St. Louis Cardinals: Highlights and key series in the 2020 schedule

Spring training games are already underway for the St. Louis Cardinals and the regular season will be here quickly. What highlights do fans have coming?

Fans are already overreacting over the results of spring training games, and the St. Louis Cardinals haven’t been playing for a week yet. It happens every year so it’s nothing new, I choose to look at spring overreactions as an expression that everyone missed baseball.

Over the course of the offseason, a lot of the analysis and results from previous seasons are pursed through and everyone is ready for new sets of information to worry about. Digging myself out of the weird hole I stepped in, baseball is back, baseball that counts is less than a month away.

That is the important thing.

The 2020 schedule has been out for a while, but now knowing the full scope of each team’s offseasons, looking closer at it can let us start to get excited about the big months ahead. Without more delay, what are some highlights for the 2020 schedule?

A Quick Start

Every Cardinals fan compares the team to the others in the NL Central. The Reds had a huge offseason, the Brewers reconstructed more than half of their roster, the Cubs are relatively the same, and we don’t need to talk about the Pirates. Right out of the gate, the Cardinals will be tested against not only the class of the NL Central, but also the NL as a whole.

Starting in Cincinnati, the Cardinals play three there then go straight to Milwaukee for three against the Brewers. They then play the home opener series against the Orioles. From there, the titan Dodgers come to town for four games before the Cards go to Wrigley for a series, then play the Dodgers, Rockies, and Reds again.

The Cardinals are going to have no time to start the year slowly. How interesting it will be to see the Cards play both Mookie Betts and Nolan Arenado in the first month after they were connected to both players in the offseason. It’ll be a fun time to be on social media during those series.

Interleague matchups

The Cardinals have an interesting interleague set coming for 2020 as the aforementioned Orioles come to St. Louis for the first time since 2003. If you forgot, the Orioles used to be the St. Louis Browns until after the 1953 season. This is an interesting start to the year and is a kick off to a fun year of interleague matchups.

More from St Louis Cardinals News

• Cardinals Rumors: 3 pros and cons of signing Carlos Rodon
• Cardinals: Here is Willson Contreras’ first message for St. Louis fans
• How do the St. Louis Cardinals stack up with Willson Contreras?
• Cardinals: The insane asking price the Athletics had for Sean Murphy
• St. Louis Cardinals: Ask me anything with Josh Jacobs – 12/8

In June, the Cardinals host Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and the Toronto Blue Jays for two games in St. Louis then head North of the border in August for two games in Toronto. June Also includes a tripe trip to historic Fenway Park to face the Betts-less Red Sox.

Prior to the All-Star break, the Cards will get to see Randy Arozarena and Jose Martinez again in Tampa Bay for three games and directly after, the almost-Cardinal Giancarlo Stanton and the Yankees come to town. The Yankees series is the first the Cardinals have played the winningest franchise since 2017 and will be just the third series the teams have played against each other since 2005.

Rounding out the interleague schedule is the yearly I-70 series which has the two games in Kansas City in August and the final two interleague games of the year in mid-September in St. Louis.

The Cardinals get to face some old faces and the class of the American League East in what should be competitive series all around.

The Final Stretch

Last season, the Cardinals had a brutal final stretch of the season where they played the Cubs, Nationals, and Brewers in 13 of the final 16 games. This year, we don’t yet know what the exact landscape of the NL Central will be, but the final stretch may be just as difficult.

In the final three weeks of the season, the Cardinals play the Cubs for four at home, then host Kansas City, then play four at Great American Ballpark, three against the Brewers, then finish the season in Chicago with three against the Cubs.

The NL Central may once again come down to those final three weeks as they did in 2019 and hopefully, the Cardinals once again come out on top.

The biggest issue I have with the 2020 schedule is that (just like in 2019), the Cardinals have three off-days on Fridays. Fridays are for baseball, not for rest. Either way, it’ll be a fun season and will be over before you know it. Be sure to enjoy it.