Baseball has decided the Cardinals will play at 5:15 EST on a Thursday afternoon, that sweet spot between lunch and dinner. It exists because the sky opened up over Busch back in June and the schedule has been limping ever since, and now here we are, first pitch at a quarter past five against a team that walked off on us four days ago.
And the maddening part is that it matters.
D-backs at Cardinals: How to Watch
- First pitch: 5:15 p.m. ET, Busch Stadium (makeup of June 25)
- TV: Cardinals.TV; DBACKS.TV
- Radio: KMOX 1120 AM / 104.1 FM and WIJR 880 AM (en español); Arizona on ESPN 620 AM and La Campesina 101.9 FM
- Probables: RHP Brandon Pfaadt (4-1, 4.58) vs. RHP Michael McGreevy (4-7, 2.92)
- Records: Arizona 53-49, St. Louis 52-49
One Game Apart, Same Wild Card
Arizona is 53-49 and second in the West. St. Louis is 52-49 and third in the Central. Baseball Reference has the D-backs at 35.6 percent to reach the postseason and the Cardinals at 30.2 percent, and both of those numbers point at the same third wild card spot.
These are not two teams playing out a Thursday. These are two teams standing on the same square of ice.
The split since the All-Star break could not be starker. Arizona has scored 21 runs in its last two games and 40 in its last six, hitting .290 as a team and ranking top five in the National League in OPS, on-base percentage and slugging. St. Louis is 2-4 in the second half with the sixth-fewest runs in baseball over that stretch — a .214 average and three home runs, total.
We Just Played Them. It Did Not Go Great.
Last weekend in the desert, the Cardinals took the opener 5-4 and then lost the next two, including a walk-off in the tenth on Sunday, 8-7, with Luis Gastelum wearing it. Getting walked off in extra innings on a Sunday in Arizona is the kind of thing you carry home in your carry-on.
Arizona is 4-2 against St. Louis this season. They also swept three at Dodger Stadium the weekend before that, and put fifteen runs on the Athletics on Wednesday. They are playing like a team that believes something.
Lineups
Lineups subject to change.
| # | Cardinals | Pos | AVG |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | JJ Wetherholt | 2B | .257 |
| 2 | Jordan Walker | RF | .289 |
| 3 | Alec Burleson | DH | .279 |
| 4 | Lars Nootbaar | LF | .248 |
| 5 | Masyn Winn | SS | .240 |
| 6 | José Fermín | 3B | .256 |
| 7 | Nathan Church | CF | .228 |
| 8 | Blaze Jordan | 1B | .253 |
| 9 | Jimmy Crooks | C | .169 |
| # | D-backs | Pos | AVG |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ketel Marte | 2B | .258 |
| 2 | Corbin Carroll | RF | .252 |
| 3 | Geraldo Perdomo | SS | .237 |
| 4 | Gabriel Moreno | C | .302 |
| 5 | Max Kepler | LF | .235 |
| 6 | Tim Tawa | 1B | .217 |
| 7 | Adrian Del Castillo | DH | .195 |
| 8 | Ildemaro Vargas | 3B | .264 |
| 9 | Ryan Waldschmidt | CF | .260 |
Michael McGreevy Is 4-7 With a 2.92 ERA
Nineteen starts. A 2.92 earned run average. One hundred and eight innings, a 1.10 WHIP, 71 strikeouts against 24 walks. And a 4-7 record, because run support is something that happens to other people’s pitchers.
Early in his career the book on McGreevy was that he was lucky — soft contact that would eventually regress. A 1.10 WHIP across nineteen starts is not luck. That is the eighteenth overall pick from 2021 becoming exactly what the scouting report promised, on a staff that needed it badly.
If you want one number that explains the 2026 Cardinals, it isn’t the record. It’s a 2.92 ERA attached to a losing pitcher.
Brandon Pfaadt goes for Arizona at 4-1 with a 4.58, which is roughly the inverse arrangement, and which will annoy you if you think about it for more than four seconds.
Why Cardinals Fans Cannot Enjoy a Lead
It isn’t that they lose. It’s that no lead is a lead.
Matthew Liberatore has a habit of finding trouble early — a missed call, a walk, and suddenly there’s a crooked number up before anyone’s found their seat. Then the bullpen comes in and throws zeroes the rest of the way. Eight and a third scoreless. Wonderful. Five-nothing.
And every arm down there has a name that turns up in trade columns. Riley O’Brien is an All-Star with 42 appearances and a permanent residence in every rumor with a St. Louis area code. He also throws ninth innings that take a decade off your life and end with the Cardinals winning by one, which is somehow both the problem and the solution.
The deadline is August 3. Everyone in that bullpen knows it, and you can hear it.
Jordan Walker Is Still Doing It
Twenty-two home runs, a .289 average, an .868 OPS. Ninety-nine games, ninety-five of them in right field. He won the Home Run Derby nine days ago and came back and kept hitting, which is not what usually happens to Derby winners and is exactly what you’d want from a 24-year-old who spent three seasons being called a disappointment.
He hits second. Behind him, Alec Burleson has 69 RBI, and JJ Wetherholt — the rookie — leads off with fifteen homers and ten steals. The lineup is young and it is fun and it is one competent bullpen away from being a real problem for somebody in October.
Who’s Available Off the Bench
Cardinals
Iván Herrera — 101 games, an All-Star, the regular designated hitter — starts on the bench, with Burleson at DH instead. Herrera is 2-for-10 with two RBI lifetime against Pfaadt, so this isn’t a matchup call. Expect to see him. Also available: catcher Pedro Pagés (1-for-7 vs. Pfaadt) and outfielders Bryan Torres and Nelson Velázquez.
D-backs
And here’s the one that will get a reaction at Busch. Nolan Arenado is not in the starting lineup.
The former Cardinal — 96 games and 94 starts at third base for Arizona this season — sits while Ildemaro Vargas plays third. Arenado is 0-for-3 lifetime against McGreevy, a sample size of nothing, so this reads as a scheduled day off rather than a matchup decision. If St. Louis takes a lead late, he is exactly the bat Arizona sends up.
The rest of the D-backs bench: outfielder Jorge Barrosa, first baseman Tyler Locklear, catcher James McCann.
Masyn Winn owns Brandon Pfaadt. He’s 4-for-10 with a 1.238 OPS against him — comfortably the best history any Cardinal has with today’s starter, which is a strange sentence to write about a shortstop hitting .240.
Going the other direction, Gabriel Moreno is 2-for-3 against McGreevy with a 1.667 OPS, and Tim Tawa is 1-for-2 with a home run. Ketel Marte, Max Kepler and Ildemaro Vargas are each 1-for-3.
Jordan Walker, for all the noise he’s made this month, is 2-for-11 against Pfaadt.
MLB The Show 26 Has Jordan Walker at 66
Sixty-six. The Home Run Derby champion, a first-time All-Star, hitting .289 with 22 home runs and 76 RBI in 99 games, is rated sixty-six overall.
That puts him one point ahead of Nathan Church, who is hitting .228, and dead even with Thomas Saggese, who has played in 32 games. San Diego Studio looked at the man who beat Kyle Schwarber in Philadelphia and landed on: about a Nathan Church.
In fairness to the algorithm, Walker spent three seasons being genuinely bad and ratings lag reality. In fairness to reality, he is the best position player on this roster and the game has him twentieth.
The Top of the List
Masyn Winn is the highest-rated Cardinal at 82, defensible if you’re paying for the glove — slickest shortstop this side of Bobby Witt Jr. — and harder to defend against a .240 average and four home runs.
Second, at 80, is Matt Svanson. A middle reliever with 38 appearances. He is rated fourteen points higher than the Derby champion.
Alec Burleson and Kyle Leahy tie at 76. Iván Herrera, an actual All-Star, sits ninth at 73.
The One Thing It Gets Right
JJ Wetherholt is 72 overall, which is stingy for a rookie leading off with 15 homers and ten steals. But his potential grade is A — the only A on the entire forty-man roster. Nobody else clears a B.
So the game is saying two things at once: not much today, everything tomorrow. For a 23-year-old four months into his career, that’s probably right, and it’s more faith than it has extended to Walker.
Elsewhere in that column: Nathan Church, D. Jimmy Crooks, D. Hunter Dobbins, D. The game is not hiding its opinions.
Ratings move during the season, so the 66 should climb. It had better.
Baseball Without Borders at Busch
Look down the Arizona lineup card. Ketel Marte and Geraldo Perdomo are Dominican. Gabriel Moreno, hitting .302 and catching, is Venezuelan, as is Ildemaro Vargas at third. And hitting fifth is Max Kepler — born in Berlin, one of the very few German-born players ever to reach the majors and by a distance the best.
Arizona starts five international players today. St. Louis starts one.
The D-backs roster runs deeper still: seven Venezuelans including All-Star lefty Eduardo Rodríguez, five Dominicans including 40-year-old Carlos Santana in his seventeenth season, Cuban Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Nicaraguan Jonathan Loáisiga, Mexican Gerardo Carrillo, and Canadians Michael Soroka and Mitch Bratt. Eight countries in one clubhouse.
St. Louis answers with Panamanian All-Star Iván Herrera, Venezuelan catchers Pedro Pagés and Yohel Pozo, Puerto Ricans Bryan Torres and Nelson Velázquez, Mexicans Ramón Urías and Luis Gastelum, Dominicans José Fermín and George Soriano, and Cuban César Prieto. Fermín is the one in today’s lineup, at third base.
What Happens Next
The Reds come to Busch for the weekend after this. Three games over .500, one game back of Arizona, eleven days until the deadline, and a front office that has to decide whether this group is worth adding to or worth thinning out.
Nobody knows. That’s sort of the point. You come to the ballpark and you see something you’ve never seen before, and then you drive home arguing about it.
First pitch, 5:15 p.m. ET. It is a stupid time for a baseball game. Watch it anyway.
