This weekend, the Washington Nationals visit the St. Louis Cardinals with nothing on the line. With both teams long since excused from any playoff ambitions, they’ve been free to tend to more important work: providing experience and development for their players, taking stock of their strengths and weaknesses, and preparing for better days to come. Fans will pour into Busch Stadium to soak in the dregs of summer, simmering in late-evening 80-degree heat, as they allow baseball to take place in front of them, hazy little figures on the field who may someday soon become sharp, and massive. They’ll be able to say they remember when they first saw them.

Soon October will pump its fireworks and 120-decibel house music directly into our brains, and we’ll become trapped in a month-long moment. We’ll be told that one team will succeed, and 11 others will fail, and forget about the 18 that failed even earlier. Worse still, we’ll have to evaluate the amount of respect each franchise was given, and how much it merited. But before we agree to that illusion, to accept the excitement it promises, there’s still one week of normal baseball, and we can still accept success in non-trophy form. In this safe little bubble, we can appreciate these two average teams, the St. Louis Cardinals and Washington Nationals, as being wild success stories.

Though both franchises appeared to be heading in the right direction, overhauling their front offices with bright young minds and accumulating young talent through deadline sales, the general consensus was that it would be fairly ugly in the short term. It almost always is, after all. Both teams sold whatever they could at the 2025 deadline, and looked the part after: St. Louis played 67-win ball the rest of the way, while Washington performed at a 68-win clip (which was, to be fair, a slight improvement over their first half).

Teeming with young players to provide opportunities, both franchises bought cautiously—one might say, prudently—over the winter. Paul Toboni and the Nationals traded Jose A. Ferrer for backup catcher Harry Ford, plucked a few guys off waivers, and devoted most of their energy to stocking the rotation with innings-eaters in Foster Griffin, Miles Mikolas, and Zack Littell. Their primary move was a blow to their 2026 chances, trading staff ace Mackenzie Gore to the Rangers for more help down the line. Chaim Bloom similarly spent the winter deconstructing his roster, moving Sonny Gray, Willson Contreras, Nolan Arenado, and Brendan Donovan. The team’s only real addition was Dustin May, who was obviously brought on to flip at the trade deadline, which is exactly what happened. This is what the first full year of a rebuild looks like.