Riley O’Brien, the closer who snagged an NL All-Star nod this season for the St. Louis Cardinals, has shockingly turned into the team’s biggest disappointment. Yeah, you read that right. According to ESPN’s Bradford Doolittle, the guy who was supposed to lock it down has completely faltered in the second half of the 2026 MLB season.
The Numbers Don’t Lie: All-Star To Liability
It’s a tough look for O’Brien, especially considering the Cardinals came into 2026 with super low expectations and actually became competitive thanks to young guns like Jordan Walker and JJ Wetherholt. They had an impressive season, even if the postseason is a little out of reach. But O’Brien’s struggles are a huge wrench in the works. The Cardinals’ bullpen has been bleeding runs, with only two teams blowing more saves and only one allowing a higher percentage of inherited runners to score. Doolittle points right to O’Brien as the poster child for this mess. He leads the NL with 37 saves, which sounds great, but his ERA is a stomach-churning 4.13, and his bWAR puts him at replacement level. Yikes.
The Philadelphia Nightmare And A Cloudy Future
We’ve all seen a closer melt down, but O’Brien’s return trip to Philadelphia was a particularly brutal example. He walked onto the mound in the ninth with a 4-0 lead and two outs, only to surrender a walk-off home run to Kyle Schwarber of the Phillies. Talk about a gut punch. That was just one of many rough outings since the All-Star break, where he’s blown four saves and rocked a 5.40 ERA. The real head-scratcher here is that O’Brien has “the stuff to be an elite closer,” as Doolittle puts it, but he’s just lacking consistency and command. The Cardinals might have thought they had their closer of the future in O’Brien, but after this second-half slide, that’s a massive question mark for Oli Marmol and the whole St. Louis squad as the 2026 season wraps up.
This article was created with AI assistance and published under Seattle On Tap’s editorial standards. See our Editorial Policy.
Originally reported by The Sporting News.
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