The Cardinals are Starting to Play Better, But Are They Really?

It’s been a long 2 weeks for the Cardinals; after sweeping the Marlins in 3 games, they have dropped 8 out of 10 to the Braves, Tigers, and Pirates. Prior to this patch, the Cardinals dispatched the sub-.500 teams pretty well and struggled against the better teams; well, the Pirates and Tigers have killed that trend.

Not only have the played badly, but it appears there could be a fracture in the clubhouse. Last Thursday (June 24), Tommy Edman said this to the media:

“I don’t think we’ve necessarily done the greatest job of making a game plan for how guys are going to throw us day-by-day and working on things pre-game that are specifically tailored to prepare ourselves for that. So I think we’re going to kind of start to implement a few more of those things into our pre-game routines and hopefully that helps us out.”

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Edman essentially threw the coaching staff under the bus here, along with the front office. There have been plenty of former players calling the Cardinals analytics into question; both Kolten Wong and John Brebbia talked about how much more data they are receiving from their new organizations. Now Edman has said they don’t get what they need to prepare for a team.

Along with a “game plan” day by day, the team also isn’t adjusting in game; typically, the second and third time against a pitcher work out better in the hitters favor. They’ve seen the pitches the first time up and the pitcher is more exhausted further in the game he goes.

These issues are split between the players, coaches, and front office. The players need to execute, plain and simple; the hitters aren’t getting on base and the pitchers are walking too many batters. At the same time, the coaches and front office need to supply the players the info they need to succeed; they should have access to every ounce of data on what they’ll face each day and adjust when it’s not working.

Mike Shildt is starting to make some of these adjustments; he’s changed the lineup more since Edman’s statement. Granted, I don’t think he agreed with what Edman said:

“I don’t want to misrepresent that the report wasn’t accurate or that the scouting wasn’t good or that the understanding of what we were going to do wasn’t good. It was the attention to the execution of it.”

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Hearing these quotes, it makes me wonder the status of the clubhouse right now. The Cardinals have been slow to make moves to the coach staff, specifically in season. It took the Bud Norris/Jordan Hicks story and Yadier Molina calling out Mike Matheny on Instagram to get Shildt in the manager position.

Shildt is doing his best to put on a unified front and keep the players out of the media crosshairs. The constant statement is the team has started to right itself. Below are charts of the teams runs scored and allowed for the season:

Notice the trends lines on each. For the season, the Cardinals are trending downs for runs scored and up for runs allowed; neither are what the team wants to see. It makes sense though. Harrison Bader is on the DL and the team was clicking when he was in the lineup. You are getting subpar play out of the primary replacements (Justin Williams, Lane Thomas). You are also seeing Paul DeJong struggle to be better then Matt Carpenter, Molina showing his age, and Edman regressing.

The pitching side is struggling because Jack Flaherty and Miles Mikolas are out, John Gant can’t fix his walk issues, and Carlos Martinez has regressed to a 5th starter on his best days. The injuries have pressed Johan Oviedo into the rotation when he isn’t ready, and allowed scrap heap project Wade LeBlanc to get a shot at starting. These pitchers aren’t going deep either, which has put even more stress on a fractured bullpen.

But is Shildt correct that things are starting to click for this hitters?

The hitters are trending up over their last 10 games; granted, part of that might be to the 9 run spike against the Braves. The pitching is trending upwards too, but that’s not a good thing. They are tending to over 5 runs allowed per game, with Adam Wainwright‘s 2 1-run starts the low point. This 10-game stretch has the Cardinals going 2-8 with a run differential of -25; this puts their Pythagorean record for that stretch as 2-8 (meaning they are playing as badly as they appear). They have averaged 2.5 runs per game.

It’s easy to say they are getting better over the last 10, but if you look at the 10 game stretch before that, you see a better picture. In those 10 (June 5-16), the Cardinals were 3-7 with a run differential of -13 and averaging 3.2 runs per game; their Pythagorean record for that stretch was actually 4-6, so they were an underperforming team.

In the last 20 games, the team is trending downwards in runs scored by almost half. The 10 games before that they averaged 4.2 runs per game. While Shildt is correct that they are trending up for the last few days (hello sample size bias), they are still getting worse over the long term.

This team is not a playoff caliber team right now and I don’t know if adding players would make them marginally better; they won’t be able to get in the Wild Card at this point and the division is going to be very tough down the stretch. Even if they do make the playoffs, getting past the Dodgers or Padres will not happen.

They might be better off treading water for the next 86 games and focusing on next season; they have a lot of money coming off the books and can make some significant upgrades. There are too many holes to address via trade, and any available free agent they’d bring in now won’t be a difference maker. It could be a long summer.