Thursday, June 18

As of the morning of June 16, the Cardinals had a 50.6 percent chance to make the postseason, according to FanGraphs’ odds. Fifty percent! On Opening Day, that number was 9.1 percent. Now, it’s a coin flip.

Few people saw that coming, including the Cardinals. It’s a remarkable turn of events for a team that was rather explicit in the offseason that 2026 results would not be the highest priority.

“Our top priority will be to build our talent base for the long term,” team president Chaim Bloom said when he was introduced as the new man in charge at the end of last season. “That may mean hard decisions and short-term sacrifices. But to get where we want to go, we can’t take shortcuts. … When we have to choose between short-term gratification and our bigger goal of contending consistently, we will choose the long term.”

So far, Bloom and the front-office brass have done nothing to contradict that statement. All players they added in the offseason -- Dustin May, Ryne Stanek and Ramón Urías -- were signed to short-term deals, and the only veterans they kept (Lars Nootbaar, Andre Pallante) are ones who didn’t have significant trade value at the time.

The surprising thing has been how well the pieces remaining on the roster have performed. These are mostly young players who are using 2026 as a way to prove their long-term fit with the team, like Alec Burleson, Iván Herrera, Riley O’Brien, Michael McGreevy and NL Rookie of the Year race front-runner JJ Wetherholt. Then, of course, there is Jordan Walker, whose emergence has come to serve as the symbol for a team that, at last, is taking big steps forward.

Not only are there forward momentum and 50-50 postseason odds, but the fanbase is slowly starting to stir back to life after some dormant years. Just look at the shirtless, pleasantly noisy dudes out in right field every night at Busch Stadium. So, the question must be asked: How much should the Cardinals prioritize this season?

Bloom’s focus on the long term has led some to suggest that the Cardinals should not deviate from their original plan. By that thinking, players such as May (whose brilliance of late, if continued, would make him one of the top starters available at the Trade Deadline), JoJo Romero and Nootbaar should still be flipped if the right deals can be found. And there is some sense to this. Bloom has shown an ability to get some incredibly useful pieces, for both the short and long term, from Deadline trades. The current starting third baseman, Blaze Jordan, came in return for Steven Matz, a player who didn’t have much utility left for the Cardinals when they traded him to the Red Sox on July 31. If a team is desperate for a pitcher like May or a bat like Nootbaar, and a prospect haul becomes realistic, Bloom will have to listen.

But the notion that St. Louis should be aggressively shopping those players, that Bloom shouldn’t consider the success of the current roster and think only about the long term, seems foolhardy. The thing about the young players currently fueling all this Cardinals success is that someday soon, they’ll be more experienced players, still playing for St. Louis, at the moment that the long term arrives and becomes the short term. Those players will be better for having gone through a postseason chase -- successful or otherwise -- and they’ll want to know the front office has their backs.

It is one thing to be cold-blooded in a fantasy baseball scenario; it is quite another to do it in the middle of an actual postseason push. How does Walker take it if, in his breakthrough season, the Cardinals are fighting for an NL Wild Card spot and suddenly trade the team’s ace? How does that make Walker feel about his future with the franchise? How would it make you feel, as a Cardinals fan? It would surely enter everybody’s mind the next time he and St. Louis are pursuing October.

It is also presumptuous to think that these playoff opportunities will be forever plentiful, that they’ll always happen no matter the best-laid plans. Ask the Orioles about that. Injuries happen, and young players don’t always progress as expected. Assuming you’ll be better in three years than you are now, and therefore don’t have to take advantage of your current opportunity, is just that: an assumption, not a fact.

The Cardinals are competing right now. Why worry about doing something in the future that you are, in fact, doing right now?

This is not to say St. Louis should be rash, that it should trade its top prospects for overpaid veterans to win as many games as it can in 2026, future be damned. (There’s no chance of that happening, anyway.) It doesn’t even mean the Cardinals should go outside the organization for help. But it does mean that actively subtracting, hurting this team’s active contention for a future theoretical one, is counterproductive.

Bloom and company have shown, through their nimble roster machinations over the past month, that they can improve this team without sacrificing in the long term. Maybe we can give them the faith that they can continue to do so without sacrificing the short-term, either.

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