Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- Jacob Misiorowski struck out 10 in five no-hit innings against the St. Louis Cardinals on Tuesday night.
- The Cardinals sit six games above .500 but rely on luck with a negative run differential and strong extra-inning performance.
- St. Louis faces a tough NL Central and must decide whether to contend or rebuild with valuable trade pieces still available.
Getting bodied by Jacob Misiorowski is not necessarily a reason to change the direction of your franchise. That said, the St. Louis Cardinals still have a ways to go.
Misiorowski is currently the sport’s most dominant pitcher, allowing 11 hits and six walks against 48 strikeouts in a 4-1 May. The Cardinals launched an exploratory committee with getting no-hit by him last night, before a Padro Pages bloop single ended it in the sixth. Misiorowski had, to that point, pitched five no-hit innings with one walk and 10 Ks. Not bad.
St. Louis has been one of the luckiest teams in baseball
But the Brewers have supreme expectations this season. The Cardinals are the ones that need some expectations-consulting, which I am of course here to provide. Currently on pace for over 90 wins, six games above .500 despite a -3 run differential, FanGraphs has them projected for 81 wins — which probably won’t be enough in a competitive NL Wild Card race.
There is lots of evidence that the Cardinals have been among the luckiest teams in baseball, and we don’t have to look much further than their 7-1 record in extra innings or their 14 comeback wins. Those are some genie-in-a-bottle numbers that simply cannot and will not continue, though they’re actually underperforming most of their expected hitting stats in terms of contact quality, average and slugging. Of course, we don’t determine playoff seeds based on your contact quality, we do it with wins; in that department, this team has been very lucky.
So how lucky are they feeling? The Cardinals will eventually have to decide if they’re going to go for it with a flawed but better-than-expected roster or if they'll sell some valuable pieces — Dustin May or closer Riley O’Brien to name two. As Matt Martell pointed out on Sunday, it’s too early to make that determination given the work-in-progress status of their farm system under Chaim Bloom, but they are certainly better than we expected. Jordan Walker in particular has kept up his production and could really be a budding superstar. If nothing else, Cardinals fans can hang their hat on that.
The NL Central will make it hard for the Cardinals to keep this up
The problematic reality for the Cardinals is this: They have played about as far above their heads as you can expect so far this season, and only hold the second NL Wild Card spot by half a game. If they were in the AL West, they’d probably have a 99.5 percent chance to make the postseason (jokes, kind of, I mean they’d be in first place by four games), but they are stuck in a brutal NL Central in which every single team is two or more games over .500. At some point, this division is going to start cannibalizing itself, and I’m worried the Cardinals will wind up getting eaten.
That’s not to say there isn’t lots to build on, but I’d adopt a “wait and see” approach if I were Bloom as far as 2026 is concerned. This is a multi-year rebuild with quite a lot to like, and trading some older pieces might fit the timeline better than talking themselves into a 2026 Linsanity run. But none of those trade chips will net a titanic return, so they could also just chill out and see what happens! That’d be fun, relaxing and provide a nice bit of clarity on the season financed by house money. If I was a Cardinals fan, that plan has my vote.
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