Cardinals' historically bad win projection for 2026 is sobering for fans

Even with the guarded optimism surrounding Chaim Bloom during his first offseason as President of Baseball Operations, the St. Louis Cardinals and their fans were handed a blow by national projection systems. While ZiPS and other player-specific projections have been released, Baseball Prospectus just released their first prediction using their PECOTA system.

The St. Louis Cardinals are projected to be the third-worst team in the majors in 2026

As the Cardinals subtracted their high-priced, aging, and/or valuable talent from their major league roster, fans were understanding of most moves while also staying positive about what those deals meant. Losing Sonny Gray, Willson Contreras, and Nolan Arenado all said different things about those players and the Cardinals organization, but it also created opportunities that we expected to be central to the team last season. None of those three are regarded as small losses, but the overall hit those departures are expected to have on the rest of the roster was minimal. After the team won 78 games last season, fans saw little reason to believe that losing that trio and pairing that with the pitching that came back and the expected emergence of youngsters JJ Wetherholt and Ivan Herrera, a massive drop-off in wins seemed like an unreasonable expectation.

That is not what that national media believes, though. After the Cardinals dealt Brendan Donovan, FanDuel dropped the Cardinals' projected win total to 69.5, on which I admittedly took the over. It turns out that I, along with a lot of other social media Cardinal fans, could be blinded by our Cardinal-colored glasses, because Baseball Prospectus agrees with the underperforming expectation. In the first PECOTA projections of 2026, the Cardinals are projected to finish an abysmal 66-96 and last place in the NL Central. If that's not enough, that record would be historically bad.

Since the league moved to a 162-game season, the Cardinals have never won fewer than 70 games in a season. 2026 could set a new basement for St. Louis, even if the FanDuel number is hit. In the first year of a rebuild, losing is expected, but the number of losses fans are expecting the Cardinals to accumulate still does not approach the ominous 100 number. A 70-win season seems realistic, and even palatable to a point, but anything less than that would mean that things went severly wrong.

Last year, the Cardinals trotted out Miles Mikolas and Erick Fedde for a combined 51 starts, and both of those pitchers are mercifully unemployed by St. Louis. Fedde has since signed with the White Sox, while Mikolas remains a free agent, but the replacements taking the mound for the Cardinals are expected to be better than the combined 11-21 record that Mikolas and Fedde put up last season. Replace those two and add a full season of Ivan Herrera, additional seasons of growth for Masyn Winn and Victor Scott II, and hopeful steps forward by Jordan Walker and Nolan Gorman, 2026 could be full of surprising performances. Add in the fact that JJ Wetherholt is likely going to see plenty of time at the major league level, the upcoming season could be full of excitement, even if it does not come with tallies in the win column.