Another week, another official announcement from MLB on how the St. Louis Cardinals are going to make up a boatload of lost games.
Three of those games, from last weekend, are against the Cubs, and they are now back on the schedule as doubleheaders for Monday, Wednesday, and September 5:
MLB announces Cardinals scheduling updates. pic.twitter.com/KlDE1A0QOL
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) August 14, 2020
The priority for now, as you can see, is making up the NL Central games. I get that, and I agree with that. If the Cardinals aren’t going to get to 60 games this year, then you at least want to see them get in all their NL Central games.
As for what this means going forward, we discussed this morning the implications of the Cubs now having to play five games in three days next week. It probably won’t be horrible thanks to getting to deploy 29 men and having an off-day after the series, but the Cubs do lose out on two “normal” starts from what has been a stellar rotation. As things line up now, Kyle Hendricks and Tyler Chatwood would each get a start on the doubleheader days, and Yu Darvish would start the 9-inning game in the middle. We’ll see if Colin Rea or Jose Quintana or Adbert Alzolay or another call-up gets the fill-in start(s).
If the Cardinals can actually return to action this weekend as now scheduled, we’ll get our first look at how they make up their roster. We know that top outfield prospect Dylan Carlson is coming up, but beyond that, we don’t have much of a sense on call-ups, waiver additions, etc. We don’t even know whether some of the players who originally tested positive are now actually eligible to return – it’s been over two weeks, so it’s certainly possible.
Also, a reminder: doubleheaders this year are just seven innings, and because the make-up games were supposed to be in St. Louis, the Cardinals will be the “home” team for one of the games in each of the doubleheaders. So that’ll be wild.