by Tom
Okay, it’s been awhile and frankly it’s probably for the best.
I’ve been writing 1982 a lot over the past couple months, and balancing the time it takes to write something semi-cohesive with the tone and structure of an Eddie Izzard special is a bit…challenging. But have no fear you get a Sunday Funny Sunday for today as the trade deadline approaches and work continues on ‘82 Part 3.
We also have movie reviews now, because why not. This site could use more traffic and what better way to add to an absurdist left-wing sports website than some absurdist left-wing movie analysis. You’ve certainly grown to love me screaming into the void about the history of arbitration or umpire scouting reports, now you get to absorb what my friends have to say about Oppenheimer. We’re going to turn this place into Deadspin before it went to shit.
This team sucks
Boy oh boy did I gauge the Cardinals wrong with my preseason pick. I mean I got a lot wrong–White Sox, Rangers–but this baseball team has filled enough diapers to sink a cruise ship.
I’ve been meaning to write a more detailed write-up about this season’s woes, but the list goes on and on. It’s a drag, man, and quite frankly the weekly embarrassments have inundated me. I don’t know where to start. We always knew the Card’s success hinged on their pitching. I even pointed out in my preview that bad pitching may prevent us from winning the division or missing the postseason entirely. SORRY WHAT I MEANT TO SAY IS THAT THEY’LL END UP IN LAST FUCKING PLACE.
Those Yinzer fuck Pirates are ahead of us, and when things seemed on the mend earlier this month–you fools–the 2023 Redbirds dropped 7 of their last 9 and are facing a 4 game sweep at the hands of the Cubs. This team is shitting itself at a rate only matched by the ‘95 Cardinals who were 20+ games under by this point in the season. This is a generational catastrophe in sports management, an organizational disaster.
Are you a Cohen Brothers fan? This season is our Ladykillers.
The ‘23 Cardinals have found a way to post a top 10 offense with a bottom 10 everything else. This is what Rockies fans grew up with in the 1990s, and it sucks. Holy shit I rather be living under the Matheny era again–the liberal version of saying George Bush wasn’t that bad. This team is going to score 740 runs this year and win 70 games, they should be relegated to a beer league.
The Pitching and Defense
How did we get here? I don’t know, let’s spin the wheel on this one and start off with “We have six starting pitchers” which I would like to amend “We have six starting pitchers and they all suck.”
Despite the incredible power of foresight, I couldn’t imagine them blowing chunks this bad. I was looking forward to Adam Wainwright chasing 200 wins–he’s currently sitting at 198, with a season ERA bigger than my dick–and the emergence of Matthew Liberatore and Jack Flaherty’s contract year. My cautiousness was measured but reasonable, that this core would be league average and that the Cards would struggle to win low-scoring close games, as long as the bullpen was respectable.
Boy was I wrong.
Cardinals starters have the 8th worst ERA in the league, 3rd worst K%, 5th worst K/BB ratio, and the most hits. They’re ranked 15th in fWAR which is broken because they’ve somehow thrown a ton of innings (14th). Their FIP is also a middling 15th in the league at 4.37.
I know you’re having a mental flashback right now, all these numbers seem vaguely…familiar right? It’s because these numbers are eerily similar to last season, yes. The difference being is that the 2022 squad got A) very lucky and B) had a tremendous defense. Cardinal starters have surrendered the 2nd fewest home runs on the year, and have the 12th best walk rate. But this rotation’s .330 BABIP is WORST IN THE LEAGUE.
I’m hoping this serves as some kind of wake-up call to the front office–we’ll get to them. Doing things Dave Duncan or Whitey Herzog style when it comes to pitching is a draconian concept. When your star players take a step back defensively or you play your elite middle infielder in…centerfield, or your gold glove winning utility man blows out his shoulder, or you play an outfield with the 2nd worst DRS and OAA, when all of those things happen you may want starting pitching that can generate some swing and miss action.
Which the Cardinals haven’t had since, I don’t know, the Mike Matheny years. WE’VE HAD TIME TO FIGURE THIS OUT.
Cardinals starters generate the 2nd most amount of contact in the league. They have the 2nd worst outside zone swing and swinging strike percentage in the whole league. They can’t get guys to chase, and when they do they have a pathetic 8.0 Whiff%, 3rd worst in the league.
The entire pitching staff sucks, might I add; ain’t nobody clean from the turd-flinging winds of this shitnado. The bullpen has blown 24 saves and are 4th in the league in losses.
24 blown saves. The MLB record is 36 set by the ‘21 Nationals and buddy I think we’re gonna catch them. You can probably do the math right now on a team that is 46-60, and take half of those blown saves and losses and turn them into wins, and if you did that you’d have a 58-48 team that’d be half a game ahead of Milwaukee in the division. Hell, if you took a 4th of those blown saves and converted them you’d BE AHEAD OF THE FUCKING PITTSBURGH PIRATES AT LEAST.
It’s sort of incredible that the bullpen shits itself in high leverage situations so much. I mean, there’s the 40 home runs we’ve given up in 2 strike counts, the fact that ‘pen has the 7th worst ERA in high leverage situations, but still this shit balances out eventually. Before Ryan Helsely hit the IL on June 12th, the bullpen had the 5th best K%. Yeah they had the 6th worst amount of walks, I get that, but they were punching dudes out and making their own luck the kind of crap you want from a relief corps.
And most of this was because of Helsley, Giovanny Gallegos, and Jordan Hicks, the latter of which got off to such a putrid start half the fanbase wanted him DFA’d, but has since blossomed into the elite strikeout merchant we were all hoping he’d turn into. Every other reliever is not blowing dudes away.
We had 14 blown saves then, really bad but not historically bad yet or even leading the league. The bullpen was a top 10 group in not giving up homers and fWAR. The ‘pen even had a 4.05 ERA, which isn’t great but not terrible! It was just stupid high leverage moments, those could be fix with the proper coaching and luck!
NOPE. Helsely hits the IL and since June 12th the bullpen is bottom-tiered. 3rd worst K%, a 5.64 ERA, and 10 more blown saves in half the time. There is no hope coming. Especially with a defense that was top 3 last season, but is bottom third this year. If you’re not going to give your soft-tossers an elite defense, maybe get with the program and do what the winners have been doing for years.
Timely Hitting
The offense is fine but overrated.
We have 7 guys on the team with at least 200 plate appearances with an OPS+ over 100. That’s GREAT, until you look at high leverage and RISP.
Oh wait, they’re pretty good. So what gives?
Oh I get it, when they’re good they’re really good, and when they’re bad they’re absolute dogshit. You remember that 10 game stretch in May when we all thought this team was turning it around? They posted a 1.142 OPS and a .472 wOBA in that stretch, miles ahead of the competition. They went 7-3 during that stretch.
And what happened after? 20th in wOBA since. Those 10 games were a mirage. July has been legitimately good, but because this offense has this defense and this pitching staff a top 10 slugging team with RISP can only muster a .500 record. For 36 games this season the team was really good at hitting when it mattered, but the other 70 games you couldn’t rely on them to make another team sweat.
What’s most infuriating has been what this team does with the bases loaded. Look at it, and ask yourself, “how many more wins could we’ve had from this?” And don’t blame it on shit like Ron Kulpa. I hope the Cardinals see Ron Kulpa in their dreams for posting stats like this. A .561 OPS with the bases juiced and a 26th ranked wOBA; there’s a handful of games there that could have been had if this team performed better.
Time for Some Unnecessary Cruelty
Oh no, cruelty is totally necessary here. With everything that has gone wrong here, who do you think is to blame for this roster?
The entire front office. Hell you can throw management a middle finger too. This team is a laughing stock this year, and everyone in charge of fielding a competitive team has tripped over their own dicks every step of the way.
I mean just in the last 24 hours has Mo finally came out to publicly say we’re not trading our star third baseman, who had the option to test free agency for more money but opted in to stay in St. Louis. This was amid reporting from the LA Times that Dodgers and Cardinals were seriously considering a trade for the all-star third baseman. And these rumors were picked up by national baseball writers because sports journalism in this country is subjected to the same click-bait generated titles and headlines as everything else, despite conflicting reports from excellent local reporters Derrick Goold and Katie Woo. And Nolan Arenado had to answer questions from the press while these reports circulated, and the Cardinals front office dragged their heavy flaccid dicks in issuing a statement, all while their star third baseman probably began questioning his sanity and commitment to this team.
What a fucking disaster. There’s the on-going Willson Contreras saga, where after we signed Willson to a 5 year team friendly deal, we began having second thoughts about his catching ability–you’ll be surprised to know that Willson is having the kind of season you’d expect from a guy with his career numbers–and for the next couple weeks suggested he’d DH more while Andrew Knizner caught, or maybe take some reps in the outfield because what better way to alleviate a catching logjam than to exacerbate an already volatile outfield one.
Willson was thrown under another bus when it came out that certain factions of the pitching staff didn’t like him calling pitches, leading to Miles Mikolas to call his own for an inning only to learn he sucked at it, culminating in him needing two pitches to hit Contreras’s friend Ian Happ after Happer accidentally plunked him with a backswing. That cut to the forehead is nothing compared to the Cardinals who have beaten him with a bat all season.
Tyler O’Neill feuded with Oli Marmol, then went on the IL as he’s prone to do and seemingly disappeared. Dylan Carlson did everything that management wanted only to be relegated to a fourth outfield spot, only to earn his position back when O’Neill went down and when his play began improving he was placed back on the bench. Helsley’s arbitration hearing, fucking starting our only good trade piece in Jordan Montgomery this close to the trade deadline. Bringing up Taylor Motter, DFA’ing him twice–soon to be a third I’m sure–carrying three catchers numerous times in the season, carrying 12 pitchers instead of 13 when the staff had to pitch numerous, exhaustive bullpen games. Oh and there was the Zac Gallen interview, the tweets and reporting about how backwards Cardinal pitching pedagogy is, Adam Wainwright getting bullied off Twitter momentarily, and the mere simple fact that, as of today, the Cardinals, WHO ARE SELLING THIS SEASON, have yet to make a single goddamn trade.
They never asked themselves if they should make a contingency plan in case something like this happens. There is no “break glass in case of emergency.” The lunatics are running the asylum. There is no one at the wheel.
With all that said the front office put together this team, and when things got bad–so bad early they could be addressed–they farted in their hand and threw it in our faces. They said we were overreacting, that we need to be patient, and even though they had plenty of time to diagnose what was always wrong with this team they refused to do so. This season should serve as the epitaph to Mozeliak’s tenure when he leaves, and if he doesn’t turn it around next season remember him as Edward Smith of the Titanic; they’ve seen the iceberg all along folks, they just didn’t care to move out of the way.
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