Celebrating Cardinals legend Adam Wainwright's (accurate) optimism

It was a tweet that made you think. Well, it’s more likely that it’s a tweet that first made you do a double-take. But then it made you think.

On May 4, beloved former Cardinals pitcher (and now country crooner) Adam Wainwright posted on X that the Cardinals may not be as bad as we all were imagining.

That day, the Cardinals had swept the Mets in a doubleheader. (It’s still too soon to address the Blues portion of that tweet.)  It was probably the best two wins for the team at that point in the year, but it would be farcical to pretend that optimism was particularly high.

Even after the sweep, the team’s record stood at 16-19. They were in fourth in the NL Central, five games out of first place. They had the fifth-worst record in the entire National League.

Since then? The Cardinals have gone 11-2 (as of the time of this writing). In Adam we trust?

Look, I’m about as big an Adam Wainwright fan as there is, but even I thought this was probably just his trademark optimism. Yes, the double-header sweep was nice, but the team’s brutal play in April, its unreliable bullpen, and the lack of success from either Jordan Walker or Nolan Gorman left a lot to be desired. You had to really squint to try and see that this team might reel off a 11-2 stretch.

But Wainwright looks like he was right. No new pieces were added, of course, but tweaks were made to the bullpen and the lineup, and now the team taking the field looks like vintage Cardinals baseball.  The team is still winning at home, but they're winning on the road, too. They can win slugfests or squeak out 1-0 thrillers.

It helps, of course, to have incredible defense, along with a rotation that looks like it's clicking and a bullpen that finally seems to have allowed fans to put away the Tums. Matthew Liberatore is quietly pitching like one of the best in baseball, and Ivan Herrera is doing his best Albert Pujols impression.

Is this kind of run sustainable? Will the rotation run out of gas or will Herrera cool down? Will the Cubs simply run away this thing at some point this summer?

Maybe. But for now let’s appreciate what we have. What looked like a season of discontent has morphed into what should be a summer of fun. Even if the team can’t stay in contention through the end of the season, the future looks so much brighter than it did before. Victor Scott II and Liberatore look like the real deal, Lars Nootbaar has stayed healthy thus far, and Brendan Donovan is putting together an All-Star-worthy season.

I’ve long self-identified as a Cardinals homer who always tried to see things through red-colored glasses. But it's also no secret that I’ve been rather pessimistic about the team heading into this year.

Maybe by the end of the year, that pessimism will still look right. But for now, I was way off base and Adam Wainwright was right. Cardinals baseball is fun again.

And that’s worth celebrating.