The Cardinals acquired Riley O’Brien from Seattle for cash considerations in November 2023. Cash considerations. That’s not a trade — that’s a rounding error. Two and a half years later, contending teams are calling Busch Stadium about him, the Yankees are reportedly sketching out packages, and Mark Feinsand at MLB.com wrote that “a successful reliever with four years of club control would seem to be exactly the player a young team would want to hold on to, but O’Brien is already 31 years old and his value is as high as it’s ever been.” That tension — the four years of control versus the 31-year-old body and the peak market right now — is the actual decision Chaim Bloom has to make before August 3.
The Cardinals are in wild card territory. That wasn’t the plan.
Why O’Brien’s Value Has Never Been Higher
The surface stats are good: 3.68 ERA, 17-for-21 saves, 32 appearances. The underlying stuff is better. O’Brien’s sinker sits at 98.4 mph, he’s in the 93rd percentile in ground-ball rate, and his walk rate is essentially nonexistent at 2.6%. The Dodgers lost Edwin Diaz to elbow surgery and need a proven closer. The Yankees’ bullpen situation is a running disaster. The Blue Jays are watching Jeff Hoffman implode. All three teams have farm systems loaded enough to outbid each other on a closer with four years left on his deal.
Riley O’Brien gets the save for the Cardinals.
Here’s what I wrote about their closer situation tonight. pic.twitter.com/VA7UP9c39X
— Brendan Tuma (@toomuchtuma) April 6, 2026
That tweet is from early in the season, when O’Brien was still establishing himself in the role. By late June he’s converted 17 saves and the market has caught up to what he actually is. The window for the Cardinals to sell from a position of maximum leverage is not infinite — it closes the moment O’Brien has a bad week or a scout flags something in his delivery.
The Case for Selling: Bloom Already Wrote the Script
Chaim Bloom traded Ryan Helsley at the 2025 deadline. Helsley, the Cardinals’ closer at the time, went for prospects while the team was in the middle of its rebuild teardown. O’Brien is Helsley with four extra years of control and a hotter market.
Bloom has been explicit about his philosophy. Per CBS Sports coverage of the Cardinals’ rebuild, Bloom stated his operating principle directly: “When faced with a decision between short-term and long-term, choose the long-term every time.” He traded Arenado. He traded Sonny Gray. He traded Willson Contreras. He traded Brendan Donovan, a controllable player fans loved. The pattern is consistent and the O’Brien situation is the same calculus at a higher price point.
JoJo Romero is almost certainly gone regardless. Jeff Passan has the Cardinals moving him before the deadline, and with an expiring $4.26 million deal and a season that’s made him one of the more useful arms in the NL bullpen, Romero is the easy trade. That one doesn’t require a philosophical debate. O’Brien is the one that does.
The Case for Holding: This Team Is Ahead of Schedule
The 2026 Cardinals were supposed to be an evaluation year. Jordan Walker broke out. Rookie second baseman JJ Wetherholt has been legitimately good. Ivan Herrera. Alec Burleson. Lars Nootbaar missed the first two months with heel surgery before returning on June 5 — and even without him, the team climbed into wild card position.
Ken Rosenthal has suggested Bloom isn’t treating the standings as irrelevant. If the Cardinals are within striking distance at the deadline, Bloom won’t simply sell everything to clear the decks. The team’s surprising competitiveness is real, and trading your closer in July while you’re holding a wild card spot requires you to decide, clearly, that 2026 is not a real run.
That’s the honest conversation Cardinals fans deserve and haven’t gotten yet.
What the Front Office Has to Say Out Loud
Bloom’s Boston tenure ended, in part, because he was too slow to commit to a direction. The Red Sox fired him after years of operating in the uncomfortable middle — not rebuilding hard enough, not competing hard enough. Cardinals fans watched that tenure from a distance and the lesson was obvious: the worst outcome is organizational drift.
The Cardinals are hovering near the wild card. That’s good. O’Brien is drawing top-market interest. That’s also good. Those two facts are pulling in opposite directions, and no one in St. Louis has said plainly which one wins.
If the Cardinals are real contenders, hold O’Brien and go for it — a closer with four years of control is exactly the kind of piece you build around. If this is a transitional year that got unexpectedly fun, sell him now while the market is at its ceiling, pocket the prospect haul, and let the Walker-Wetherholt core develop without wasting their cheap years on a 87-win bubble season.
Both positions are defensible. The indefensible one is waiting until the deadline forces the answer at a lower price.
