St. Louis is a baseball town that lives and breathes on box scores. But if you spent any time looking at the St. Louis Cardinals player stats from the 2025 season, you know that the spreadsheets don't always tell the happy story we're used to seeing at Busch Stadium. It was a year of "what ifs" and "not quites."
The Cardinals finished 2025 with a 78-84 record. Honestly, it felt a lot heavier than that. For the third straight year, October baseball was a ghost in St. Louis. While Chaim Bloom takes the wheel from John Mozeliak heading into 2026, the numbers left behind by the 2025 squad are basically a roadmap of where things went off the rails.
The Willson Contreras Experiment and a Power Vacuum
The most jarring shift in the 2025 St. Louis Cardinals player stats was Willson Contreras's move to first base. Replacing a legend like Paul Goldschmidt is a tall order. Contreras did his best, puttering through an ice-cold April where he hit a miserable .145, but he eventually found his rhythm.
By the time the season wrapped, Contreras was slashing .257/.344/.447. That's a 123 wRC+, which is actually pretty solid for most players, but it's a bit of a "red flag" when you realize he led the team in home runs with just 20.
Think about that.
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The Cardinals, a franchise built on the backs of Pujols and McGwire, didn't have a single player hit more than 20 homers. It's the first time in decades the "actual power" has just vanished. Contreras did maintain elite bat speed—95th percentile, actually—which suggests he isn't declining physically. He just needs someone in the lineup to actually protect him.
Masyn Winn is the Real Deal (Mostly)
If there was a bright spot in the dirt, it was Masyn Winn. The "Energizer Bunny" of the infield finished with a 2.2 bWAR. He played 150 games and proved that his arm is basically a cannon, often clocked in the high 90s on throws across the diamond.
However, his offensive stats tell a story of a young player still trying to figure out Big League junk.
- Batting Average: .253
- Home Runs: 9
- Stolen Bases: 9
- OPS: .673
Winn struggled mightily against velocity, specifically anything 95 mph or faster. He’s got the range and the "it" factor, but if the Cardinals want to win in 2026, that .310 OBP has to climb. You can't have your leadoff-style spark plug getting on base less than a third of the time.
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Pitching Stats: A Scarier Movie than Halloween
Let's be real: the rotation was a nightmare. Sonny Gray was the only thing resembling an ace, and even he ended the year on the shelf with forearm tendinitis. Gray's final line—14-8 with a 4.28 ERA and 201 strikeouts—looks okay on paper until you realize the team was 17-11 in his starts and basically helpless everywhere else.
The rest of the staff? It's rough.
Andre Pallante went 6-15 with a 5.31 ERA. Matthew Liberatore hovered around a 4.21 ERA but never looked like the dominant force he was projected to be. Then you have the Ryan Helsley situation. He earned 21 saves with a 3.00 ERA, but in a season where you lose 84 games, a high-end closer feels like a luxury car parked in a driveway of a house with a leaky roof.
The team allowed 754 runs while only scoring 689. You don't need an advanced degree in analytics to know that's a recipe for a fourth-place finish in the NL Central.
The Jordan Walker Conundrum
We have to talk about Jordan Walker. It's almost painful at this point. 2025 was supposed to be the breakout. Instead, Walker spent a huge chunk of time in Memphis. When he was in St. Louis, the stats were bleak: a .215 average and only 6 home runs in 363 at-bats.
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His strikeout rate spiked to 126 in just 111 games. He’s hitting the ball on the ground too much, and the 113 extra-base hits from the entire Cardinals outfield was the lowest in MLB history. That is a staggering statistic. The grass at Busch Stadium saw less power than a AA affiliate.
What Needs to Happen Now
The 2025 St. Louis Cardinals player stats show a team that is fundamentally "fine" but functionally broken. They have "accumulators" but no "game-changers."
If you're looking for the path forward, keep an eye on these specific metrics:
- Outfield XBH: If this doesn't double in 2026, the offense is dead on arrival.
- Strikeout Rate (Walker/Winn): Both young stars are chasing too much junk. The walk-to-strikeout ratios are the most important numbers to watch in Spring Training.
- First Pitch OPS: Contreras was elite here (1.220 OPS). The rest of the team needs to stop taking "get me over" strikes and start punishing pitchers early.
The era of Chaim Bloom is officially here. Whether he can turn these middling stats into a winning formula depends entirely on whether the DeWitt family opens the checkbook for a true frontline starter or if they keep betting on "upside" that hasn't materialized.
For now, the 2025 stats serve as a cold reminder that history doesn't win games—slugging percentage and ERA do. To see how these numbers stack up against the rest of the league, you can check the official MLB Player Rankings.
Stop looking at the back of the baseball cards and start looking at the swing decisions. That's where the 2026 season will be won or lost. Focus on the hard-hit rates of Thomas Saggese and the health of Sonny Gray's forearm. Those are the only stats that actually matter for the future of this franchise.