Wednesday, July 08

The Cardinals have reached -- passed, actually -- the midpoint of their season and, much to the surprise of everyone (not least of which the team itself), they’re firmly in the playoff chase. No matter how this season turns out, and no matter how the team acts (or doesn’t act) leading up to the Aug. 3 Trade Deadline, this is an unqualified success. The Cardinals are much better, much faster, than anyone could have imagined.

This sort of success has many parents: There is no one player who has elevated the team to this point. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying to try to find a team MVP from the first half.

Below is a countdown of the top seven candidates, but first ...

Honorable Mentions: Nathan Church, José Fermín, Dustin May, Andre Pallante, George Soriano

Church has proven himself a potential lineup mainstay, a terrific defensive center fielder with pop. Fermín’s versatility has given manager Oliver Marmol considerable options. May has been up and down but has shown the highest ceiling of any starter. Pallante was the toughest cut from these top seven and may have turned his career around. And Soriano has become perhaps the team’s most reliable setup reliever.

As for the top seven ...

7. SS Masyn Winn

The Cardinals’ biggest issue with their pitching is their lack of strikeout stuff, particularly from their rotation. They’ve thus been forced to rely on their defense by keeping the ball down and letting the infielders take care of the rest. Winn, a Platinum Glove Award winner, is the center of that as one of the best shortstops in the game and a security blanket for any pitcher who can keep the ball down.

The bat hasn’t entirely come around the way the Cardinals might have hoped, but he has shown improvement and has busted out to a blistering start in July. Winn has been forced to be a veteran leader on this young team despite being just 24, and he’s beginning to very much look the part.

6. RP Riley O’Brien

O’Brien looked like a Mason Miller-esque dominant force in April before wobbling a bit in parts of both May and June, but for the last fortnight, he has returned to form. At his best, he looks like a pitcher who has found, at the age of 31, the formula that had eluded him earlier in his career.

This is an electric arm with sometimes overpowering movement. O’Brien is tied for second in the National League in saves and has been the fulcrum around which the rest of the bullpen has pivoted. The Cards are not currently in the race without him.

5. C Iván Herrera

The Cardinals have long been enamored with Herrera’s raw power, and while that has stayed mostly steady this year, the major improvement has been in his ability to get on base. Out of the pivotal two-hole, Herrera has raised his OBP by 20 points from last year and, in fact, leads the Majors in hit-by-pitches; he’s one of the main reasons Jordan Walker is leading the NL in RBIs.

Herrera has always kept his place in the catching rotation, and while he’s still not throwing anybody out, he has proven to be a reliable backstop for Cardinals pitchers, who increasingly trust him. You’d like to see a little bit more power productivity; you wonder if a consolidation of the on-base and the slugging is coming.

4. SP Michael McGreevy

Sure, the underlying numbers say that he should not have a 3.12 ERA. But those underlying numbers have been saying that for a while, and yet he keeps having more and more success. McGreevy has been the Cardinals’ most consistent starter -- no small feat on a team that has had only seven pitchers make a start this year -- and he has been able to regularly keep batters off-balance with his wide assortment of pitches.

If McGreevy can maintain that 3.12 figure in the second half, he would finish with the lowest ERA by a Cardinals qualified starter since Adam Wainwright’s 3.01 in 2021. Who saw that coming?

3. 1B Alec Burleson

The Cardinals knew what they had in Burleson after his breakthrough season in 2025. But he still had plenty to prove, particularly whether he (one of the “older” Cardinals regulars) was one of the players they’d be building around. That’s still up in the air, one supposes, but Burleson has only gotten better this year. That’s specifically true in the power department: He’s well on pace to zoom past his career high of 21 homers, and he hasn’t sacrificed his bat-to-ball skills to do so.

And seriously: Did anyone in the world think Burleson would be one of the top RBI men in baseball this year?

2. 2B JJ Wetherholt
He homered in his MLB debut on Opening Day, and it was a surprise to no one: Wetherholt has seemed like a 10-year veteran from the very beginning in St. Louis. He has been nothing but steady since then, constantly making adjustments and establishing himself as the odds-on favorite for NL Rookie of the Year honors.

Two ways Wetherholt has been even better than advertised: His power (particularly his opposite-field power) and his defense at second base, where he’s already one of the best in the game. A case can be made that he should have made the All-Star Game this year. He’ll have plenty of chances in the future.

1. RF Jordan Walker

This year might not have been Jordan Walker’s last chance -- he is still only 24, after all -- but certainly it was a referendum on whether he would be a significant part of the Cardinals’ future. Consider the referendum passed. Walker leads the NL in RBIs and became the power bat the Cardinals always believed he would be -- and that the franchise desperately needed. He’s about to play in his first All-Star Game, and he has become the sort of feared slugger that other teams pitch around, which only helps all the other hitters in the lineup.

Chaim Bloom’s front office is early on in the process of rebuilding the entire organization, to make it sustainable and constantly replenishing with new talent. But what they’re really trying to do is this: Find the next Jordan Walker. They have one now.

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