ST. LOUIS — After a season in which he showed just some of the enormous potential in his prodigious bat, Cardinals catcher Iván Herrera is a wanted man this offseason.
The Cardinals want Herrera maximizing his enticing potential in 2026, setting up a detailed curriculum for his winter so he can not only recover from a recent elbow procedure, but also show up to Spring Training better equipped to compete to be the team’s everyday catcher.
Then, there’s the Panamanian National Team that wants Herrera in the middle of its lineup when it faces Cuba to kick off the first round of the World Baseball Classic on March 6. Herrera, 25, appears on the verge of his prime and is ready to show the baseball world how elite his bat-to-ball skills are on a big stage, according to Cardinals international crosschecker Damaso Espino.
“Iván has proven he can overcome any obstacle, and he has the ability to be a bigtime productive player in the big leagues,” said Espino, who is also Panama’s GM for the WBC. “I’ve known Iván since he was 15 when we signed him, and I love his competitiveness. He’s already proven over the years that he can hit at the highest level of this game. So we’re hoping to have him in there and producing for Panama in the Classic.”
Herrera’s availability will come down to the health of his right elbow, which was cleaned out arthroscopically of loose bodies (bone spurs) — something that hindered how often he could catch for the Cardinals in 2025.
At the MLB Winter Meetings, Cardinals president of baseball operations Chaim Bloom said that Herrera is in a phase of workouts that focuses on plyometric exercises to improve his explosiveness. Herrera will begin throwing baseballs again “in a couple of weeks,” Bloom said.
“He’s been awesome from everything I’ve heard from [coaches], very engaged,” said Bloom, who has been busy this offseason trading Sonny Gray, signing free-agent pitcher Dustin May (per sources) and fielding trade offers surrounding Brendan Donovan, JoJo Romero, Willson Contreras and Nolan Arenado. “Kudos to him. It’s one thing to sit in [manager Oliver Marmol’s] office and say you want to put time into this, but he’s put in his time.”
A Cardinals club at the beginning stages of a rebuild has good reason for investing in Herrera’s health. Not only did he slash .284/.373/.464 — all top three totals among the Cardinals — and smashed 19 homers in 107 games, but he was also their most clutch player in 2025. He hit 10 homers when the club was behind and seven when games were tied and he was often the reason the Cards won (a .335 batting average, a 1.000 OPS and 12 homers in St. Louis victories). He also tormented left-handed pitching all season (a .330 batting average, a 1.115 OPS and nine homers), became the first Cards catcher ever to hit three home runs in a game (April 2 vs. the Angels) and tied for the third-most homers hit in September in MLB (eight).
The underlying metrics seem to suggest that there’s even more in Herrera’s middle-of-the-order bat. His batting run value ranked in MLB’s top 88 percentile, while his expected weighted on-base percentage (.371) and expected batting average (.279) ranked in MLB’s 92nd and 90th percentile, per Baseball Savant.
The questions, however, surround Herrera’s work behind the plate. Possibly because of the lingering elbow trouble and a knee he badly sprained on April 6, Herrera was limited to just 14 games behind the plate, and he didn’t throw out any of the 15 foes who stole bases on the Cards in 2025. That came after he threw out just four of 59 base-stealers in 2024.
Herrera, who was rushed to the big leagues for 11- and13-game cameos in 2022 and ’23 because of injuries to Yadier Molina and Willson Contreras, still has a strong desire to catch — something he told Bloom and Marmol late last season. Bloom thinks that Herrera was promoted early in his career when he wasn’t necessarily ready, and he could be in line for major improvements following an offseason of work.
“When you look at the entirety of his career, I’m not sure he was ever really set up for success at that position because of a number of factors,” Bloom said. “That’s not a negative or taking shots at anybody. Some of it’s about the state of the organization — what else is available at the position internally, where you might not get that fair shot and yet you’re being asked to perform in the big leagues and so you’re not in a pure teaching environment, either.
“I just think we haven’t done everything yet that we should be doing to support him as a young catcher. And we have a chance to play catch-up on that now, and it seemed to me to be something worth doing.”
