Dumping Marmol is no answer if it means keeping status quo in Cardinals’ front office

Maintaining patience isn’t working. Perhaps it’s time for the St. Louis Cardinals to play with a different characteristic beginning with the letter P.

Call it hacked off, maybe. Or simply angry.

“Probably can’t hurt,” starter Jordan Montgomery said Wednesday of that suggestion after the team lost its 42nd of its first 69 games.

The last place Cardinals have the worst winning percentage in the National League and the third worst in baseball, ahead of only the woebegone Athletics and Royals. They are one of only five teams — those two, the Nationals and the Rockies — who haven’t yet reached 30 wins. They are sinking a lot faster than they’re swimming, and the temperature finally feels like it’s being turned up.

“At some point, you just have to do something about it,” manager Oliver Marmol said after his team was swept by the Giants to wrap up a 1-5 homestand.

The Cardinals entered the ninth inning Wednesday with a two run lead. They had that same lead with two out and an 0-2 count on the ninth hitter in the San Francisco lineup, outfielder Mike Yastrzemski.

His homer to tie the game was only too predictable, as was the unraveling that followed in the tenth inning.

Marmol added, “you keep getting punched in the face? Punch back.”

There was an opportunity to do so, literally, on Tuesday night. LaMonte Wade, Jr. reached second base and danced around the basepath as though he might take off for third. He didn’t, but the feint rankled Cardinals starter Jack Flaherty. Strong words were exchanged, and the benches and bullpens cleared.

The closest anyone came to engaging physically with an opponent, though, was lefty Génesis Cabrera wrapping up in a playful embrace with former teammate John Brebbia. Maybe it was the wrong time to go down literally swinging, but the team is certainly going down. They shouldn’t do so without a fight.

“We just don’t execute,” third baseman Nolan Arenado said. “We don’t execute. This has nothing to do with the coaches. That has to do with players, and as players, we don’t execute.”

Whatever appetite may be growing outside the clubhouse for a shakeup of the coaching staff isn’t echoed inside its walls. To a man, the players have taken ownership of their failures and pushed back against suggestions that the dugout leadership should be set up to take a fall.

Shallow at best

That doesn’t mean it won’t happen. A team with World Series expectations can’t have its worst year in decades without some attempt to re-roll the dice. Whether Marmol and his coaches deserve to stay in place may end up not mattering if an increasingly erratic front office feels like it’s out of deflector shields.

Such a change, though, would be surface and shallow at best. Turning over the dugout for the third time in five years without so much of a whisper of change coming to the front office can’t be an acceptable solution.

And since the baseball operations buck stops firmly on John Mozeliak’s desk, and since Mozeliak is — arguably deservedly — fully ensconced in the best graces of ownership, that seems to be a road to nowhere.

So then the dugout is left to roll over or get mad. There’s time to do the former if the latter doesn’t work out.

“I don’t know whether it needs to be angry or not,” Arenado said. “It doesn’t matter. You can be angry or happy or whatever. I don’t think anybody’s happy about what’s going on here.”

Take it personal

Catcher Willson Contreras suggested a different P — personal.

“I’m not sure if your mind can be positive, but you have to take this personal now,” he said. “It’s not about individual seasons. It’s about taking it personal. Taking this personal and make adjustments.”

Contreras meant personal as a collective. He meant a challenge to the team as a whole to demonstrate it’s better than what they’ve shown to date, though the time to do so is draining away. With six weeks until the trade deadline and a bevy of potential free agents who would stand out on the market, the looming decision around whether to be a team that sells off short term players is about to be made for them.

‘Can’t get used to losing’

After all, the Cardinals haven’t won a series in four weeks. What difference can another six make?

“At some point, you can’t get used to losing,” Marmol said. “We’ve got to do something about it. Call it whatever you want. Swing of emotions, whatever the case may be. We’ve been here, and at some point you’ve got to strap it on and go. Today’s unacceptable.”

He didn’t need to expand his point to the rest of the season. That much is obvious. Fans can read the standings as well as anyone else, and that initial P — chafed? Fuming? Nettled? — creeps right back in every time.