The Cardinals are going to place outfielder Tommy Pham on waivers, reports Katie Woo of The Athletic. He has not been designated for assignment and can continue playing for the Cards for now. He can also stay with them if he goes unclaimed, but the waivers are irrevocable, so he will be changing teams if any other clubs puts in a claim. He will be postseason eligible for his new club as long as he is claimed prior to September 1.
Acquired from the White Sox alongside Erick Fedde in the three-team deadline deal that sent Tommy Edman and minor league righty Oliver Gonzalez to the Dodgers, Pham returned home to the organization that originally drafted him. He debuted with a bang, hitting a pinch-hit grand slam in his return to the Cards, but the 36-year-old outfielder has since fallen into a slump. After posting a Herculean .379/.400/.759 slash in his first eight games back in St. Louis, Pham has just three hits in his past 47 plate appearances.
Even with that downturn over the past three weeks, Pham still owns a solid .254/.321/.378 slash in 374 plate appearances this season. He’s only been about 2% worse than league average at the plate this season overall, as measured by wRC+, and he’s been characteristically solid against lefties: .232/.323/.439 (115 wRC+). He’s drawn poor defensive ratings across the board, though his defensive marks have been weighed down by the White Sox playing him in center field for more than 200 innings — largely out of necessity. Pham isn’t the plus corner outfielder he once was but can still handle left field capably.
Pham is playing the current season on a $3MM base salary, and he’ll be a free agent at season’s end. Any team that claims him will owe Pham $484K for the remainder of the season before he returns to the open market this winter.
The Cardinals are seven games back in the Wild Card hunt and even further buried in the National League Central. Both FanGraphs and PECOTA give St. Louis scarcely more than a 1% chance of reaching the playoffs. We’ve seen teams erase larger leads in September in the past, but it seems charitable to even call a playoff berth a “long shot” at this point. Even if the Cards like their chances more than those odds would indicate, the team surely recognizes the slim nature of their playoff hopes and will give Pham a chance to chase down a ring in the event that another club wants to add a veteran right-handed bat to its bench mix for the regular season’s final four weeks.