The St. Louis Cardinals are riding a five-game winning streak and stand with the fifth-best record in Major League Baseball.
What the Cardinals are doing defies expectations -- and not just because of their reduced payroll for the 2026 season.
No, it’s many of the core statistics in the sport that suggest the Cardinals shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing in the win column.
Let’s start with the pitching staff. The Cardinals rank 30th out of 30 MLB in strikeouts, with St. Louis pitchers only mustering 136 Ks on the campaign.
The team in 29th, the Arizona Diamondbacks, has 162 punchouts. The gap between the Cardinals and D-backs is, by far, the largest between any two teams in the league-wide rankings.
Of course, there are other ways to produce outs -- and we’re seeing the Cardinals find many of them with the club’s capable defensive alignment serving as a feather in its cap. But that’s only getting the Cardinals so far, as St. Louis ranks 26th in baseball in Earned Run Average at 4.83.
The Cardinals’ middling run suppression has been equal opportunity across the rotation and the bullpen as both units rank outside MLB’s top 20 teams in ERA in those respective categories.
Now, the club’s 103 runs scored ranks a respectable 11th in the league, a mark that outpaces the Cardinals’ 16th-ranked team batting average (.233) and 13th-ranked OPS (.707). Those offensive categories are passable, certainly.
But when combined with the club’s pitching marks, it has resulted in a minus-8 on the season-long run differential, suggesting the Cardinals expected win total is more like 10-11 than the 13-8 record the team currently holds.
So how are the Cardinals doing it?
It really boils down to their otherworldly results in one specific category -- they’re winning close games like nobody’s business.
The Cardinals are 10-1 in games decided by two or fewer runs, suggesting that the team is figuring out ways, by hook or by crook, to come away with victories in those games that hang in the margins. Only the Reds, who lead the NL Central, have been better in this category across MLB.
St. Louis is 5-0 in one-run games and 5-1 in two-run games. The Cardinals are also 5-0 in extra-inning contests.
When the game is tight, the Cardinals are putting on an absolute clinic, securing the win nearly every time.
Of course, this statistic isn’t the most scientific. If the St. Louis bullpen keeps the automatic runner in Sunday’s 10th inning from scoring, for example, we’re not adding that game to this ledger.
There are, surely, numerous other such examples that could articulate why this stat isn’t necessarily the most valuable, or predictive, in determining whether the Cardinals can remain a force in the NL Central for the long haul of the season.
But so far, it’s hard to argue with the results, which seem to -- at least, on the surface -- put the Cardinals in the crosshairs of the ‘clutch’ category. When the chips are down, and a game has the potential to swing for or against the Cardinals, at least so far, it’s pretty much always gone their way.
Whether the trend continues remains to be seen, but it does seem to align with the notion of everything Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol has preached going back to spring training.
Do the little things well, pay attention to the details, understand that mistakes will inevitably happen, so be ready to put them behind you in order to focus on making the next play.
A simple, well-intended mantra that is helping the Cardinals to, frankly, more wins than they are supposed to have to this point in the season.