MILWAUKEE — Andre Pallante put on a light impression of Triple-A Memphis pitching coach Darwin Marrero as he recited a mantra of Marrero’s that in many ways sums up the central thesis of the 2026 St. Louis Cardinals season: “You either win or you get better.”
These Cardinals did more of the former than many expected, and by their calculations, a whole hell of a lot of the latter. They finished the 2026 season on Sunday with a 6-4 loss to the Brewers which dragged them across the finish line at 77-85. They were 2-11 against the Crew and 0-6 at American Family Field, a frequent venue for humbling results that nonetheless houses a competitive vision which lingers hazy on the horizon as a potential outcome for a long (?) path along a rebuild.
“This group is young, they’re learning how to be big leaguers, they’re learning how to be consistent with their tools, and that’s what makes it exciting,” manager Oli Marmol said. “It’s a really good start, and that’s the point of a rebuild. You should get better every year until you’re the best.”
There have been plenty of teams of recent vintage who kickstarted a rebuild at the bottom of the bottom. There have been teams on both sides of Chicago, in Baltimore, in Houston, in Kansas City, perpetually in Pittsburgh and Anaheim and Cincinnati where there not only is not hope or progress, there’s also not even the vague outlines of a plan. Whatever there is to be said of the way in which the Cardinals embarked upon this season, undertaken with a shockingly low payroll that even still was half-filled by dead money spent on players playing elsewhere, they did not win 57 games. That is a bar so low that it would almost need to be buried, but it is also not a bar that all teams are guaranteed to clear.
“I credit the overall mentality of the group for that, because the attention to detail was super high for that clubhouse,” Marmol said. “You look at how many one-run games we were on the right side of and the wrong side of, every night was a dogfight, and you only do that when you’re dialed in to the small things.”
Even after a season-ending loss, with some players rushing to catch flights home for the winter, others will still pouring over paperwork, in conversation with coaches. Victor Scott II sat with Casey Chenoweth, one of the assistant hitting coaches. Brycen Mautz and Quinn Mathews were with pitching strategist Kyle Driscoll, talking as they ate and squeezing every opportunity for a moment or a conversation out of time together before winter sets in.
It’s a winter that does not come with guarantees. The end of a collective bargaining agreement will certainly bring on a lockout initiated by ownership, as a negotiating tactic if nothing else, and it would take an atmospheric shock to avoid the sport going dark for perhaps months over the winter. There will be disruptions, some of which the Cardinals learned to weather in the winter of 2021. There will be fewer small moments to remind everyone who invests in the grind of a 162-game season that the grind is sincerely worth it, as well as hard, and necessary to work through.
There are also rumors and whispers inside the clubhouse, maybe born more of hoping and wishing than cold analysis, that the team is prepared to tick up its spending ahead of 2027. That will, in part, be unavoidable; Ryne Stanek’s option decision is the only looming free agency-adjacent potential departure on the immediate horizon. There will be plenty of other shifts and cuts around the margins, players added to protect them from the Rule 5 draft, and natural attrition.
But they did not win 57 games. They won 77. That is not perhaps a fully accurate gauge of where the long-term success prospects lie, but it doesn’t mean nothing. It can’t be allowed to mean nothing. There is a balance between skipping over important parts of building a healthy organization and adding supplements when the time is right.
The Cardinals do not yet know when the time is right, or if they think they do, they aren’t yet willing to say. Chaim Bloom will meet with the media on Monday afternoon and lay out some of that vision as he discusses the organization’s plans for the winter. They will be fascinating, and after a year in which the fair and prudent thing to do was to judge the organization by its own standards, it remains to be seen when the time will be to dig up that bar and raise it.
Marmol addressed the team following the finale, taking them through a laundry list of what he felt were some of the most important highlights of the season. JJ Wetherholt’s big league debut made that list, and so did Bryan Torres’. Those were very different events, he pointed out, but each says something about where the organization is and what they hope they have the capacity to be.
“The most important part of all of this is how they responded to the moments that weren’t good, because I think we were pretty elite at that,” Marmol said. “We played some of our best games after the biggest gut punches. That says a lot about the group when we talk about buy in and what we want to be known for. That is what matters, in my opinion.”
More will matter soon. Perhaps sooner than they expected.
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