The St. Louis Cardinals did what a retooling club does with a rental starter on Saturday: they ran him out at Chase Field, watched him labor, and lost. Dustin May gave up five runs on eight hits and four walks over five innings in a 5-3 loss to the Diamondbacks. Two weeks from the Aug. 3 deadline, that is the kind of start that shapes what a rental arm can bring back in a trade.
May signed a one-year deal last winter for exactly this moment. CBS Sports reported this week that the Cardinals are listening on him, and MLB Trade Rumors put the question plainly: should St. Louis shop him? President of baseball operations Chaim Bloom has signaled he intends to stay the course as a seller, even though the club at 51-46 has hung around the National League wild-card picture longer than anyone expected.
Execution is the sticking point. A rental starter’s return is set by his last month of work, and May’s has been uneven — a couple of short blowups on either side of a clean July 6 outing, and now four walks in five innings against Arizona. Buyers will scrutinize the command, not the stuff; velocity has never been the question with May. Teams pay for a starter they can trust in October, and right now his line invites hesitation.
The context around him is thinning, too. St. Louis just lost late-inning lefty JoJo Romero to an appendicitis stint that will carry him to the edge of the deadline, as covered here, pulling another chip off the board at the worst possible time. Lars Nootbaar is the other name most often floated. And if the Detroit Tigers keep Tarik Skubal off the market, the rental-pitcher tier gets shallow in a hurry, and a healthy, affordable rental like May could climb it almost by default.
For fantasy managers, May is a hold-and-watch rather than a stream this week; a trade to a contender with a sharper infield defense behind him would help his ratios more than his current form suggests, but the walks make him a risky start until he strings together two clean outings. Romero’s absence, meanwhile, opens leverage innings in the St. Louis bullpen — Scott Blewett and Matt Svanson are the names to track for holds in deeper leagues.
