Heading into Friday’s game, the Cardinals’ record stood at 14-10. Extrapolate that winning percentage over a full season, and we are looking at a 95-win pace! The Cardinals are back, let the good times roll! OK, a 95-win pace might be a little optimistic… Over at FanGraphs, their projection system actually likes the Cardinals LESS than when the season started and is projecting them to win only 45.6% of their remaining games (down from 46.4% on Opening Day). Maybe we shouldn’t start planning a parade just yet. I will fully admit that we still do not really know who these 2026 Cardinals are, but as they continue to bank wins, Chaim Bloom has to be considering the possibility of a more complicated trade deadline than originally anticipated. Since we do not know if the Cardinals are real, the only reasonable solution I can think of is to flip a coin (or a few million) and try to predict if Chaim Bloom will get to take a summer vacation or will be glued to the phone lines come August 3rd.
Before we start flipping coins, let’s set the stage. The Cardinals have played 24 games and have 89 more to go until the trade deadline. The NL Central is shaping up to be an absolute dogfight with all five teams currently over the .500 mark, but with the advent of the third wild card in 2022, there are an increasingly large number of teams that remain in contention later into the summer. So, with 14 wins in the bank, how many of the 89 games remaining until the deadline would the Cardinals need to win to be considered a proper contender and perhaps force Chaim to hang onto his expiring contracts or even consider adding players? To answer this question, I went back and looked at all teams with a record better than .500 on August 3rd of the last four seasons and averaged their odds of making the playoffs at that point in time.
This does not come close to capturing all the context of team quality, strength of schedule, and divisional situation, but it gives a directional reference point as to what kind of a record is needed to be considered “in contention” at the trade deadline. Nine of the ten teams between 7-9 games over .500 at the last four deadlines have had playoff odds greater than 50%, so that seems like as good a place as any to draw the contention line.
Using a random number generator, I simulated 100,000 sets of the 89 individual games remaining until the deadline to see how often the Cardinals landed at a 60-53 record or better by August 3rd. For the first run, I slightly weighted the coin to give the Cardinals a 45.6% chance to win each game to reflect their current rest-of-year projected winning percentage. Here are the results:
So if we assume the projection systems nailed the Cardinals’ team quality and the first 24 games were just lucky, the hot streak has given them a 15% chance to be squarely in contention with another 19% chance of being over .500 but more on the fringes of the race. This raises the question, what were the chances going into the season that the Cardinals would be in contention at the deadline, if we assume the projected 45.6% winning percentage is accurate? I re-ran the simulation for the full pre-deadline 113-game sample size without giving the computer knowledge of the first 24 games. Out of 100,000 runs, only 6.5% of the stretches ended with a record of 60-53 or better, less than half of what the simulation spits out now.
Now, what if you are on the more optimistic end of the spectrum and the first 24 games have convinced you that the Cardinals are a true-talent .500 ballclub and have roughly even odds in each game? Once again, I ran 100,000 sets of the remaining 89 pre-deadline games and saw a dramatic increase in complicated trade deadline scenarios. The results:
There you have it: if you accept the premise that 7 games over .500 at the trade deadline is fully “in contention” AND you believe the Cardinals are a .500 talent team, there is a 42% chance of a trade deadline that will have Chaim tossing and turning.
The real question I was trying to answer with this article was how impactful early-season wins can be in setting the stage for one of the largest front-office decision-making points each season. Obviously, the front office will have a more robust algorithm than “7 games over .500 we buy or hold, anything worse, we sell.” The standings at that point in time will be a real factor, as will the internal assessment on how “real” the team’s record is. Still, this framing does give a directional sense of what it means to bank early-season wins. If the Cardinals continue at this pace for another month, or stumble into a seven-game winning streak, the team’s position could force Chaim into making an uncomfortable decision.
What would the Cardinals’ record need to be for you to support the unthinkable, adding at the deadline? Should Bloom continue to stay the course of deferred gratification and trade all the expiring contracts no matter what? I am not sure how I would answer either of these questions, but I would love to wrestle with them for another couple of months, if the Redbirds want to keep on winning for a bit.