The Cardinals are at the point in the calendar where the roster picture starts to sharpen, and for a handful of players on the 40-man, the outlook is getting pretty bleak. As St.
Louis heads toward the finish of the 2026 season, the organization has plenty of reasons to keep turning over the roster and making room for younger talent. That leaves several current Cardinals looking like poor bets to be around when 2027 arrives.
Victor Scott II is the clearest sign of where things stand. Since coming back from Triple-A earlier this month, he’s been parked on the bench, which says plenty about how the Cardinals view his place in the outfield mix.
Nathan Church and Everson Pereira are already on the 40-man roster, Joshua Baez could see time in center field, and Bryan Torres, Jose Fermin, and Thomas Saggese have all shown enough versatility there to make Scott feel expendable. His big league line tells the same story: .203/.280/.256 in 810 plate appearances, with defense and baserunning only lifting his career fWAR to 0.9.
This season has been even rougher, as he’s hit just .190/.269/.252 for a 50 wRC+. It’s easy to root for Scott to find something somewhere else, but a return to St.
Louis feels unlikely.
Nolan Gorman is in a different kind of holding pattern, but the result points the same way. After his breakout 2023 season, he’s now gone through three straight years of regression, and the Cardinals may be better off admitting the fit hasn’t worked.
He’s hitting .188/.274/.314 with nine homers in 296 plate appearances this year, and his 64 wRC+ is the worst mark of his major league career. The strikeouts are still a problem too, with a 31.8 K%.
There has been some defensive improvement since he moved back to third base, but even that has come with enough shaky moments to keep the position unsettled. Third base remains open, but the club probably needs to stop waiting on Gorman to solve it.
Matthew Liberatore’s case is a little more complicated, but the end result still points toward a change. For a stretch of 2025, it looked like he might finally be settling in as a young starter worth building around.
In his first 10 starts that season, he posted a 2.73 ERA and 2.58 FIP across 59.1 innings. Since then, though, the numbers have gone off the rails.
Over his last 50 starts, he owns a 5.20 ERA and has averaged just under five innings per outing. Opponents are hitting .287/.345/.478 against him, and he has struck out only 20.7% of the hitters he’s faced.
His eRA is the third-worst among 55 starters with at least 240 innings in that span, and most of the advanced metrics are ugly too. Liberatore is entering his second year of arbitration, which means his $2.26 million salary from 2026 is about to climb.
The Cardinals have seen him succeed in relief before, so that route could make sense again, but the starter experiment seems ready to run out of road.
Cesar Prieto simply hasn’t made a case at the major league level. In 18 career games, he’s produced a -0.6 fWAR and a -57 wRC+, and there isn’t much room to keep carrying that on a roster already crowded with middle infielders and utility types.
The Cardinals also need to account for Jesus Baez, who is Rule 5 eligible this offseason and likely needs a 40-man spot. Prieto is currently occupying one of those spots, and unless he comes back on a minor league deal, he doesn’t look like a real part of the next roster build.
Pedro Pages could be the next catcher to get squeezed out, depending on how the offseason unfolds. If the Cardinals decide to cash in on Ivan Herrera or Jimmy Crooks trade value, Pages suddenly becomes a logical piece to move on from.
The same could happen if Herrera is moved off catcher altogether, which would change the timeline for Pages in St. Louis.
Right now, he’s clearly settled into a backup role, and while that gives him value elsewhere, it doesn’t necessarily give him much of a future here. With Rainiel Rodriguez on the way and Leo Bernal already staking a claim to the starting catcher job, Pages’ fit is fading fast.
In Other News...
Cardinals Reset Already Has One Veteran Miss Fans Wont Forget
The Cardinals rebuilding reset has moved quickly, and one of the early veteran additions did not last long. Ramon Urias was brought in to give St. Louis some stability and depth on the infield after the front office sent several experienced players elsewhere before the 2026 season, but injuries and poor production soon cut his stay short.
For a club that is clearly leaning into younger options under Chaim Bloom, Urias became a reminder that not every low-cost veteran fit is going to stick. St. Louis has already shown it is willing to keep moving on from established names as it sorts out the next core, and with few notable free-agent additions to speak of, the roster churn is likely to keep making room for prospects and role players who can actually take hold. [Read more 🡒]
Cardinals Quietly Added A Former Top Prospect While Bigger Moves Wait
While bigger roster questions wait for the offseason to open up, the Cardinals made a quieter add by claiming right-hander Chase Hampton off waivers from the Nationals. Hampton brings another arm into the organization at a time when depth matters, especially for a pitching pipeline that can always use more options heading into next year.
Hampton was once in the Yankees system and is working back from Tommy John surgery, which makes this less about an immediate impact and more about a longer view of what he could become. For now, St. Louis is holding other roster moves until the postseason wraps up, so this is the kind of under-the-radar pickup that can get overlooked even if it ends up mattering later. [Read more 🡒]
Cardinals May Soon Face A Pitching Decision Fans Will Debate
The Marlins have been testing a flexible pitching model that has started to draw attention around the league, and it is the kind of idea that naturally gets coaches, front offices and fans talking. By using some of their starters out of the bullpen between turns through the rotation and leaning on their scheduled side sessions, Miami is exploring a way to squeeze more value out of its arms without fully changing their roles.
For the Cardinals, it is the sort of experiment worth watching because it could offer another way to manage a staff over the long haul, especially if the game continues to demand more innings from fewer pitchers. Still, the conversation comes with the usual caution: the potential upside is clear enough, but the health questions and the actual payoff are not, and that is exactly why this kind of decision would be debated so heavily in St. Louis. [Read more 🡒]