The St. Louis Cardinals major league squad has teased with us for long enough. Despite the team only being a handful of games out of a playoff spot, I am personally ready to write (in erasable pen) the 2025 season as the third consecutive season in which the Cardinals have missed the postseason.
However, it has not been a total wasted season as the Cardinals have seen some growth the big league roster has shown at certain positions and enters September with four prospects all ranked within the top 100 based on MLB Pipeline’s evaluations. A fun discussion within those prospects is that two of them, JJ Wetherholt and Leonardo Bernal, have been tearing apart Double-A pitching and a third, Liam Doyle, looks to continue his ascent in the organization and has been promoted to Springfield. The final prospect on that list is catcher Rainiel Rodriguez, who is laying waste to Single-A pitching with 20 homers and a .555 slugging percentage as an 18-year-old.
With the support of Wetherholt, Bernal, and a phenomenal team pitching performance, Springfield won the first half of the league by six games and are on the way to winning the second half with less than a week to play. Minor league playoff rules state that if a team wins both halves of the season, they will take on the next best record in the first three-game series of the postseason. The playoffs are scheduled to begin September 16.
While Springfield has been on an unreal tear this season, the major league Cardinals have been set in mediocrity and seemingly have more questions than answers. The position player group has plenty of complementary pieces, but are missing a legitimate star and have redundancy with defensive positions and handedness. Based on FanGraphs measures, the Cardinals offense has been league-average or worse and is missing thump basically everywhere in the lineup as Willson Contreras leads the team with 20 homers. In total, the team had hit 137 home runs which puts them 28th in baseball. As mediocre as the hitting has been, the pitching been worse.
We should not be surprised but the rotation of Sonny Gray, Miles Mikolas, Erick Fedde, Andre Pallante, Matthew Liberatore, and Michael McGreevy (hat tip to healthy pitching am I right?) is ranked 22nd in all of baseball by measure of FanGraph’s WAR and even that may be generous. Interestingly, Cardinals starters have combined to throw the 9th-most innings of any other rotation and have the third-best walk rate, but that is where the positivity ends. Those innings were eaten to the tune of a 4.75 ERA (24th) and a 4.22 xFIP (18th) that are paired with the second-worst strikeouts per nine innings at just 6.92 with the organization’s pitch to contact approach causing a .266 opponent batting average, better than only the Orioles and Rockies.
That rotation will hopefully undergo massive changes next year, but that might be totally possible on a large scale unless the Cardinals decide to dip into the free agent market. As of now, the only “guarantee” in the rotation should be Michael McGreevy, who is settling into his backend rotation role despite fans believing he was a Cy Young candidate wasting away in the minors while Fedde continued to pitch. I still believe Liberatore is a rotation piece but he was also extremely successful in the bullpen and may be an option to shift back there. Pallante is a huge question mark as he has not won a game since his seven inning shutout in July and has not really looked close to figuring it out. This is where the main question for today comes in. Can we buy into the success the roster is having in Springfield as the team looks to the future?
While JJ Wetherholt is not in Double-A anymore, he hit .300 with seven homers in 62 games before his promotion to the next level. Other top 30 prospects have done well offensively as well with Bernal looking ready for a bump to Memphis, Nathan Church was putting together a nice season before his promotion to the bigs, and Joshua Baez and Chase Davis have both tapped into some more power but are a little further away than the others. Pitching-wise, the rotation in Springfield has been spectacular and a main reason for their success. Five pitchers have started at least 10 games in Double-A and the highest ERA between them is a 4.07, which would be the lowest for any of the pitchers on the major league staff. At the highest level, Cardinals pitchers have a 7.52 K/9 rate while the Double-A Cardinals have a spectacular 9.89 K/9, which would be the highest rate in the entire major leagues.
So, back to the question. Do these stats mean anything to you? Should those stats mean much to Chaim Bloom and Co.? As a fan, I want to look at these numbers are allow myself to get cautiously excited while remembering that we will never see many of these players play for the major league squad, and even if they will, we may be years away from that. With the team probably continuing to cut payroll and fall further into mediocrity, it will take a lot from these prospects to change the outlook of the organization.
