Harrison Bader, Tyler O’Neill and the St. Louis Cardinals must learn how to hit

I just can’t figure out how St. Louis Cardinals outfielders Harrison Bader and Tyler O’Neill continue to be victimized by sliders a foot off the plate.

Yeah, I get it. It’s hard to hit a little, round ball with a skinny, round stick. But these guys are pretty accomplished at the basics of hitting, which is proven by the fact that they’ve managed to make it as far as the big leagues. It’s not if they can put the bat on the ball that’s in question as the strikeouts pile up. It’s a matter of resisting the urge to be suckered into swinging at a pitch they couldn’t reach if they had a boat oar instead of a bat.

Sliders have been the bane of MLB hitters for decades. Bob Gibson made hundreds of guys look clueless with his slider. But Gibson was also famous (or infamous, depending on which side you’re on) for backing hitters off the plate with a fastball just under their chin to keep them honest. And that’s the thing. Pitchers aren’t allowed to pitch inside anymore. Just like runners can’t take out the second baseman or bowl over the catcher, contact between the ball and the batter is seriously frowned upon by the umpires and the commissioner’s office.

It seems to me that if Bader, O’Neill and basically all the other hitters in baseball crowded the plate as much as possible that they’d essentially cut the strike zone in half. Pitchers would have to throw the ball so far outside to put it beyond the batter’s reach that they shouldn’t ever be tempted to swing at that pitch and, as a result, they’d get more fastballs and less sucker pitches. Hitting is a guessing game in many ways. The more options batters can take off the table, the more likely they are to succeed.

That may been a shot in the dark, but the Cardinals aren’t getting any help before the end of the season because the trade deadline has passed. They need to find a way to make the hitters they have more productive and, as it stands, O’Neil is batting only .192 with a .297 on-base percentage while Bader is hitting a very modest .215 with a mediocre .333 on-base percentage. The way I see it, the worst thing that could happen is they’d draw a few more walks and take a few more pitches off their body armor to get on base more often, and they’d give themselves a fighting chance to get on via a hit.

But if major league players aren’t capable of hitting the ball the other way when their opponents are shifting against them, what are the odds they can adjust in the batters box to take away the slider? I just don’t understand how the game is played anymore. It seems like many of the nuances of the game are becoming a dead art.

Although the MLB team did a pretty good job in the first game against the Detroit Tigers on Thursday at Busch Stadium, the hapless offense in game two couldn’t do a darn thing and it cost the Cardinals a game it couldn’t afford to lose. The Tigers lost 19-0 to the Milwaukee Brewers 24 hours before, but they held the Cardinals to three runs in the night cap and gave themselves a chance to come back. And that’s exactly what happened. The previously bulletproof St. Louis bullpen was shot full of holes and surrendered five runs in the top of the last inning, apparently losing third-string closer Giovanny Gallagos to an injury.

Yes, it’s hard to play doubleheader after doubleheader. Yes, the Cardinals have suffered a lot of injuries this season. But the time for excuses is over. This is the hand they’ve been dealt and they either have to make the best of it or they can just go home and wait for next year to come.

While this team did a pretty good job of surviving a pair of ridiculous five-game series in Chicago — and how patently unfair is it that they play all 10 games against their chief rival for the National League Central crown on the road? But they haven’t done a very good job at all taking care of the teams they ought to beat. The Tigers, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the sub-.500 Cincinnati Reds. The Cardinals should have won at least five more games than they have so far. And if they did, it would likely be in first place, potentially hosting a three-game opening round playoff series instead of looking like they’ll probably have to find a way to win two of three on the road.

The time to play better is rapidly getting away from this team. It’s hard to believe because we’re used to baseball season being a marathon. But its three-quarters of the way over. And it’s going to be an awfully long winter thinking about the woulda, coulda, shouldas that have been packed into this short campaign.

Scott Wuerz

Belleville News-Democrat

Scott Wuerz has written “Cheap Seats,” a St. Louis Cardinals fan blog for the Belleville News-Democrat, since 2007. He is a former BND reporter who covered breaking news and education.