Shildt’s managerial misfires haven’t helped St. Louis Cardinals’ strained pitchers
Perhaps an underrated reason for the enduring affection which baseball holds is that many fans believe they know how to run a game just as well — if not better — than their team’s manager.
How hard, after all, can it be to fill out a lineup card, send up some pinch hitters, and bring your best guys out of the bullpen?
That apparent simplicity invites the consistent criticism that St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Shildt has managed to avoid in large measure since ascending to that position in 2018.
This week, however, he invited it.
“You know, I’ve got to own it,” Shildt said last week about his attempt to squeeze starter John Gant through an additional inning, which instead put a game out of reach. “Didn’t feel like that was the best decision I’ve made and I’ve got to be accountable for it.
“Didn’t work out, and I take responsibility fully.”
Shildt, a protege of White Sox manager and Baseball Hall of Famer Tony LaRussa, certainly picked up a few tricks from the postgame press conferences which used to be known affectionately as “Tony TV.” Sometimes, when the team falls down, it’s the manager’s job to fall on a grenade.
In Shildt’s tenure, he’s had relatively few explosions to mind.
The 2018 team which he took over was foundering in the wake of strained relationships between ex-manager Mike Matheny and some of the team’s most important players. In 2019, Shildt guided the Cardinals through the first round of the playoffs and was named NL Manager of the Year for his efforts. The 2020 season was derailed by the pandemic and still ended in a playoff berth.
It’s been a smooth ride, which is part of why the current chop is so jarring.
On the day before Gant’s start, Daniel Ponce de Leon barely managed to finish the first inning. Shildt called the performance of the starters “not sustainable,” mentioning that the team’s bullpen, ostensibly a strength, had been forced into a position where pitchers were pitching because they were available rather than because a spot was optimal.
In that vein, rolling the dice on Gant — facing Washington’s three best left-handed hitters for the third time — might be defensible.
And yet two days later, the reliable Adam Wainwright, sitting at 85 pitches and with the bottom third of the Washington lineup due, was yanked in the bottom of the fifth inning for a pinch hitter with one out, a runner on first base, and the team already down four.
Where was the concern for the bullpen then?
When the choice was made to let Gant bunt, Génesis Cabrera was warming up. Shildt explained later that night that Cabrera had only one inning to give after having pitched the day before. And yet Cabrera wasn’t brought in, but was warmed up a second time later in the game.
That was that. His shot was shot. A day of usage from the team’s most effective lefty reliever went down the tubes before it ever got through the outfield gate.
Andrew Miller has endured the same fate on multiple occasions over the past week, which might explain why he managed to record only five outs in a six-game homestand while allowing three runs on five hits. While Cabrera and Miller burned up in the bullpen, Tyler Webb pitched in seven of the Cardinals’ first 10 games.
No wonder his earned run average soared above 11.
As the team’s bench coach before taking over as manager, Shildt had a literal front row seat to the fraying relationship between Matheny and star catcher Yadier Molina. It should be no surprise that Shildt has been careful to mind that relationship in his public comments over the past three years, but excessive deference also invites questions.
Perhaps the first sign of an issue came last year in Milwaukee, when Molina absorbed a swing flush on the left wrist but refused to leave the game, even after teammate Matt Carpenter joined Shildt in trying to coax him to the dugout.
A similar situation popped up again last week, when a sentimental decision to pair Wainwright’s rotation turn with Molina’s outrageously impressive 2,000th start with the Cardinals meant that Molina took off Tuesday night, not Wednesday afternoon.
As a result, rather than getting two full days off in a row (including Thursday’s travel day), Molina again set his own schedule and Shildt turned staff ace Jack Flaherty over to the care of backup catcher Andrew Knizner.
The truth, of course, is that managing a Major League Baseball team is a great deal harder than it appears, and all the lineup machinations in the world won’t help Lane Thomas make the botched routine plays in centerfield that instead saw him sent back to the minors.
And yet part of the reason Thomas was patrolling centerfield in the middle of the week was that Shildt didn’t provide sufficient playing time to Randy Arozarena when Arozarena was called up in 2019.
All he’s done since is win an ALCS MVP and set the major league record for home runs in a single postseason. But as a Cardinal, he had a hard time finding the outfield grass ahead of Tommy Edman, a reliable hitter playing out of position.
Shildt was named manager of the Cardinals in large part because the team understood it needed healing, connection, and respect. Like other organizational stalwarts Brian Snitker in Atlanta and Luis Rojas of the New York Mets, Shildt bided his time in the minors and impressed at every level to earn every opportunity he’s received.
The time is now to track his development.
“Players win games and managers avoid losing games, and I didn’t do my part today,” Shildt said Monday.
There aren’t many days like that which the Cardinals can afford.
