Cardinals at the crossroads: Signs of flight amid turbulent first half
Even as the St. Louis Cardinals choked and sputtered across the season’s official halfway point at the end of Wednesday’s 8-0 loss to the Chicago Cubs, there were still signs evident on the field of a team finding itself in a position to push a little harder than their offseason inertia may have suggested.
Newly acquired utility player Garrett Hampson pitched the ninth inning as part of his Cardinals debut, wrapping up a game in which he started in centerfield and also played an inning at shortstop. That display of flexibility was part of what prompted the Cardinals to have interest in Hampson as far back as the winter, he acknowledged.
“Took a little while longer,” he said, “but I’m here now and I feel good.”
Hampson eventually signed a one-year, $1.5 million deal with the Arizona Diamondbacks in the offseason. That team would lose him on waivers to the Cincinnati Reds, who would do so in turn to the Cardinals. The modest financial commitment was still greater than the minor league deal St. Louis was able to secure with José Barrero, who fills the same roster roles as Hampson and was designated for assignment to clear his place.
Having already passed through two spots, the Cardinals are on the hook for only Hampson’s pro-rated major league minimum salary for the remainder of the season. They got the player they wanted at half the cost, but for only half the year.
“I do feel like this is a value add in a lot of different ways,” manager Oli Marmol said of the difference between the two players.
Modest though it may be, the Cardinals are adding value. They aren’t yet subtracting any. The way the schedule plays out over the coming weeks will fully stress test whether that posture will endure.
The Cardinals won 44 of their first 81 games, which makes for simple and encouraging math – they are on pace for 88 wins, which would have been sufficient to secure a wild card slot in both 2022 and 2023, coming up one game short in 2024. They enter play Thursday, ahead of game 82, trailing the San Francisco Giants and San Diego Padres by half a game each, as well as the Milwaukee Brewers by one game.
They are precisely perched on the precipice of being a playoff team, with arguably the toughest stretch of their schedule already in the rearview mirror. Every scrap of messaging from the franchise’s decision makers throughout the winter and into spring training suggested a team that was bracing both its players and its fans for a painful cratering in service of a planned ascension, but instead, players have taken it upon themselves to set the bar of expectations increasingly high.
“I didn’t expect us to be winning like this at this point,” said third baseman Nolan Arenado, who also did not expect to be a part of the collective “us” to which he was referring after a winter of waiting for an inevitable trade which did not materialize. “Games like this, it’s easy to wake up. This is the most excited I’ve come to the ballpark, for this series, in about two years.”
Arenado spoke to a “standard” on both sides of the ball that he pegged as having been set in spring training. He acknowledged his own fade offensively – on pace for 20 home runs and 78 RBI but a notch below league average in his production rates – but said he’s “absolutely” seen a step forward in team-wide maturity.
“I think that’s something we’re seeing with this group,” he said. “We’re starting to learn that to be a good player, or to be here for a long time, you’ve gotta play both sides of the ball.”
The starting pitchers in the second and third games of the series for the Cardinals are perhaps the best personification of the coming crossroads. Both Michael McGreevy and Erick Fedde were hit hard by the Cubs, with McGreevy able to steady the ship after a five-run inning but Fedde unable to get himself back on track.
The Cardinals have acknowledged that their internal projections saw McGreevy having already spent much more time in the majors to date than his three starts and 21 ⅓ innings this season due to simple attrition; pitchers, who inevitably get hurt, have not yet for the Cardinals at an astonishing rate, and his most obvious path to permanent promotion has therefore been delayed.
Fedde, a free agent at season’s end, has been one of the league’s most obvious trade candidates for months, and a team which views itself as needing to allow their young players every opportunity to assert their skills could flip him simply to open a roster spot and give McGreevy the second-half opportunity which he has earned.
It’s unlikely that president of baseball operations John Mozeliak will need much provocation to give his team a chance to win in his final months at the helm. There is, frankly, not a lot of joy in going out as a loser, and whatever presence his personal pride might have in the decision making over the coming month, there is more than sufficient data to suggest folly in a teardown.
A team which has used the word “runway” so often since February that it now draws barely concealed eye rolls and snickers would do well to remember one of the first rules learned by every new pilot – if enough speed has been gathered, it’s much more dangerous to slam on the brakes than to pull back on the stick.
Once the plane is really moving, it needs to fly.
