After the Dodgers managed to trick the Red Sox into giving them two outfield prospects (two top prospects, at that) in exchange for Dustin May at the trade deadline, May said in his first media scrum in Boston, “I was kind of pushed out. We had quite a few guys in that organization.“
Yeah, man. Maybe you were pushed out because you were … pretty bad?
Shohei Ohtani returned to the mound in June, Tyler Glasnow came off of the IL in early July, Blake Snell followed right after the trade deadline, Yoshinobu Yamamoto had been healthy and thriving all season, and the Dodgers were favoring Emmet Sheehan over May as a starter in the weeks leading up to the deadline.
Despite a great start to the season and managing to stay healthy through July (a miracle for a guy as injury-prone as May), he registered a 5.59 ERA from April 22 through his last Dodgers start on July 27. It was a miracle the Dodgers were able to get the return they did from the Red Sox, especially when Boston was paying for, at most, three months of his services before he hit free agency.
After being tabbed as a “best fit” for a bottom-feeder teams like the White Sox, Nationals, and Twins earlier in the offseason, May has found a new home with the Cardinals on a one-year deal, though the money attached has yet to be reported.
St. Louis isn’t quite as much of a bottom-feeder as the aforementioned teams, but they’re not far off, having finished 2025 with the 11th worst overall record in baseball.
Dodgers trade deadline bait Dustin May signs one-year deal with Cardinals to return to NL
The Dodgers … don’t like the Cardinals — at least Clayton Kershaw surely didn’t. It makes sense; the two saw quite a bit of each other from the 2004-2014 postseasons, and the Dodgers lost three out of four of those meetings, sometimes as a direct result of a much-memed Kershaw choke.
Even though the Cardinals are nowhere near that same contending form, they still see each other twice in the regular season and the rivalry still flares every now and then. In 2024, Miles Mikolas said the Dodgers were playing “checkbook baseball,” and in August of this year, they got five runs off of him in three innings.
It hurts even more for the Cardinals that longtime fan favorite Tommy Edman is now a Dodger, and it’ll hurt even more if LA actually pulls off a trade for Brendan Donovan or Lars Nootbaar.
St. Louis can have May. If he keeps pitching in 2026 how he did in 2025, the Dodgers are going to have zero problems hitting against him.
