Cardinals' season receives final nail in the coffin after Willson Contreras injury

Tell me if you've heard this story before: The St. Louis Cardinals have endured one of their bleakest stretches of baseball and are now going to be without star catcher Willson Contreras for a sustained stretch.

Nope, this isn't the beginning of May. The script seems to be repeating itself with this Cardinal team as we approach the end of July.

On a night when the Cardinals' little run of wins came to an end, Sonny Gray blew up again, and the offense looked overmatched, the club also lost Contreras to a fractured finger after getting nailed by a pitch that was left up and in by Pablo Lopez in the fourth inning.

We actually almost saw Brendan Donovan tonight as the club's emergency catcher, as he himself took a wild pitch off the neck but was able to remain in the game.

Losing Contreras for any amount of time is a huge blow for the Cardinals, as he has far and away been the club's best player this season. We don't know how much time Contreras will miss yet, but he has slashed .263/.379/.470 with 15 HR and 36 RBI, good for a 141 wRC+ over the 83 games he has appeared in this season. Contreras already fought his way back from a fractured forearm this season, but time is running out on the Cardinals' chances of making a playoff push and his return even mattering.

Catcher Ivan Herrera is being recalled from Triple-A to replace Contreras on the roster, so it will be good to see what he can do in an extended run with the big league club.

A lot was going to have to go right for the Cardinals to make any kind of playoff push the rest of the way, but now that Contreras is down, I think it is safe to say their playoff hopes are officially over.

This fanbase is going to want accountability and change this offseason. I think we were heading in that direction regardless of how things finished this season, but now it feels all but guaranteed that this era of Cardinals baseball and the leadership that built it will be coming to a close following the season, and a new regime will be tasked with picking up the pieces and getting the organization back on course.