Examining the St. Louis Cardinals’ 2022 regular season schedule

The St Louis Cardinals’ 2022 regular season schedule is out and, well, the early signs are it isn’t gonna be easy.

Major League Baseball released the 2022 schedule and it’s already clear that the St. Louis Cardinals will not have a cakewalk to the postseason.

For the second straight year, they will be playing the Pittsburgh Pirates at PNC Park. Their next series, a two-game stint against the Chicago Cubs, will mark their earliest trip to Wrigley Field since 2015, according to MLB.com. The other highlights from the schedule include Interleague Play against the American League East, with each series against the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Tampa Bay Rays, Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays coming at Busch Stadium.

The end of the season, when the Cardinals would ideally be making their playoff push, will come with three straight series on the road against the San Diego Padres, Los Angeles Dodgers and Milwaukee Brewers before coming back to St. Louis for a three-game series against the Pirates.

Examining the schedule this early is always a flawed exercise — we don’t know what the Cardinals or any of these teams will look like next season — and we also don’t even know if baseball will start on time next year, as the Collective Bargaining Agreement is up and the negotiations between MLB and the MLBPA are expected to be very tense.

But it will be interesting to see what the Cardinals look like next year. For one, they’ll have Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt back again. The offense should (hopefully) have some more firepower alongside them. But the rotation should look drastically different, with talk that one of, if not both, of Alex Reyes and Jordan Hicks could enter the starting unit.

There should be more clarity as the offseason continues, but right now, the early indications are the Cardinals will have their hands full next season.