A year ago this was supposed to be simple. The Cardinals blew things up, cut payroll, and pointed toward a rebuild. Instead they've spent 2026 hovering right around .500 and, somehow, holding onto the NL's last Wild Card spot heading into August.
MLB Trade Rumors dropped its full deadline breakdown on where the Cardinals actually stand.
That breakdown paints a franchise stuck between two plans. President of baseball ops Chaim Bloom has made clear he's not blowing up the long-term vision just because the team is overachieving, but a 24.4% playoff probability from FanGraphs and five teams within 3 games of that Wild Card spot make it a lot harder to just punt on 2026.
So the Cardinals are doing what a lot of fringe contenders do at the deadline: playing both sides. On the sell end, righty Dustin May is the most obvious rental — he's making $12MM this year, his ERA sits at 4.78 over 98 innings, but teams still like the arm talent enough to be in on him for mid-tier prospects. Reliever JoJo Romero, who's put together a 3.35 ERA with 21 holds, would normally be a nice sell-high piece too, except he's reportedly dealing with a recent appendicitis issue that's muddying his value.
The more interesting name is Lars Nootbaar. Unlike May or Romero, he's not a pending free agent — he's got 2 more years of arbitration control, which makes him the kind of controllable, cost-effective piece that other front offices actually covet instead of a rent-a-player. If St. Louis really is leaning sell, moving a player like that for young talent is the move that defines the whole approach.
It's the classic August 3 squeeze: sell too hard and you insult a clubhouse that's overachieved all year, buy and you risk mortgaging even more of a farm system that's still being rebuilt. Bloom's public line has been that the Cardinals won't deviate much from the long-term plan — which, translated, sounds a lot like quietly selling off the pieces that don't matter for 2027 while telling the fanbase they're still trying to compete.
With the deadline 3 weeks out, expect the Dustin May sweepstakes to be the first domino. What happens with Nootbaar after that will say a lot more about whether St. Louis actually believes in this surprise season or is just running out the string with a smile on it.