St. Louis Cardinals begin season’s final month teetering on brink of playoff relevance
As the last regular season month of Major League Baseball begins to unfold, the St. Louis Cardinals are stubbornly refusing to fold, demonstrating and insisting upon relevance even as their odds get longer and more specious.
Entering play in Milwaukee on Friday night, the Cardinals sat 2 1/2 games behind the Cincinnati Reds for the second and final wild card spot in the National League. The San Diego Padres were a mere half game behind the Reds, and the Philadelphia Phillies, having taken advantage of a soft schedule, raced into a dead heat with the Cardinals.
By virtue of winning the season series between the clubs, the Phillies hold the tiebreaker between the two. And so the Cardinals, relevance waning, entered a stretch of seven games against two of the best teams in baseball — Milwaukee and the Los Angeles Dodgers — with two teams between them and the team they couldn’t quite run down earlier in the week.
“Probably the biggest difference in the two right now is the health of their [pitching] staff,” Cardinals manager Mike Shildt said Wednesday about his club and the Brewers, who St. Louis entered the weekend trailing by 13 games in the standings. “They’ve been able to keep their rotation intact, and, you know, we’ve had however many guys go through our rotation.”
The rotation the Cardinals have now is the one they have conceded they’re likely to have for the remainder of the season. That requires the club to anchor itself to Adam Wainwright, who was named the National League Pitcher of the Month in the same month in which he turned 40 years old.
Behind Wainwright comes Miles Mikolas, who hasn’t pitched in the sixth inning since 2019. Behind Mikolas come J.A. Happ and Jon Lester, one of whom just had his worst start as a Cardinal and one whom just had his best.
Since being acquired for roster churn parts at the trade deadline, the two have provided the stable innings the club wasn’t receiving from Johan Oviedo and Jake Woodford, but neither has particularly dazzled.
Kwang Hyun Kim rounds out the five, having for a second consecutive season been moved back from the bullpen out of necessity after having made only one appearance under those circumstances. Kim’s last appearance of more than four innings was on July 22, though that start did cap a stretch of four in which he pitched at least six innings.
Should the Cardinals continue to battle down the stretch and find themselves in a win-to-get-in game on the last day of the season, and should that game allow for a start from Wainwright, it’s likely the Cardinals would turn to Happ (who just allowed seven earned runs to Cincinnati while recording only three outs) or Mikolas to start a hypothetical wild card game.
If there’s no path through October, does the path to October really matter all that much?
“You look at baseball, historically, they’ll say pitching and defense,” Shildt said. “This team’s done that fairly consistently. The defense has been fantastic for us this year. I really have been super pleased with the ability to get the most out of the churn that we’ve had with our pitching.”
Having lost their staff ace in Jack Flaherty for half a season, Shildt is correct to say that the amount of churn the team has had to weather has been substantial. Twelve different pitchers have made starts for the Cardinals in 2021, with only Wainwright and Kim making at least 20. Wainwright is the only pitcher on staff to have thrown at least 100 innings.
Wainwright’s 27th start, on Friday night, in an historical marker in its own right, as it represents the 300th of his career with Yadier Molina as his catcher. Only three other pairings in major league history have reached that plateau, with Detroit’s Mickey Lolich and Bill Freehan holding the record at 324.
With Molina under contract for a farewell season and his leaning on Wainwright to do the same, the 2022 season could represent a glorious victory lap for one of the most storied partnerships in the history of baseball.
But, despite indications pointing to the contrary, the 2021 season isn’t quite over yet.
With 30 games remaining entering the weekend, the club has six more matchups — three each with Cincinnati and San Diego, all at home — against the clubs they’re attempting to chase down in the wild card race.
A mind-bending 17 of their final 30 games are against the Brewers and Cubs, representing the contours of a traditional race even if it would be an extreme statistical outlier to reach as high as Milwaukee or sink as low as Chicago.
A sweep in Cincinnati would have tightened the NL wild card race significantly, but the Cardinals were blown out in the third game there. So too would a sweep in Pittsburgh, but the club blew a 7-1 lead in that series’s first game and a two-run lead in the ninth in its last game.
They have been on the very precipice of true content for more than a month, all the while balancing falling off the other side and flirting with disaster.
The final month will see rubber meet the road. The safe bet is on a gentle drift, and pulling in just shy of their intended destination.
This story was originally published September 5, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
