The Cardinals and manager Oli Marmol have agreed to a two-year contract extension, according to a report from Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Marmol was entering the final year of his contract in 2026 but now figures to remain in St. Louis for the 2027 and ’28 seasons, with a club option for 2029. The Cardinals have subsequently announced Marmol’s new deal.
It’s the second extension Marmol has signed with the Cardinals. The 39-year-old initially took over as manager in St. Louis following Mike Shildt’s dismissal in October of 2021. Marmol’s first season as manager saw the Cardinals romp to a division title with a 93-win season thanks primarily to MVP-caliber performances from both Paul Goldschmidt (who won the award in the NL) and Nolan Arenado (who finished third). Unfortunately, the Cardinals were delivered a quick exit by the Phillies in the Wild Card round that year and went home that October without winning a single playoff game.
The end of the 2022 campaign also marked the end of longtime franchise face Yadier Molina‘s playing career, and Molina’s departure ushered in a transitory period in Cardinals baseball. While the club added an impactful bat behind the plate in Willson Contreras, pitchers in St. Louis struggled to adapt to life after the nine-time Gold Glover they had grown accustomed to working with. Meanwhile, both Goldschmidt and Arenado regressed in a big way, and injuries to key players like Brendan Donovan and Tyler O’Neill left the Cardinals to tumble from the top of the NL Central all the way to the bottom with a 91-loss campaign. In the years since, the Cards haven’t done much better. 2024 saw the franchise get just barely back over .500 with an 83-79 record that left them tied for second place in the NL Central standings, but the team fell right back below .500 in 2025.
Difficult as Marmol’s tenure in St. Louis has been, management and ownership clearly do not lay the organization’s struggles at his feet. They signed him to a two-year extension prior to the 2024 campaign, the last year of which he’ll manage the team on this year, and even after John Mozeliak retired and new president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom took over, both Bloom and team ownership have expressed confidence in Marmol in the run-up to today’s extension.
It’s understandable why the team would choose to stick with Marmol despite a lack of on-field success. The Cardinals have saddled Marmol with a stagnant and aging roster for the majority of his time with the organization. Outside of deals for Contreras and Sonny Gray (both of whom were traded to the Red Sox this past offseason), St. Louis has made relatively minimal efforts to improve the roster via trades and free agency in recent years, instead banking on internal developments that haven’t come to fruition. That lack of internal development has been attributed to the organization by the team’s decision to reallocate funds that once were used for player development into fortifying the big league payroll, and over the past two years the team has started to move towards a rebuilding phase where they plan to scale back payroll and return their focus towards player development.
Given the current state of the organization, it’s understandable that the Cardinals would look to keep someone they had enough confidence in to install as MLB’s youngest manager at the time of his hire. Now headed into his fifth season as a big league manager (with a decade of coaching experience prior to that), Marmol now has plenty of experience handling young players and veterans alike and his work with last year’s Cardinals team, which lacked the win-now expectations that most seasons in St. Louis come with, will surely prove informative for the difficult task of rebuilding into a contender that the organization now faces.
