinforce their likely position in the St. Louis starting rotation for 2026.
Thanks for reading …
–Bernie
Bernie was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame in 2023. During a St. Louis sports-media career that goes back to 1985, he’s won multiple national awards for column writing and sports-talk hosting – and was the lead sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch from 1989 through 2015.
You can access his columns, videos and the podcast version of the videos here on STLSportsCentral, catch him weekdays on the “Gashouse Gang” or “Redbird Rush Hour” on KMOX, and Bernie does a weekly “Seeing Red” podcast on the Cardinals with his longtime pal Will Leitch. Bernie joins Katie Woo on the “Cardinal Territory” video-podcast at least once per week, and you can catch a weekly “reunion” show here with Bernie and Randy Karraker every Friday morning at 10:30 am.