It’s easy to dismiss the Cardinals since they’re under .500, but this is still a team that could surprise in the NL Central. They aren’t one of the NL’s premier teams like they’ve been in the recent past — the NL Central isn’t exactly setting the world on fire the way it was when the Cubs won 97 games and finished in third in the division — but they’re very much in that “anything can happen in the postseason” zone.
Should the Cardinals buy, sell, or stay at the MLB trade deadline?
The only consistency in the Cardinals’ 2017 is their inconsistency, and now they have to decide where that leads them.
Photo by Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images
They just have to get there first, and there is no guarantee they will. So the question before them is whether it’s worth buying to try to be the weakest division winner in the NL — one potentially worse than either of the wild card teams — or if it’s time to sell to prepare for 2018. They could also sit and do nothing and see if their course reverses itself enough to overcome their middling season so far. But where’s the fun in that?
The team
The St. Louis Cardinals were supposed to come back strong this year with Dexter Fowler in tow, but instead they have bounced between disappointing and dominant to end up right around .500 on the season. Thanks to disappointment elsewhere in their division, however, that’s not as untenable a position as it would have been the last few seasons in the NL Central.
Their record:
50-51, which is not where they expected to be on July 27
Their expected record based on runs scored and runs allowed:
54-47, which is closer to where they expected to be and would also be good enough for first place in the NL Central
Their expected record according to BaseRuns:
55-46, same feelings as the above, except with another win included
Photo by Ed Szczepanski/Getty Images
Is the Cardinals offense underperforming, or just not very good?
Was the Dexter Fowler contract a mistake?
For more on the Cardinals, visit Viva El Birdos
(A definition of BaseRuns can be found here.)
Games behind first place:
They’re 3 1/2 back, which is somewhat comforting given they are under .500
Games out of second wild card:
St. Louis is seven games back of the second wild card, if you’re wondering how the NL Central is stacking up to the rest of the Senior Circuit
Pending free agents
Lance Lynn
Zach Duke
Seung-hwan Oh
Farm system rank before the season (Baseball America)
The Cardinals ranked 12th, but when you adjust for the surprises they’ll pull from nowhere, they’re more like a top-10 rank.
What it would take to contend next season
Not much! The Cardinals are playing under their record, and while you don’t want to necessarily chop their season up into little itty bits, between their expected records being good enough for hypothetical NL Central supremacy and their 47-42 showing following their poor 3-9 start, they should feel pretty good about next year. Lance Lynn will leave a hole in the rotation, but that’s not an impossible problem to solve, and the same goes for the open slot in their pen should they lose Oh.
And as implied on more than one occasion here, they aren’t exactly out of it yet this season.
Conclusion
The Cardinals probably shouldn’t give up on 2017 by selling off everything that isn’t nailed down, but moving Lance Lynn in the right deal would make a lot of sense — the right deal, in this writer’s opinion, would be one that helps set them up for 2018 with a trade return instead of making them jump through the new qualifying offer hoops that will be active this offseason.
From the sounds of it, the Cardinals agree, too:
The Cardinals don’t need to rebuild. Retooling now isn’t a bad plan, though, especially if they can do so without sacrificing much as far as their chances at the postseason in 2017 go. Moving Lynn would weaken the rotation, especially with Marco Gonzales recently dealt to the Mariners, but it’s also possible he brings back a return that makes them a real threat in 2018 again, too. It’s at least worth exploring.
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