Cardinals’ series loss to Tigers is a learning experience, not a setback
The St. Louis Cardinals lost their first series in nearly a month on Wednesday, and it was hardly one deserving of scorn.
The Detroit Tigers are the owners of the best record in baseball, and they eagerly displayed depth of both pitchers and hitters which demonstrated an interesting example of the sort of team the Cardinals have ridden to their early season success; high talent without much recognition, elite skill sets which compliment each other, and the ability to win games in multiple ways without overwhelming star power.
They serve as an interesting model of aspiration for these Cardinals, as well as a test that might technically have been failed, but not in a way which brings much alarm. Rather the series was a useful measuring stick, and in squeezing down pressure in some ways which have been absent on a wave of positivity in recent weeks, it revealed perhaps a few truths about the way in which the team will operate in the short term as it seeks a stable long term.
Pedro Pagés has earned team’s trust and is highly valued
With the Cardinals down one run in the bottom of the sixth inning on Tuesday night, they were presented with a tantalizing opportunity. A rally against Tarik Skubal forced him from the game, and righty reliever Brenan Hanifee was called upon to pitch to Nolan Arenado. He singled, and was followed by Jordan Walker chopping a grounder to deep short which was wrangled by a diving Trey Sweeney. Sweeney didn’t have a play at first, but by keeping the ball on the dirt, he kept the bases loaded and brought the inning to Pagés.
It’s the kind of situation in which Oli Marmol has been aggressive with a pinch hitter throughout the course of his managerial career. Alec Burleson was available on the bench in light of the lefty Skubal getting the start, and with the three-batter minimum in effect, Hanifee was stuck. The Cardinals, too, are carrying three catchers. Iván Herrera was in the lineup – indeed, on base – as the designated hitter, but Yohel Pozo was on the bench and able to catch the remainder of the game.
Instead, Pagés hit a sharp ground ball to third to end the inning. The Cardinals would rally to tie in the bottom of the seventh, so it wasn’t as though that jam was their last opportunity to score. It was clearly not, however, a spot in which Marmol was particularly tempted to remove his catcher from the game, despite the offensive opportunity.
“Pagés does a really nice job of keeping the damn score,” Marmol said after the game. “You want him behind the plate because that’s what gives you a really good chance to keep them from adding on, so you weigh that into the equation.”
Indeed, the manager was clearly a touch more tortured by his bullpen deployment decisions than the way he stuck with his catcher. Since returning from the injured list on May 9 in Washington, Herrera has played in 11 of the team’s 12 games and been the designated hitter in nine of them. He’s caught twice – the second game of a doubleheader in Philadelphia, and yesterday’s day game following a night game. His bat is irreplaceable, but his battery mate has locked down behind the dish.
A young offense is susceptible to swoons
Monday’s rain-interrupted blowout saw the Cardinals put up 11 runs, and they followed that performance with scraping four in a game started by Skubal, the reigning AL Cy Young Award winner, on Tuesday. Those are encouraging signs, but they’re cocooned by scoring one run in each of the last two games over the weekend in Kansas City and in Wednesday’s series finale.
Hitting is hard, and the Cardinals have recommitted under hitting coach Brant Brown to the sort of situational baseball which has helped them put together a robust offense even without many significant power threats. They enter play Thursday third in the majors in batting average and fifth in on base percentage, but 11th in slugging percentage. They have just 47 home runs, good for 19th.
That is in part the result of personnel, especially as Nolan Gorman (more on him below) scrapes by with just one homer after leading the team in that category two years ago and Nolan Arenado searches for his own power stroke. That requires them to generate offense in long stretches, and that’s easier said than done.
Conquering the challenges of Busch Stadium isn’t a simple task for any power hitter, and a team which plays half its games there is unlikely to be a team pushing for a McGwire-esque summer. The Cardinals have demonstrated that in some of their susceptibility to the season’s ebbs and flows, and overcoming that natural cycle will be necessary as they move into offensive maturity.
Nolan Gorman’s runway has significantly narrowed
Throughout the winter, the Cardinals operated under the expectation that Arenado would be traded and Gorman would take over the daily reps at third base. As neither has happened, that’s left them seeking ways to get the young lefty in the lineup, albeit with less urgency than they might have thought.
Through 50 team games, Gorman (who did spend a minimum 10-day stretch on the injured list with a strained hamstring) has just 95 plate appearances and 79 at bats. At that pace, he would put up 307 plate appearances over a full season, which would be the smallest total of any of his four seasons in the majors. That includes his rookie season in which he played just 89 games after a mid-season callup, and last year, when he was sent to Triple-A Memphis for the season’s final month.
With a .563 OPS and a 59 OPS+, it’s not as though Gorman has been beating the down door for more playing time. But the lineup decisions around using Herrera largely as a DH, as well as trying to find space for Burleson and all but cementing Brendan Donovan at second, have rolled downhill to push Gorman into a spot where it’s hard to see where he even might be used. Pagés came back to the plate on Tuesday night in the bottom of the eighth inning with a runner in scoring position. He hit for himself with Gorman on the bench; that scarcely came as a surprise.
“Gorman is currently on pace before 314 at bats, which is not nothing,” Marmol said before Monday’s game and before the week lengthened the denominator of that equation. “That’s with missing ten days on the IL, so that could put him at 350 otherwise. That’s a real look at somebody over the course of a full season.”
Perhaps so, but it’s also their most limited look at Gorman in any of the last four seasons. It’s fair to wonder if that demonstrates that they believe they’ve seen what they need to see.
