The St. Louis Cardinals are approaching a crossroads at the trade deadline. On the surface, this is a team in the thick of the NL Wild Card hunt. Dig a little deeper, though, and the Cardinals are a team stuck between two timelines — the veteran, win-now approach of John Mozeliak and the more long-term viewpoint of his looming successor, Chaim Bloom.
St. Louis tried to offload Nolan Arenado and get younger in the offseason, but those overtures fell through. This is an excellent defensive team, with a few productive vets propping up an otherwise faulty and inconsistent lineup. The Cardinals don't really feel like a contender, especially with the rotation falling apart at the seams.
We all knew Miles Mikolas would hit a wall eventually, but more surprising are the ongoing struggles of Erick Fedde. After coming over from the KBO and putting together an excellent 2024 campaign split between the South Side of Chicago and St. Louis, Fedde's production has fallen off in 2025. He's past his prime at 32 years old, but this level of regression was entirely unpredictable.
Fedde has allowed 17 runs over his last 10 innings pitched. After his latest dud — a two-hit, four-walk, three-run effort in 1.1 innings against the Cubs — Fedde was put under the microscope by Cardinals manager Oli Marmol, who said they were evaluating all paths forward.
Well, now we know the route St. Louis has chosen, and it speaks volumes about the direction of this team.
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Cardinals will keep on starting Erick Fedde amid struggles
Marmol called out Fedde (rightfully) after his recent slump, raising questions about his immediate future with the team.
"We'll use tomorrow as an off day to take a step back and figure out what (the next steps) looks like," Marmol told reporters. "(Fedde) has to find a solution to what's going on... Continuing to go down this road doesn't seem beneficial at the moment."
And yet, it appears that St. Louis and Fedde will... continue to go down the same road. The veteran righty is slated to start for the Cardinals on Saturday.
Erick Fedde will start Saturday for #stlcards after week of discussion.
— Derrick Goold (@dgoold) July 10, 2025
It seems like St. Louis is tipping its hand a bit. A team serious about competing for Wild Card positioning and mounting a run to October would not be starting Fedde. There are better options, both internally in the farm system and externally on the trade market.
Instead, the Cardinals are going to do everything in their power to build up Fedde's value over the next few weeks. A couple solid starts might give Mozeliak the leverage he needs to work a trade and get off of Fedde's expiring contract for some level of value. So rather than instigating immediate change and improving the on-field product, the Cards will attempt to build Fedde's stock in advance of a potential deadline fire sale.
This isn't necessarily the wrong strategy. The Cardinals don't have the deepest farm system and thus aren't equipped to win a bidding war for the best assets on the market. Instead, with Bloom certain to retool and reorient the Cards roster toward the future when he takes over the front office in a few months, perhaps it's best for St. Louis to cash in on their veterans at the deadline (Fedde, Nolan Arenado, Ryan Helsley, etc.). Trying in vain to make the playoffs, not to mention advancing in the playoffs, is what landed the Cardinals in this position to begin with.