In case you missed it, Jake and I talked to Derrick Goold earlier in the week on the podcast, which was very informative in many ways and you should listen to it if you haven’t. One of the takeaways from the podcast was that from Goold’s knowledgable position, the Cardinals are not going to judge their progress by wins and losses in 2027. He effectively said they do not care about wins next year. They care about development, they care about the future, but wins will not be the metric in which they judge how the season goes.
This was disappointing to hear. He did make the point that most people seem to perceive the 2026 team as better than the 2025 team even though it won less games. I think that’s more of an expectations thing and that the team seemed to be moving forward based on why they were good. Also, fans might perceive it that way, but I don’t think there is a very good argument that the 2026 team was actually better. They didn’t get worse (it was a one-win difference) after trading Sonny Gray, Brendan Donovan, and Nolan Arenado. That was big and showed the Cardinals were closer than we thought.
Or at least, I was hoping that was the takeaway. Doesn’t appear to have been the takeaway the Cardinals are choosing to take from the 2026 season. I’ve made this comparison before and it probably won’t be the last time I make it. The Cardinals are in a remarkably similar position to the 2015 Cubs, which obviously doesn’t mean they need to behave exactly like them, but they should have a similar attitude.
You’re googling the 2015 Cubs and seeing they won a lot of games. 97 of them in fact. They weren’t supposed to. The 2014 Cubs won 73 games. If Chaim Bloom was in charge of the Cubs then, there is no way the 2015 Cubs would win 97 games and they probably don’t win the World Series in 2016. After the 73 win season, Theo Epstein realized the Cubs had a lot of prospects arriving soon, and instead of waiting for them to prove themselves, he added prematurely, which ended up not being premature at all.
He signed Jon Lester, Jason Motte, Jason Hammel, and David Ross, and also traded for Dexter Fowler. The Cardinals don’t need a backup catcher and they’ll probably sign someone like Motte, coming off a bad season. I’m also not asking for the Cardinals to sign Tarik Skubal (I doubt Bloom has permission to even attempt it) or even sign a pitcher to a 7-year deal. It’s more the idea behind what the Cubs did than their specific moves that the Cardinals should replicate. Kris Bryant, Kyle Schwarber and Addison Russell hadn’t yet debuted, but would make important contributions to the 2015 squad. Javier Baez had debuted, but 2016 would be the season he would arrive. Willson Contreras also debuted for the 2016 team and was immediately a great hitter.
None of these players had proven anything before the 2015 season. The 2014 Cubs weren’t good, but both Anthony Rizzo and Jake Arrieta become core players and Kyle Hendricks surprised with 13 great starts. So they added to Arrieta and Hendricks with Hammel and Lester. Arrieta ended up being otherworldly that year, which is obviously going to significantly help you beat expectations, but Lester had a 5 win season too.
Let’s compare it to the Cardinals’ situation. They are missing an Arietta, although they do have their fair share of potential aces who are going to debut in 2026: Liam Doyle, Jurrangelo Cjintje, and Tanner Fraklin. Question defensive stats if you want but signs point to JJ Wetherholt being a star already. There’s your Rizzo. Joshua Baez and Leonardo Bernal have had their taste. Rainiel Rodriguez would probably be a guarantee to debut if the Cardinals were attempting to win next season. The prospects are close! Very close in fact.
In addition, the Cardinals will definitely have more prospects than they can use. Wetherholt is locked in at 2B, and right now that’s the only guarantee for the infield. Jack Gurevitch, Jesus Baez, Deniel Ortiz, Blaze Jordan will have to force out Masyn Winn and Alec Burleson if only one of them gets 3B, and a decent chance Rainiel Rodriguez will end up playing either 1B or 3B at least part of the time. Right behind those guys is Yairo Padilla and Sebastian Dos Santos. In the outfield, you have Josiah Ragsdale and Tai Peete with a farther away group in Trevor Condon and Alex Frias (amongst many other mediocre prospects like Won-Bin Cho). They’re going to be entering an outfield already covered by Joshua Baez and Jordan Walker. We already need to trade catchers. I will need to make this a two-parter if I was forced to name all the pitchers.
People are getting traded at some point. You don’t need to wait to make them prove they aren’t the future before you do it. Yeah it’s risky of course. But prospects usually don’t work out, and more importantly perhaps, even if they do, you usually don’t regret trading them. You remember all the ones you do regret, which makes you have a distorted view of how often you actually regret trading prospects. If you are trading for a legitimately great player, it’s almost always a smart move to trade prospects (Marcell Ozuna was not a legitimately great player if you want to bring up that trade)
I’m still not really asking for a big move – though I would appreciate one such as trading for Gunnar Henderson. Just try to improve the 2027 team. Care about winning. At least put the Cardinals in the position where the playoffs seems like a possibility and not a pipe dream. If you are someone who believes the Cardinals can make the playoffs with the roster they have, imagine how good they could really be if 3B and CF weren’t black holes.
So we’re already good enough and we can’t block Jesus Baez or Tai Peete does not make sense to me as an argument because neither of those players will impact the 2026 team, so feel free to get a one-year solution to that problem. I have no problem with that. If either of those guys are absolutely destroying AAA and need to be called up, you’ll find playing time for them. Injuries happen or you could just trade your one-year solutions. There are ways to do this that don’t involve signing Dexter Fowler to 5 years.
On the flipside, if you think making any moves would be foolish because this team isn’t close, fine, then trade anyone you can trade. If you believe improving CF and/or 3B is a complete waste of time, because any move we make won’t result in the playoffs, you got to pivot in the other direction. You don’t think the team is close? Got to trade Alec Burleson then. Trade Andre Pallante for sure.
If you’re in between these two viewpoints, like myself, and think of the Cardinals as somewhere between a 75 and 80 win team, with young, emerging players who could easily outperform that projection, then I think getting a Henderson or a Steven Kwan or even a Luis Robert is worthwhile, because now you’re increasing your chances of of being a playoff team. I want to improve CF or 3B specifically because Baez or Bernal or Quinn Mathews or one of the stud prospects who will start the year in Memphis can change the timeline and if multiple players do have that kind of season, 90 or more wins is on the table.
I honestly find this most confusing because Bloom and company have stressed that they don’t want to give a specific date on the timeline, which I totally understand, but if you aren’t behaving any differently than if the Cardinals just won 70 games last season, it kind of feels like you have a set timeline you’re sticking to? Part of why I’m advocating for this is that I look at the roster and there honestly aren’t that many holes and the bar to improve 3B and CF and the bullpen is just not high at all.
On the positive side of that interview, Goold did expect the Cardinals to be creative in their pitching usage as a response to the likely innings limit of Cooper Hjerpe, Tekoah Roby, and Richard Fitts, plus the gradual integration of the arm talent in Memphis that hasn’t debuted. That’s kind of an easy way to improve the bullpen: just use starters for multiple innings in relief.
Third base was replacement level last year and CF was not a whole lot better than that. We’re shedding Nolan Gorman and Victor Scott (maybe), but a good portion of the PAs are going to be taken by the same players. And players who, based on scouting and projections, don’t really have upside. Are we not getting a CF in front of Church because he might get 2 WAR? Fourth outfielders still play a whole lot, and if Church really does improve, we would get the benefit of the CF the Cardinals acquire AND a very good fourth outfielder. At least Blaze hasn’t really been given a legitimate chance, even if I don’t think he has the defensive chops to play 3B (yes I know what his OAA was in a very small sample)
Last point: trying to win in 2027 will have two very positive downstream effects. First, it will make fans want to go to games. Famously, Bill Dewitt III said that if fans don’t come to the ballpark, they won’t spend. Well, if you don’t try to win, fans won’t come to the ballpark. It’s not exactly a winning message to say “listen we don’t actually care about wins right now, but we still want your money.” Secondly, it signals to free agents that the Cardinals are trying to win, which is kind of how the Cardinals can get players to come here in the first place. I see it all the time. “Why would x player want to come here?” Well they think they can win here. That’s not a selling point if you don’t do anything. It might not have an effect this offseason, but it could convince a player next offseason.
In short, even if it’s minor, one-year improvements, please try to improve the 2027 team so that the Cardinals increase their odds of making the playoffs, because I don’t think the Cardinals are far off and I want to watch a winning team again.
Movie corner
Sorry still reading Crime and Punishment. In case I didn’t pick a divisive enough main topic, here’s a divisive movie opinion: Heat isn’t that good. Yes, the 1995 movie Heat is… fine. It has some great scenes. It has a lot of subplots I don’t care about in a movie that has zero business being near three hours. Do people really care about Al Pacino and Robert Deniro’s significant others in this movie? I don’t know if it’s because Michael Mann can’t write romance, but the only relationship I actually bought was Ashley Judd and Val Kilmer, which has a very good ending. Yes I am only using the actor and not the character names because I don’t remember the character’s names and this is just faster.
I like Deniro’s ending in concept, but in practice, Amy Brenneman isn’t even a character, she’s there so that Deniro is tempted to abandon his lifestyle. When she makes her decision, she makes it because that’s what the movie needs, but it doesn’t seem very believable to me. And the movie also needed to speed run through Pacino’s relationship to make its point, where it seemed like we saw them go from the honeymoon stage to the disillusioned stage in like a couple weeks?
And can we talk about Al Pacino’s performance? I can’t believe this performance is in a movie we are supposed to take seriously. He would fit right in if he was dropped onto the set of Face/Off. But that movie knows it’s dumb. Heat is very serious. I know Pacino says it’s because he thought his character would be doing cocaine. No, Al, it’s because you were doing a lot of cocaine. If the movie wanted us to think he was on cocaine, believe me, we would have seen it because Mann certainly didn’t cut anything else.
Man I could rant for days about this movie, but also why the hell was there a shoe-horned serial killer in this movie? What a weird choice! Robert Deniro doesn’t even know about that! It’s completely irrelevant. His actions at the beginning of the movie already get us to root for him to die, it was just so unnecessary. Positives: a few great scenes, every character actor in the 90s was in this thing so you know non-Pacino division this is some good acting. (Although Mykelti Williamson does take a cue from Pacino and is more over the top than he usually is)