Will more runs result from ‘holistic’ approach to stacking St. Louis Cardinals lineup?
Thursday night’s season opening matchup against the Pittsburgh Pirates marked the first time this season that St. Louis Cardinals second baseman Tommy Edman was in the starting lineup, but not as the leadoff hitter.
That cosmetic change is hardly the only adjustment being made by a team whose woeful offensive output has contributed to a calamitous June.
In the two weeks preceding Pittsburgh’s arrival, the Cardinals hit only .197 with a .267 on-base percentage. Entering play Thursday, the team’s on-base percentage for the season slipped to a mere .298— the worst mark in the National League and better only than Cleveland and Seattle in the AL.
Describing recent internal conversations with his coaching staff, Cardinals manager Mike Shildt said “we’ve put our egg in a small basket of slug ... We’ve forgotten that, oh, by the way, you got to get on base.
“I was a big fan of the initial generation of on-base percentage. And that was, you know, ‘Malcolm X style’ — by any means necessary.”
Shildt grew up idolizing Baltimore Orioles manager Earl Weaver and recounted one of Weaver’s most famous philosophies about managing as he explained the goals for the Cardinals offense — three-run home runs are a great way to win baseball games.
“Maybe we skip the line a little bit, ultimately,” Shildt conceded. “But it’s about getting on base, and when you get out, make it a productive out. And your slug will come by residual benefit of taking a good at bat.”
The discussion of the team’s over reliance on slugging as a mechanism of scoring — and they’re merely the 24th best team in baseball by that measure — sprang from a discussion of the strange offensive splits of outfielder Dylan Carlson, who ascended to the leadoff spot in Edman’s stead.
Carlson entered Thursday slugging only six points higher on the road than at home, and yet each of his first six home runs this season came away from Busch Stadium. Carlson’s batting average, though, was 155 points higher at home than on the road, and accordingly, his on-base percentage was 112 points higher.
His home splits make him in many ways an avatar of the offense Shildt would prefer to have. His road splits are demonstrative of the offense the team does have — and proof positive that the status quo is more than insufficient.
“We’ve had very honest conversations very recently about the dimension of our offense being just that maybe too one dimensional,” Shildt said, describing those conversations as, “very, very pointed.”
“We need to get back to playing more a game that we can beat you in a lot of different ways with a lot of different tools ... we’re not walking, we’re pulling the baseball, we’re not hitting singles. We lose five on the road and score five runs total.”
The pointedness of those conversations is relevant in as much as they reflect the fortunes of embattled hitting coach Jeff Albert, whose prominence in the organization has risen as his influence has spread throughout the minor leagues. Russ Steinhorn, the organization’s minor league hitting coordinator, was hired before the 2020 season in large part due to his history and familiarity with Albert and his philosophies.
Albert’s is an organizational direction to which the Cardinals have clearly committed, so even as a faltering offense has many in the fan base wondering whether a staff change is necessary, Shildt’s revelation of those recent conversations is a meaningful signpost.
“Now we feel like we’ve got synergy going in a direction that’s more holistic,” Shildt said, leaving open the question of whether lacking synergy was in some ways inhibiting consistent results.
Moving Edman out of the leadoff spot, despite his recent struggles, is not meant to be a cure all to a team lagging on both sides of the ball. Shildt pushed back against the suggestion that Edman’s relative lack of familiarity with playing the outfield could be affecting him offensively; “it’s about the holistic look of the lineup,” more than any individual performance, he explained.
“Just looking to change things up a little bit, get a different look,” Shildt emphasized. “But really, the different looks can ultimately be how we take our bats and take our bats more consistently based on the situation and based on using the whole field.
“We’ve got to change our approach with our at bats. Regardless of what lineup you have, until that changes, we won’t see any change in results significantly, but we’ve addressed that and the lineup is a part of it.”
Those are the changes that Shildt can control from his office and his spot in the dugout.
Whether more are to come from the front office — particularly to reinforce the pitching staff — will determine whether those changes contribute to turning around a season that could feel lost by the time the All-Star break arrives.
