This St. Louis Cardinals team doesn’t deserve to make the expanded baseball postseason

The St. Louis Cardinals remain in the National League playoff hunt only because the lowly Pittsburgh Pirates were apparently feeling mighty generous over the weekend. But this team isn’t going anywhere in the postseason if it can’t find a way to score some runs on its own.

Exceedingly mediocre pitching looked absolutely brilliant in holding the Cardinals to nine hits over the last 18 innings of the series, threatening seriously to get no-hit in the process and scoring in only two of those 18 frames. If it wasn’t for the Pirates deciding to issue a bunch of free passes through walks and hit batsmen on Saturday, that game would have been a loss. On Sunday, the only scoring play was a two-run homer off the bat of Yadier Molina.

Is that expected to be nearly enough offense against some of the high-octane teams St. Louis would face from the bottom half of the playoff bracket? I wouldn’t dream it is. This team is a serious contender only to be shut out in every game it plays. It’s sad that the club has the weakest schedule in the National League over the second month of the two-month season and it can’t do any better than to climb to two games over the .500 mark. The Cincinnati Reds snoozed for the first half of the shortened season, and now they’re breathing down the Cardinals’ necks, only one game back in the chase for the second spot in the National League Central.

It’s hard to forget that if it wasn’t for the ridiculously generous playoff format, the Cardinals would surely be on the outside looking in. In my book, they should be. Regardless of what the commissioner thinks, playoff teams should be exceptionally good, not just a team that wins somewhere around half of its games. So, St. Louis is extremely lucky to have a chance to make the postseason at all in this bizarre year.

I feel bad, in a way, being so critical of the team because it has suffered so many injuries this year. But almost all those losses have come at the expense of the pitching staff — and the Cardinals’ pitching isn’t the problem. Even though Jordan Hicks, John Brebbia and Miles Mikolas have missed the whole season and Dakota Hudson has joined them on the shelf until (at least) the 2021 campaign, those guys weren’t expected to score any runs. And scoring runs is the problem. It’s so much of a concern that the one guy on the shelf who is a position player, Dexter Fowler, is eagerly anticipated as a prospective boost even though he has largely been maligned over the past three years as a chronic underachiever. It’s pretty easy to look good when two of the other three primary outfielders are hitting below .200 and the one who is above the Mendoza Line is only BARELY over it. Harrison Bader is hitting .204, Tyler O’Neill is batting .183 and rookie Dylan Carlson has a .179 average for the season. Blech.

The Cardinals simply skimped on offense because of bad contracts for Fowler and Matt Carpenter sucking up too much of the payroll. There are no internal options for help that will suddenly make this team better like Rafael Furcal did in 2011 or Scott Spiezio did in 2006. When the team tried to plug Lane Thomas into the lineup he was terrible at the plate and in the field. When they tried to turn to Austin Dean, he made Thomas look like a Gold Glover and a Silver Slugger rolled into one. For whatever reason, Jerome Williams collected dust at the alternate training site until the past few days. But he’s right at home with the other outfielders, hitting .200 with no extra base hits.

I want the Cardinals to win the World Series every year. But this team just doesn’t seem worthy. I want to believe that if the Cardinals miss the postseason for the fourth time in five years that it would create some sense of urgency and force the front office to go find a big bat that plays in the outfield and maybe a second that can man third base. But it just doesn’t seem likely that the club is going to cough up the cash to make those moves while it’s still paying Carpenter and Fowler to fill those roles poorly.

Usually, late September is the most exciting time of year to be a Cardinals fan. But this year it feels like the Cardinals are heading to a gun fight, armed only with a dull butter knife. It isn’t going to end well for them.

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.