Chaim Bloom has one message for anyone asking whether the Cardinals are buying or selling at the deadline: stop asking that question. “Obviously, you factor in everything when you make these types of decisions at the trade deadline or any other time,” Bloom said earlier this month. “But to me, the special thing about this is we’ve gotten there because we’ve been focused on the right things.” It’s a tidy answer. It is also not really an answer, and the roster is doing a lot of the talking Bloom won’t.
Lars Nootbaar is available. Dustin May is available.
Those aren’t two throw-in names floated on a slow July conference call. May is the Cardinals’ top rental trade candidate, a pitcher good enough that contenders will happily overpay in prospects for two playoff-caliber months. Nootbaar is a different kind of chip entirely, a controllable, above-average two-way outfielder any front office building toward next year is supposed to keep, not shop. Put them on the market in the same week and this stops looking like a team quietly moving impending free agents. It starts looking like a front office pricing out its best rental and its best keeper at once.
Bloom made a version of this same case back in June, when his earlier deadline strategy leaned on staying patient instead of overpaying for a name-brand arm. Patience reads fine in April. It reads differently in late July, with St. Louis at 53-52 and sitting two games back of the wild-card fringe instead of comfortably in it or comfortably out of it.
That’s the part the “focused on the right things” line is doing a lot of work to smooth over. A team that’s genuinely decided to sell doesn’t dangle its best controllable outfielder. A team that’s genuinely decided to buy doesn’t shop its best rental starter. St. Louis is doing both. Two games from a playoff spot, with the deadline closing at 6 p.m. ET on August 3. It’s the front-office version of ordering surf and turf and asking the table to split the check evenly.
MLB Trade Rumors laid out exactly where the Cardinals sit entering the final stretch, describing a front office “walking both sides of the line” — trying to add without fully giving up the season:
Trade Deadline Outlook: St. Louis Cardinals https://t.co/s6iIgmwtMw pic.twitter.com/YqY1mnIosN
— MLB Trade Rumors (@mlbtraderumors) July 22, 2026
Reasonable people can defend that approach on paper. Bloom ran something similar for years in Tampa Bay, trading veteran pieces in-season while the Rays somehow kept winning anyway. There’s a real version of this where the Cardinals sell a depth piece or two and still make a wild-card push. But the Rays rarely put their best controllable everyday player in that mix while hanging on the fringe of the race. That’s the tell here. Bloom isn’t refusing to say buy or sell because he’s above the question. He’s refusing to say it because the honest answer, right now, is both, and neither, depending on which phone call comes in first.
