The most popular buzzword of 2025 St. Louis Cardinals season isn’t rebuild—in fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find an instance where John Mozeliak has ever uttered that term in describing the team’s plans for this year.
‘Reset’, ‘retool’ and ‘transition year’ have all been prominently featured at one time or another since the announcement at last year’s end-of-season press conference that the Cardinals were shifting the inputs on their perpetual win-now competitive aim. But none of those strike me as the best buzzword of the bunch, either.
No, in the battle for the best buzzword surrounding the 2025 St. Louis Cardinals, it’s gotta be ‘runway’ that takes the crown.
In allowing free-agent veterans on expiring contracts to walk after the 2024 season, the Cardinals opened up spots for internal candidates to have the type of ‘runway’ that had rarely been freely given in recent years. Before, the Cardinals were constantly running the rat race, trying to bandage a flawed roster with short-term solutions in hopes that it would be enough to keep them in contention.
When the plan to plug three starting rotation holes in one off-season went about as well as anyone could have hoped in 2024, and the Cardinals still fell short of the postseason, a shift in organizational direction was a reasonable endeavor.
The extent to which the players who would receive this longer leash would break through to find success in their roles would go a long way toward determining the kind of year that 2025 would be for the club. But that also meant, with a decreased payroll, conceding the possibility of a non-competitive season if things didn’t break in a favorable direction for the players in this category.
The Cardinals were prepared to ride through the storms with several players in order to better inform their decision-making on the long-term futures of those individuals. Unproven players often carry upside, so there was an argument to be made that the ceiling for the 2025 Cardinals wasn’t any lower than in other recent campaigns. But the floor wouldn’t be nearly as sturdy, and the organization had to be comfortable with that.
It was time, after all, to try something different than the perennial approach of swimming upstream against an MLB current that now demands more investment in infrastructure than in merely chasing your tail with free-agent spending. Especially in a realm where the Cardinals were never the team destined to truly break the bank on a transcendent splash in that market, anyway, this shift made sense. It just meant a willingness to take a step back when there was really no backup plan to the internal options getting their opportunity to sink or swim.
So far, we’ve seen this plan play out to perfection as the Cardinals have seen the likes of Matthew Liberatore, Kyle Leahy, Victor Scott II and Ivan Herrera step into roles that might not have been so readily attainable following an alternate version of this past winter.
If the Cardinals had strained to fill every perceived weakness with the roster to placate a fan base that has long demanded consistent excellence, it would have won the PR battle of the off-season at the risk of never truly discovering the heights of what some of these standout performers have brought to the table. For the first time in recent years, there’s an argument to be made that Mozeliak’s mantra of preaching patience has improved the state of the St. Louis Cardinals.
To move forward, they had to be willing to step back.
Now, we have to acknowledge that the story of this summer of baseball in St. Louis is far from being determined. The nine consecutive wins rattled off by the Cardinals to put them squarely back in the contention conversation in the NL Central have been remarkable—and fun to watch—but it’s fair to remember that we’re a long way from even getting to Flag Day. We haven’t even hit the mid-point of the month of May. There’s still a lot of baseball to be played.
But just six weeks after most would have said that Liberatore’s best chance to thrive in the big leagues would come in a relief role, the 25-year-old left-hander looks like the most prominent starting pitching asset in the entire Cardinals organization.
Kyle Leahy has us wondering what a middle reliever has to do to get an All-Star bid around here, for crying out loud. His 1.09 ERA to this point in the season should have Leahy in the discussion, at least.
Who thought Leahy would evolve into the most reliable reliever in Oliver Marmol’s bullpen upon his first taste of MLB action back in 2023? It has taken time and development, but Leahy looks like a stud, a silent assassin who fills out any role asked of him. He can also, apparently, tie hitters like Bryce Harper in knots as they look feebly at strike three. Add it to Leahy’s bag of tricks.
Then there’s Victor Scott II. If the Cardinals had made up their minds about him after he appeared decidedly overmatched at the plate in his first MLB stint in 2024, there might not have been a center field job for him to come in and claim this spring when the results of his winter of focus and determination showed up in Jupiter, Florida.
Can Ivan Herrera hold down a primary catcher role in the Majors? Maybe that’s one of those notions of ‘runway’ that gets lost in the shuffle this summer as the priority shifts to getting his bat into the lineup in whatever way possible, leaving the primary catching duties to Pedro Pages. The latter certainly looks the part in how he has commanded the pitching staff as the lead receiver during Herrera’s IL stint.
Meanwhile, Herrera has definitely shown that the bat plays. Can he catch, manage a pitching staff and the running game? It would be nice to know, since Herrera fitting into the catcher spot in future seasons would provide more flexibility for the rest of the lineup down the road. But, right now, he's DHing and they're winning games. Runway or not, if it ain't broke, why bother fixing it?
The contributions from these players that would have been considered ‘unproven’ coming into the year have been born out of ability meeting opportunity.
But on the other side of the ledger, as the Cardinals look to cement their status as a contender in the NL Central in the coming weeks, you have Jordan Walker and Nolan Gorman.
Their extended opportunities to sort through early-season struggles haven’t held the Cardinals back from achieving their current win streak and competitive record. But the natural question among fans lately is whether the runway will run out for this duo that is struggling to find its consistent footing on a team that is suddenly playing meaningful baseball again.
Although the squeeze for playing time has been exacerbated with Herrera gobbling up daily opportunities as the designated hitter, the Cardinals can still, for now, afford to let things play out with Gorman and Walker.
In Walker’s case, he’s still providing value defensively as a vastly improved right fielder. And all indications from the club are that it’s seeing the work it needs to see from him in how he’s approaching his struggles at the plate.
There might be less belief in Gorman's ability to muster a turnaround, but the hope is that raw power is still in there. Extracting it for the benefit of the Cardinals would be, theoretically, a great way to supercharge this batting order. Unfortunately, the notion of the theoretical has been carrying the weight in the Gorman conversation for far too long—but hey, there's still a chance, right?
Still, with the Cardinals’ laissez-faire approach to the off-season suddenly turning them into a competitive ball club, it could mean the team is compelled to revisit the concept of ‘runway’ sooner than it had previously anticipated.