St. Louis Cardinals aim to prove their identity during grueling June
The St. Louis Cardinals finished April with a losing record, but their style of play demonstrated enough to their manager that he felt like more results were on the way. That showed up in May, when the Cardinals were a baseball-best 19-8.
Show it. Execute it. Next – sustaining it.
“That’s what this industry does, right?” Oli Marmol mused Tuesday from his Busch Stadium office. “Show the ability to do something, and they ask you to do it again. That is identity.”
A team whose identity was written in soft stone over the winter as an also ran that would be contributing to the sellers’ end of the trade deadline pool has an opportunity to subvert those expectations, but will have to run a tough gauntlet in order to fully establish themselves. The Cardinals are scheduled to play on 28 of June’s 30 days, and one of their off days has already passed by.
Starting with Tuesday’s homestand opener against the Kansas City Royals, St. Louis is set to play on 29 of the next 30 days, with the only day off until July 3 being set for June 16. It’s a stretch into the summer’s hot days that will see them dive more deeply into divisional play and come out just a month from the deadline with a better idea of whether this is a team that has earned additions or a team on the verge of being broken up.
The Cardinals do not yet have an answer regarding a firm trade deadline strategy because they have no way of knowing yet what the proper strategy will be. The month to come will tell them.
“I don’t see it as daunting,” Marmol said. “It’s a good challenge. Every team’s gonna have that stretch, right? We’re prepared for it. Our guys feel good going into it. We’re healthy. I don’t put more into it other than embrac[ing] the fact that there’s no off days, and enjoy playing baseball every day whether you like it or not.”
While the team is healthy by and large, outfielder Jordan Walker is not. Placed on the injured list over the weekend with inflammation in his left wrist, Walker reported to Busch Stadium during the team’s Monday off day for additional testing and some swings off a tee.
Marmol said the scans revealed no structural damage, though Walker did still have some discomfort in his swing. Until the pain fully subsides, it’s unclear how long a timeframe lies ahead of Walker on the injured list, though the expressed concern level is decidedly low from the team for the time being.
Over his most recent nine games, Walker found perhaps his most productive groove of the season to date, batting 9-for-26 with eight runs batted in – and 13 strikeouts. Still, contact rate aside, Walker was seemingly beginning to turn a corner when the injury bug struck, and the Cardinals will need him to seize what remains of that momentum when he returns.
To date, however, the Cardinals have dodged serious pitching injuries, in part due to some conservative management of schedules that saw Steven Matz bounce to the rotation as a sixth starter for a stretch of May. Given the dearth of upcoming days off, Marmol said the team plans to repeat that plan, starting on Sunday when the defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers wrap up their lone visit to St. Louis this season.
“It’s worked out well, because our guys have benefited from it,” Marmol said of what the team took away from their previous stretch with a six-man rotation. “And during that time, the usage in the ‘pen was still what we wanted it to be, even though we were a man short…It worked out well when we did it initially, so I’d like to buy them that extra day this next time through.”
Marmol said he hoped to be able to identify the pitcher the team plans to tap for that assignment on Wednesday or Thursday. Michael McGreevy, who put up 5 ⅔ innings of scoreless pitching in his one big league appearance to date this season, was set to start Tuesday night for Triple-A Memphis, and would be on regular rest to start Sunday’s game.
Despite his earlier success swinging from the bullpen to the rotation, Matz has moved sufficiently up the depth chart of high leverage relievers that it seems unlikely the team would want to remove him from that role, and he would not be able to provide the same sort of bulk innings coverage that McGreevy, stretched out and taking regular turns as a starter, would.
Those small challenges – overcoming minor injuries, leaning on depth in the rotation, finding increased spots to use bench players – will add up over the course of the month. Should the Cardinals win 15 of their 28 games this month, they’ll reach July at ten games above .500, well on their way to contention.
Should it break the other direction, a team that was preparing all winter to sell could well back into that plan. It’s in front of the team on the field now to make that decision, and whether they’re prepared to seize the opportunity will shape the story of this season.
