Three St. Louis Cardinals who will improve this year and two who will regress

These three St. Louis Cardinals should have markedly better years in 2023, while two others will likely face a downturn.

Rebounders. Post-hype sleepers. Stumblers. With a new season comes a new opportunity for every player to show that he can take that next step and have a breakout year. While some players on the St. Louis Cardinals and elsewhere will successfully continue to build on their careers through hard work and adjustments, others will find the climb more harrowing than they expected and slip down the mountain, whether it comes through age-related decline, bad luck or just a mysterious loss of previously reliable skills.

Although it's impossible to predict with complete accuracy how a given player will do in the next season, the development and evolution of sabermetrics have made it so scouts, team executives, and even fans can analyze the tendencies of players and the outcomes they provided and make an educated guess on how that player will perform in the future.

The Cardinals, like every other team, had players fail to meet expectations and others surpass them. Everyone is trying to find that new approach to give himself a leg up on the competition and improve his results, and sabermetrics can't account for the changes a player makes in the offseason.

Still, be it through analytical sabermetric predictions or just some old-fashioned gut feelings, these are three players I believe will have a significantly better 2023 than 2022 and two players who will face tough backslides this season.