Former Cardinal’s career seemed on the brink. Now Matt Carpenter is a Yankees star

Matt Carpenter’s last game at Busch Stadium seemed to pass almost without notice.

Rain shortened the Cardinals’ 3-2 loss to the Chicago Cubs last Oct. 3, and Carpenter’s 1-for-3 day didn’t come with a grand send off or a standing ovation from the assembled crowd. Instead, after seven and a half innings, he met quietly with his family near the home dugout, staring out at the spot on the field where he’d taken a long, solitary walk that morning.

At the time, it seemed a fair bet his career was wrapping up ignominiously, hitting just .203 with a .671 OPS in his last three seasons in St. Louis.

His return this weekend comes with a batting average north of .320 and a slugging percentage approaching .800, cemented in the middle of the lineup for the New York Yankees, currently the best team in baseball.

Who saw that coming?

“It’s easy to forget about what you’ve done in this game,” said Cardinals shortstop Paul DeJong, who’s gone through his own travails the last few years. “It’s all about, ‘what have you done for me lately?’ Yesterday’s home runs don’t count today.

“(Carpenter) obviously wasn’t done. He went back and did what he had to do this offseason and came out swinging, and now he’s back in the big leagues.”

Part of what he had to do this offseason was a visit to the Marucci hitting lab in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with former teammates Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt. The two remaining Cardinals came away with new bat models, oversized knobs affixed as counterweights.

Carpenter, in part, came away with an understanding the tools which had been at his disposal had not, by him, perhaps been properly appreciated.

“I just never bought into (analytics) like I should have,” Carpenter told Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic this winter in recapping the work he did to find himself again.

From the brink to the best team in baseball

Faced with his career on the brink, Carpenter re-examined his relationship to data, and used it to overhaul a swing that was barely competitive toward the end of his time in St. Louis.

“He talked about last year that he was going to try to make changes based on his performance,” Goldschmidt said, “and I know he was working hard. I know a lot of work went into it.”

The payoff, though dramatic, was not immediate. Carpenter signed a minor league deal late in spring training with his hometown Texas Rangers and didn’t make the team. He spent two months toiling at Triple-A Round Rock, and despite hitting .275 with a .613 slugging percentage in limited duty at that level, the sub-.500 Rangers told Carpenter they didn’t have a spot for him.

He asked for his release May 19 and signed with the Yankees one week later. He was in the lineup the day he signed, and the day after that, had his first homer as a Bronx Bomber.

Long ball specialist, ‘mustache-off’

His 15 long balls in his first 115 at bats with New York equal the total he put up in 416 at bats as a Cardinal in 2019, and are more than double the seven he hit in 2020 and 2021 combined. To have the opportunity to hit those homers, though, required Carpenter to change more than just his swing.

With a long-standing policy of forbidding players to wear beards, the Yankees also forced Carpenter to reveal much more of his chin to the world than he has in recent seasons, leaving only a bushy mustache which strongly recalls the 80s look of Don Mattingly.

The new styling has some fans in the Cardinals clubhouse — DeJong suggested Carpenter was in a “mustache-off” with Miles Mikolas — but it also has its detractors. Manager Oliver Marmol, whose first road roommate as a professional player was Carpenter, drew a light-hearted and less flattering comparison to an aquatic rodent — and not for the first time.

‘I’m very happy for him’

Carpenter, surely, will trade hirsute for hitting.

“I’m very happy for him,” Goldschmidt said, acknowledging it was a difficult admission given Carpenter is now an opponent. “To see him have this success after the hard work that went in, and you know, he was in the minor leagues for two months. That’s not easy to go back and do that after being in the big leagues for 10 plus years.”

He reached that 10-year mark toward the end of the 2021 season, and it too passed with little notice. That sparse acknowledgment and the whimper with which a franchise icon’s time with the Cardinals came to an end is out of character for the club, and certain to change this weekend the first time he steps to the plate.

After years of dread Carpenter would not be hitting, Cardinals fans will instead feel what opposing pitchers felt for years, and now feel again — dread that he will, and that expectation the ball can still jump off his bat.

This story was originally published August 5, 2022 at 6:00 AM.