Cardinals’ bullpen struggles again in loss. What solutions are readily available?

One of the most important documents found at Busch Stadium on any given night during the baseball season is double-sided, printed on cardstock, and somewhere between the size of a half sheet of letter-sized paper and a standard issue index card.

On each side is a color-coded grid that moves backward a week in time, tracking the usage of relief pitchers — when they threw, how many pitches, how many times they warmed up, and the stress of the situations in which they were called upon.

The card is the Rosetta Stone that maps the language of the end of a game. Paired with a spin through the clubhouse and a few furtive conversations, it can sometimes even read the future.

Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol often has his sitting on his desk when he meets with the media before games, and on Monday evening, he held it up and spun it in a circle.

“That’s theirs,” he said, referring to the Arizona Diamondbacks, whose side of the card was largely covered in white blanks. Green is the color which coincides with spaces in which a pitcher was used in game action.

“Ours looks like a beautiful Christmas tree,” he said of the Cardinals’ side, flooded with green and studded with yellow notations covering the frequency of warm ups.

It has not, to date, been a holly, jolly holiday season.

Divination of the card would help explain why Andre Pallante — out of action for four days earlier this week — was called upon Monday night with two on and no one out in the seventh inning and the Cardinals trailing by one run. Pallante did indeed throw 22 pitches in Sunday’s action and was working on back-to-back days, but those four days ahead of time gave him lots of rest in the run-up.

He also threw 22 pitches Monday, including a four-pitch walk to Corbin Carroll — Carroll’s first walk of the season — and a grand slam allowed to Pavin Smith which effectively ended any hope of a comeback in what would become a 6-3 loss.

Zack Thompson, yet to allow a run this season, also entered Sunday’s game and threw only seven pitches. In doing so, though, he spread those pitches over an inning and a third; a “two up” in the parlance of the bullpen, meaning he twice had to warm up with a break in between, rather than simply getting loose, getting outs, and ending his day.

And Thompson also had a multi-inning appearance Friday while throwing 31 pitches in game action, which would have made Monday his third appearance in four days, intensifying the impact of his workload. Pallante, who said after Monday’s game that he was “ready to perform today,” had more recent and extensive rest.

The bullpen is managed both backward and forward, and as strong as the temptation can be to simply throw the best pitchers whose arms are currently functional, the Cardinals find themselves compelled to take a much longer-term view.

“If you look at a lot of the injuries (among pitchers), it happens in April or early May,” Marmol said. “Do I need them going four out of six days this early? Not ideally. It’s looking at how they got to that fourth out of the sixth day.”

More about bullpen woes

The weekend’s action, especially Saturday’s extra innings loss to Pittsburgh, was ultimately the culmination of a string of usage that, by Marmol’s reckoning, has had the Cardinals without the full complement of their active bullpen pitchers in every game in the early going.

Pallante’s soreness which precipitated his days off came on the heels of Jordan Hicks fighting through a viral infection during the team’s trip to Colorado. Hicks, in his first night available after recovering, walked two of the three hitters he faced and allowed an inherited runner to score. Saturday, with Drew VerHagen unavailable due to workload, it was Hicks again called upon in extra innings, and his disastrous performance left him, from the team’s perspective, unable to be used in games that might still be winnable, or even competitive.

And yet Hicks is unable to be sent to the minors due to his accrued service time, leaving the Cardinals to scramble for settings they can’t afford to script in order to work with him to return to a passable form. A bullpen of eight is thus in all practicality permanently reduced to seven before workload is even factored in.

‘It’s just part of it’

There are few fan traditions that have been around longer than second guessing the choices a manager makes in deploying his relievers. Marmol, like everyone else who has held his job, is not above criticism, and from time to time will make mistakes. Some of those mistakes, though, come from imperfect options. And the data that informs those options is often far from public — even as it resides in plain view on a card which sits on a small platform in front of his seat in the dugout.

“It’s just part of it,” Marmol said. “We’re going to have to figure out how to navigate it. That part’s not going to change.”

Thursday’s off day, at least, will change the background color on a few squares. That’s a navigational beacon that should provide relief.