St. Louis Cardinals Slide Out of the Wild Card as Sell-Off Talk Gets Real

If you wanted one week to explain where the St. Louis Cardinals actually are in 2026, the first seven days after the All-Star break did the job with brutal efficiency. St. Louis went 2-5, coughed up a 7-0 lead in the desert, lost a game on a bases-loaded hit-by-pitch in Anaheim, and slid clean out of the National League wild-card picture they'd occupied at the break. And the biggest St. Louis Cardinals news of the week arguably wasn't any single score — it was the shift in tone around the Aug. 3 trade deadline, where a front office that looked like a modest buyer three weeks ago is now, per multiple national reports, trending firmly toward selling.

The Cardinals' Week That Was: 2-5 With a Collapse in the Middle

The trip started well enough. On Friday, July 17 at Chase Field, the Cardinals edged the Diamondbacks 5-4 behind JJ Wetherholt's 402-foot solo homer — his 14th — and three RBIs from Masyn Winn. Arizona tied it on a Corbin Carroll two-run shot in the eighth, but Iván Herrera's go-ahead sacrifice fly in the ninth and Riley O'Brien's 25th save got St. Louis to 51-45. It was the last comfortable night of the week.

Saturday brought a 5-3 loss in which Brandon Pfaadt outpitched Dustin May and former Cardinal Nolan Arenado — yes, he's a Diamondback now — stuck the knife in with a two-run double. Jimmy Crooks' ninth-inning homer was cosmetic. Then came Sunday, the game that will linger. St. Louis built a 7-0 lead behind a five-run third inning in which Blaze Jordan tripled home a run and later added a two-run single. Arizona chipped, chipped some more, tied it on Arenado's two-run homer in the eighth, and won it 8-7 on Max Kepler's walk-off double in the tenth. Blowing seven-run leads is not something playoff teams do in mid-July.

The Anaheim leg was somehow more deflating. Monday, Kyle Leahy gave the Cardinals six innings of one-run ball and they lost anyway, 3-2, when O'Brien's fifth blown save unraveled into a Jo Adell walk-off hit-by-pitch with the bases loaded. Tuesday, the Angels scored all five of their runs in the first inning off Matthew Liberatore — Adell's two-run homer the big blow — and cruised 5-1 despite Alec Burleson's 3-for-4 night. Wednesday finally delivered a clean win: Hunter Dobbins, making a spot start, threw six shutout innings on 86 pitches, Wetherholt provided the game's only run with a sixth-inning solo shot, and O'Brien struck out the side for save No. 26 in a 1-0 victory in which St. Louis managed just three hits. Then Thursday's makeup game against Arizona at Busch Stadium went sideways fast — Pfaadt beat them for the second time in six days, the Diamondbacks banged out 16 hits, Tyler Locklear went 3-for-5 with a homer and three RBIs, and the 10-6 loss dropped the Cardinals to 52-50.

Standout Performances: Wetherholt, Dobbins and the O'Brien Rollercoaster

Both Cardinals wins had the same two fingerprints on them. Wetherholt homered in each — the 402-footer on Friday and the game-winner in the 1-0 nail-biter — and continues to look like the middle-of-the-order presence this lineup badly needs. Dobbins' six scoreless innings (six hits, five strikeouts, no walks) in a spot start was the pitching performance of the week by a mile, especially in a stretch where Liberatore surrendered five earned runs and Michael McGreevy gave up four over 6.1 innings in the Thursday loss.

O'Brien, the All-Star closer, embodied the whole week: two saves, including that dominant ninth on Wednesday, but also the Monday meltdown that turned a winnable game into a walk-off loss. There were quieter bright spots too. Burleson had his three-hit game in Anaheim, Winn drove in three in the opener, and Jordan Walker carried a 20-game on-base streak into the weekend — tied with Kyle Schwarber for the longest active run in baseball at the time.

Where the St. Louis Cardinals Stand in the NL Central

The division race is functionally over. Milwaukee has run away with the NL Central — the Brewers sat at 64-38 through midweek — with the Cubs in second, and the Cardinals in third at 52-50, roughly a dozen games back. The realistic prize was always the wild card, and that's exactly what made this week so costly. St. Louis held the final NL wild-card spot as recently as July 21. By July 22, The Athletic was writing that the Cardinals were trending out of it, and after Thursday's head-to-head loss, Arizona (54-49) had leapfrogged them for the third spot, leaving St. Louis about a game and a half back. The underlying trend is worse than the snapshot: the Cardinals have lost 11 of their last 16.

Injury Report and Roster Moves

The medical news was mercifully short but strategically painful:

• JoJo Romero (LHP) landed on the 15-day injured list with appendicitis, retroactive to July 14, and is expected to miss more than the minimum. Beyond the bullpen hole, the timing clouds the value of one of the Cardinals' most obvious trade chips.
• Ramón Urías (3B) remains on the 60-day IL with a left elbow issue and has no verified return date after missing most of the season.

On the transaction wire, catcher Yohel Pozo was designated for assignment and right-hander Scott Blewett had his contract selected to take a bullpen spot — the kind of margins-of-the-roster churn that tells you the front office is already thinking about August.

Trade Deadline Watch: The Sell Side Is Calling

Here's where the Cardinals week in review gets interesting. As recently as July 6, Ken Rosenthal was projecting first-year president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom as a modest buyer. Then the losing happened. MLB Trade Rumors' July 21 deadline outlook described St. Louis as "straddling both sides," listing rental candidates Dustin May, Romero and Urías alongside controllable names like Lars Nootbaar, O'Brien, Andre Pallante and Ryne Stanek, plus catching depth in Crooks and Leo Bernal. A day later, The Athletic's Tim Britton and Chad Jennings went further, writing that the Cardinals are "clearly trending to the sell side" — with May the most obvious rental chip and O'Brien, who comes with three more years of control and elite save totals, potentially the most valuable piece they could move. Nothing has happened yet. But with the deadline on Aug. 3 and the team playing like this, the direction feels less like a debate every day.

What's Next for the Cardinals

The schedule offers one last chance to change the conversation, and it all happens at Busch Stadium — an eight-game homestand that began with Thursday's makeup loss:

• July 24-26 vs. Cincinnati Reds — Friday at 7:15 p.m. CT, with May, Pallante and Leahy lined up against Rhett Lowder, Hunter Greene and Andrew Abbott, per published probables.
• July 27-30 vs. Chicago Cubs — four games against the division's second-place team, ending the day the front office effectively has to declare itself.

Seven home games against the Reds and Cubs, ending three days before the deadline, could not be more cleanly scripted as a referendum.

So that's the tension heading into the weekend: the roster is playing its way out of the race at the exact moment the front office has to price it. If the Cardinals stack wins against Cincinnati and Chicago, Bloom can justify standing relatively pat and chasing that third wild card. If the last two weeks continue, expect the next round of St. Louis Cardinals news to be about departures — May first, maybe Romero once healthy, and just possibly the closer. Either way, the most consequential week of the Cardinals' season starts now, and for once that isn't hype. It's arithmetic.