As the Cardinals drift further out of 1st place, what can they do to right the ship?
If you want to press the panic button, you better be able to find it. So far, it seems to have blended in with the rest of the surroundings.
There is plenty of reason for optimism about the path forward for the Cardinals’ season at the dawn of April’s third week. And yet there are only so many ways to write that underlying numbers look promising and that positive regression is overdue while simultaneously staring down the barrel of a standings page which shows only nine wins in the team’s first 23 games and a team seven games out of first place in the National League Central.
Since realignment in 1996, the Cardinals have never won their division in a season when they were as many as seven games out at any time. Start there and work forward when making your own determination about how much you should and shouldn’t worry.
The trouble, of course, with tying calm attitudes to the way things should look as opposed to how they do look is that “should” comes on a spectrum. At the start of the year, FanGraphs projected the Cardinals with a 67.4% chance to make the postseason; entering play Tuesday, that number is 44.5%.
That’s a dramatic dropoff, but it comes with the territory. The start hasn’t been historically bad but it certainly has been run of the mill bad, and making up ground is hard, especially given the likelihood that the NL Central will send only one team to the postseason. The problem for the Cardinals is that even if results start playing up to expected outcomes even as soon as while the club is still in San Francisco, the first 23 games exist. There is no more starting from zero.
If two out of three simulations from the start of the season had St. Louis in the playoffs, that means one out of three did not. That’s an enormous edge over the long haul, and for a gambler, you would be well served — in theory — to load up every nickel you can touch if offered a two in three chance that a given outcome would occur.
Individual seasons, though, happen fast over a long timeframe. Despite a subset of 162 games, season outcomes are binary — a team is in, or it’s out. And for the Cardinals, who have consistently defined success — at least from the manager’s office — as winning the World Series, the odds of success nose dive even further. Still, that is their chosen metric, and it’s the one they’ve earned.
Solutions, anyone?
So, what’s next? What can they possibly do to right the ship? Even the team’s most ardent critics are unlikely to be so absurd as to suggest the decision makers in charge of the Cardinals are happily fiddling while small sparks set off around their proverbial Rome. Nero, at least, had a pretty clear path forward that might’ve solved the problem. That’s significantly harder to find under the circumstances the Cardinals have created for themselves.
Adam Wainwright seems set to return to the rotation as early as next week. That should provide stability and help sort out some spots in the bullpen, but it’s not a guarantee. Wainwright’s most recent public velocity readings call to mind the disastrous outings in 2018 that he, at the time, thought were presaging the end of his career. There’s every reason to expect him to help a great deal, and no reason to assume his presence is a silver bullet.
If there’s underperformance coming from the offense, it’s coming from the corners of the infield, and surely there’s nothing to be done there. As early as this February, when the Cardinals closed off a complex field in the middle of the day so he could sort through a swing hitch, Nolan Arenado has been searching for solutions. A winter spent working to send the ball the other way has left him looking for the power he’s always had.
Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt have combined for four home runs in the team’s first 23 games. There’s no description of that total that’s more apt than “insufficient.” There’s also not an obvious solution or a fix on the bench.
Being wrong is not much fun
Want to dump a few pitchers? Shake up the bench? Trade a half dozen outfielders for a half dozen different lottery tickets? There are many possibilities, each as bottomless a hole as the last.
The Cardinals, if nothing else, are often victims of paralysis by their own analysis, but even the most cavalier observers would admit that shipping off useful Major League players in April for sake of scrambling the dice around has the sort of stink of desperation that’s unlikely to turn out well.
The time for the Cardinals to break out of their intransigence was in November. They chose, in large measure, the status quo. It was defensible then and remains so now, but they’re witnessing what happens when an outlier outcome comes to life.
It’s not much fun to be wrong.