With Arenado and Goldschmidt, St. Louis Cardinals have plenty of punch
It’s hard to win a baseball game if your team can’t hit.
The 2020 St. Louis Cardinals learned that lesson nearly as well as any Cardinals team in recent memory. That they managed to win 30 of 58 games while featuring only three players who were better than the league average at the plate is a testament to a strong pitching staff and the strangeness of a small sample.
And yet with first baseman Paul Goldschmidt batting second and third baseman Nolan Arenado batting third behind leadoff man Tommy Edman, the first half inning of St. Louis’s season featured a six-run outburst punctuated by a three-run home run from center fielder Dylan Carlson, hitting seventh.
It was a realignment designed to deliver a wallop.
“Even from the first inning, like, guaranteed you’ve got to face both of them,” said Cardinals manager Mike Shildt of his offensive cornerstones. “And there’s just an immediate little bit of a punch in the face that says, ‘here it is,’ and we turn it over (and) there they are again.”
That repetition saw Goldschmidt score three runs in the season’s first four innings, driven in by three different players — a Paul DeJong single in the first inning, an Arenado single in the second, and a two-run laser beam home run from Tyler O’Neill in the fourth.
“I think that’s what it’s gonna take for us to be successful as a team,” Goldschmidt said. “I think that’s a strength of ours. We’ve got a lot of great players, we’ve got a deep bench, and it’s gonna take a complete team effort.”
For Goldschmidt and Arenado to have upward lineup mobility will require the players behind them to imbue the lineup with length.
After a scorching spring, early returns on O’Neill’s new approach are promising. Carlson, the team’s postseason cleanup hitter, continues to look more like the top prospect who arrived on his second trip to the majors last summer rather than the overmatched insurance policy who arrived on his first.
“We trust each other a lot out there defensively, and now, you know, just kind of do the same thing offensively,” Carlson said. “Just keep putting together good at bats. Just trust in the process and figuring things out.”
The defensive outfield unit is a work in progress as they work through the loss of Harrison Bader, who is out for at least a month with a flexor strain in his right forearm. Carlson’s shift to center has opened up right field for righty-hitting Austin Dean and lefty Justin Williams, and the latter of the two figures to see the majority of plate appearances against right-handed pitching.
Though Bader is primarily known for his defensive wizardry, he was also one of the three above average offensive Cardinals in 2020; Goldschmidt and Brad Miller (now back with the Phillies) were the others.
Adding Arenado in the offseason was of course the most important step the Cardinals took in addressing their clearest area of weakness. His presence should provide the sort of lineup power arguably not seen in St. Louis since the last Cardinals’ pennant-winning team in 2013, which featured Carlos Beltrán and Matt Holliday at the top of the order.
That model was successful not because any players hitting behind the two were individually unstoppable forces, but because many were reliable — Matt Carpenter, primarily the leadoff hitter, and Allen Craig, Matt Adams and Yadier Molina, hitting behind the duo, all recorded an on-base plus slugging percentage of .830 or better.
In 2020, only Goldschmidt crested that statistical hill.
“I’ve got asked a lot about the lineup, and I think the biggest difference hitting second and maybe hitting third or fourth is you kind of are getting on base and able to be driven in a little bit more,” Goldschmidt said.
“I think just the way the lineup kind of lays out, the more you’re hitting towards the top of the order, Tommy and me probably at second, you have an opportunity to score a little bit more runs and maybe drive in a few less just by virtue of how it sets up.”
Cardinals ace Jack Flaherty, whose uneven opening day performance resulted in the club needing every available ounce of run support, saw in action Thursday the challenge the lineup can produce for a pitcher on paper brought to life.
“I think you look at having Goldy and Arenado right there, back to back, and then you got Paul (DeJong) right after him who’s no slouch,” Flaherty said. “Then O’Neill homered today. So it just continues to add on, the whole lineup. I mean, the depth of it. (Carlson) hitting the homer in the seven hole today, so it was good.”
“We have high expectations in every area of our game,” Shildt said after the opening win, “but we definitely have them with our offense.”
“It’s the way good offenses operate. And we did damage and we expect to score more than four quite a bit.”
