Frustrated Cardinals feel pressure of losing, but nobody seems to have a solution
Pressure comes with the territory.
Anyone whose chosen profession forces them to compete, every night in front of live crowds and a television audience, while displaying athletic ability at a level higher than all but the slimmest minority of living people, is prepared to wear that. In large part, after all, that’s what the money is for.
Most commonly, baseball players manage that pressure by leaning on the inevitability of the next day. In a game based on failure, the ability to relax and trust your skills while knowing there’s another chance the next day can have a powerful soothing effect on an otherwise busy brain.
“We have to be perfect to win right now,” St. Louis Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said after Sunday’s series-dropping loss to the Cincinnati Reds.
That’s a tough way to do business.
Monday’s loss to San Francisco tumbled the Cardinals to 13 games below .500, just one shy of their low water mark in a season that’s been characterized by an historic drought of winning.
Despite a late inning lead, a bullpen that suffered a blow with Ryan Helsley’s placement on the injured list was unable to hold, and at bats for Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt in the eighth and ninth innings with a chance to tie or take the lead failed to produce a ball out of the infield.
Perhaps the most consistent thing about the problems they’ve been having is that they’ve been having problems. If it’s not one thing, it is seemingly always, always another.
“I think it’s probably just feeling the pressure,” shortstop-turned-center fielder Tommy Edman said. “We haven’t won a lot of games. Everyone’s just probably trying to do too much. Everybody’s trying to get that big hit, and sometimes we try too hard and it makes you not do well.”
Edman described a team that doesn’t have to play “great in all three phases” – pitching, offense, defense – as long as they play “well” in all three. It’s a fine distinction, but one worth considering, especially in the context of what it means to be perfect.
“It just seems like each day, there’s one (phase) that doesn’t really perform,” Edman said. “If that one side just does really poorly, then it doesn’t give you a chance.”
Goldschmidt, who grounded out to Giants closer Camilo Doval on the first pitch of his last at bat to end Monday’s game, is nothing if not a model of consistency. Even he, though, spent Monday switching up a pregame routine that just two days before his manager called, by way of a compliment, “pretty robotic.”
A first baseman taking some lighthearted infield practice is barely notable for most players even under the most trying of circumstances, but Goldschmidt isn’t most players. Part of his process for keeping his body in its best shape over the grind of a long season is staying off his feet when he can, drilling down on where his focus needs to be.
And yet there he was Monday afternoon, fielding and spinning at shortstop for what he estimated was the first time since he transitioned to first base in college, approximately 15 years ago.
Typically, he explained, he avoids doing any work at all with an infielder’s glove so that he doesn’t get used to fielding balls deep in his palm rather than out in the pocket of a first baseman’s mitt.
This season is anything but typical, and even the most granular details of routine are open to inspection.
“You’re going to be frustrated no matter how you lose,” he said after Monday’s defeat. “When you get blown out or it’s a one run loss, it’s a loss. It doesn’t matter…I’m up there, I’ve got a chance, I get a hit and we tie the game. You definitely go home thinking about that. You feel like you let the team down when you don’t come through.”
Whether it’s Edman or Goldschmidt or Willson Contreras with his sinking numbers and confidence plummeting even faster still, it’s difficult to see the way through this current predicament for the Cardinals.
No one in the clubhouse believes the team is bad enough to play a full season at a 65-win pace. No one seems to have the answers for breaking out of that cycle.
The organization’s higher ups, fronted by Marmol without much sharing in the water weight by the front office, don’t seem to have the answers either. Certainly the manager isn’t responsible for the outcome of individual at bats or each isolated mental lapse in the field which has allowed too many runs to slip and slide away.
Unfortunately for all involved, it’s not clear whether they have the answers either.
One year removed from receiving multiple first place votes as the NL Manager of the Year and winning 93 games, Marmol is left to gather up the disparate pieces of an increasingly despondent clubhouse and reassemble them on the proper track.
He has earned time, still, to figure those things out. He has the security of his position granted in part by the recency with which he achieved it. Given the way this organization does business, it is almost beyond imagining to think that security could waver in anything resembling the near future.
Business, though, has gotten sloppy. The team upstairs has reflected some cracks of the team on the field, and the further they tumble, the harder they become to predict.
No one, after all, is perfect.
