By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/09/30/so-whats-in-the-cards-now/You could say it happened in almost a blink Thursday night. Cardinals rookie Paul DeJong, the club’s
home run leader with 24 despite his late May call-up, drove one that looked like its final resting place
would be the other side of the center field fence in the bottom of the eleventh, with his club down,
2-1. Cubs centerfielder Leonys Martin thought it looked like something else and made it happen,
timing a perfect leap and grabbing the ball before it crossed the fence.
Martin also grabbed the Cardinals’ final hope for surviving the National League wild card race while
he was at it, two days after the Cubs pushed the Cardinals out of the NL Central race and one day
after they clinched the division at the Cardinals’ expense.
“Off the bat, I thought it was going to go,” said DeJong after the game. “It feels like the rug got taken
out from under me. End of the season. End of the opportunities for us.”
It was the opposite of how the Cardinals’ season began, when they edged past the Cubs 4-3 on Opening
Day. On that day, Randal Grichuk walked it off with a base hit. Who knew the Cardinals would lose their
next six of seven? Or start the season 3-9? Or, lose nine of their first twelve? Or, go 23-29 in one-run
games? Or, prove unable to keep it going after they went 78-63 from 17 April to 22 September?
“I stand up here and tell you that I think we’re just a few games or something happening and it’s going
to work out to where we achieve what we want to achieve,” said manager Mike Matheny after Thursday
night’s loss, “and I fully believe that. This is the first time I have to stand up here and say that it’s not
going to happen. We fell short.”
What hurt most was losing to the Cubs’ scrubs, more or less. Oh, Kyle Schwarber opened the tenth with
a ground ball, but Cardinals reliever Matt Bowman threw errantly to first base, enabling Schwarber to
second. Then Taylor Davis—undrafted free agent, 0-for-3 on the night to that point—ripped a double to
left. It was his first major league run batted in, and it proved even bigger after Martin vaporised DeJong’s
would-be bomb.
“They probably hate me,” Davis said of the Busch Stadium crowd after the game. “Rightfully so.”
It was the opposite of how the Cardinals’ season began, when they edged past the Cubs 4-3 on Opening
Day. On that day, Randal Grichuk walked it off with a base hit. Who knew the Cardinals would lose their
next six of seven? Or start the season 3-9? Or, lose nine of their first twelve? Or, go 23-29 in one-run
games? Or, prove unable to keep it going after they went 78-63 from 17 April to 22 September?
But maybe nobody figured Grichuk, Stephen Piscotty, and last year’s rookie star Aledmys Diaz would
drop off the table as profoundly as they did this year—the threesome averaged an 87 OPS+ this year.
DeJong’s pleasantly surprising 2.5 wins above a replacement level player probably offset Diaz’s sinking
from last year’s 3.5 to this year’s -0.6 WAR and a demotion while he was at it. The surprising Tommy
Pham leads the Cardinals with 6.3 WAR this year, with Jedd Gyorko’s 3.6 in second, but a few other
key Cardinal bats dropped almost out of sight.
Nobody went into the season betting that Matt Adams would play himself out of the left field mix and
out of town, traded to the Braves, where he might have hit nineteen bombs but his 0.7 WAR made
him extremely replaceable. (Why not move him back to first base? Easy—it would have moved Matt
Carpenter back to third and left Gyorko trying to find at-bats in the spare pile.)
Nobody entered the season figuring aging Jhonny Peralta would go down with a respiratory illness
and lose his starting shortstop job to Gyorko. Nobody started by figuring Carpenter would battle
shoulder issues much of the season.
The Cardinals’ starting rotation was better than serviceable, with four of the five delivering above-
average run prevention, and mid-August callup Luke Weaver ended up out-pitching Mike Leake,
traded near August’s end to the Mariners in a deal that seemed to shock his teammates, especially
Lance Lynn—who started Thursday night’s game, was pulled for a pinch hitter before he could finish
a quality start, and faces the question of whether the Cardinals think they can afford to bring him
back.
With Adam Wainwright struggling and finally yanked from the rotation at about the time of the
Weaver callup, Lynn looked like the Cardinals’ best starter. He looked so good in spring training
that Leake playfully guessed his asking price publicly and offered to negotiate an extension for
Lynn. Dealing Leake was thought to free up enough extra money for the Cardinals to make a
push at keeping Lynn, but Lynn himself wasn’t exactly ready to put that in the bank.
“I’m sure whenever the time comes– when the World Series is over and five days after, I’m
sure somebody will talk to me,” he said after the Leake trade. “I just don’t know who it is.
They’ve had a whole season. Five days isn’t going to matter. But I just work here.”
So does Yadier Molina, who’s about to begin a very profitable contract extension but who’s
been showing his age a little more dramatically this year.
The season began with a laugh and a half, on a day the Cardinals lost to the Cubs in a game
they once led, when reliever Brett Cecil threw a fastball in the dirt to Matt Szczur, the carom
hit Molina in the chest protector, and the ball stuck right there. It was funny as hell until
Cecil walked former Cardinal Jon Jay and then threw Schwarber a first-pitch meatball that
might have gotten the big Cub fined if he didn’t send it over the right field fence.
Unfortunately, Molina’s season turned from laugh to drastic in Boston at mid-August. Coming
into Fenway Park riding an eight game winning streak, Molina first whacked into a fourth-
inning triple play, one frame before the Red Sox dropped an eight-spot on the Cardinals en
route a 10-4 demolition.
The next night, in the sort of calamity that used to happen to the Red Sox almost exclusively,
an early 4-0 Cardinal lead became a 5-4 heartbreak loss after Molina couldn’t grab a perfect
strike home from the cutoff man as Jackie Bradley, Jr. sailed across the plate, the Boston
hustler scrambling back to touch the plate before Molina could retrieve the ball.
Molina may have out-hit the average National League catcher this season and still given
defense above the league average, but his OPS+ was a mere 96 and the Cardinals have to
be worried whether age and concussions have finally caught up to their longtime mainstay.
Nobody wants to say Molina losing the ball in Boston was the play that built this year’s coffin
lid, but playing only .500 baseball from that game through Friday night’s loss to the Brewers
isn’t what postseason teams do down the stretch.
The Cardinals have a lot of offseason thinking to do. They have to decide how to re-adjust
Grichuk, Piscotty, and Diaz. They have to fish or cut bait on Lynn and decide what Wainwright’s
remaining future will be. They have to fix a bullpen that isn’t really as good as losing only five
games in the ninth inning looks (it was fewer than the NL East champion Nationals and the
wild card-contending Brewers), not when they surrendered a .334 on-base percentage in
high-leverage situations and lost closer Trevor Rosenthal—right after he re-claimed the job
in August—to a blown ulnar collateral ligament.
They have to decide whether Matheny is really the right man on the bridge. Until last year
he’d at least gotten them to the postseason dance, only to lose the girl in the worst ways
possible. From a gassed Michael Wacha having no slider left to stop the Red Sox from winning
the 2013 Series to Matheny refusing to lift Wacha in relief despite lifeless stuff a year later,
and watching Travis Ishikawa kick the Cardinals home without a pennant with one big swing
in the bottom of the ninth. Then Matheny had to manage a 2015 National League division
series without a thumb-compromised Molina and watch the Cubs bludgeon them home in
four games.
Matheny’s pitching management came under fire yet again the night the Cubs clinched this
year’s division on his dime. With Wacha pitching one of his best games—six shutout innings
and eight punchouts—in a game the Cardinals absolutely had to win to stay on life support,
at least, Matheny, who had to know long before how vulnerable Wacha gets when he starts
the third time around a batting order, had nobody ready in the admittedly shaky pen to help
protect a 1-0 lead.
Then the Cubs torched Wacha and turned the deficit into their own four-run lead. It almost
made pushing the Cardinals out of the entire postseason picture the following night child’s play.
“Matheny is six seasons into a Big-Boy job — SIX — and he’s still incapable of managing a
bullpen,” fumed Bernie Miklasz, the Hall of Fame writer now working for St. Louis’s ESPN
affiliate radio stadion. “He continues to screw up, time and time again. He continues to have
too many instances of standing still as trouble grows and intensifies and swallows his team.
Matheny is the worst I’ve ever seen at this crucial part of managing.”
These Cardinals weren’t a horrible team, not when they can be 82-78, but something was
wrong with their picture, after all. Forget how much it has to burn them that the Cubs looked
so shaky in the first half only to plow back to another division title in the second half. They
now have to spend an off-season figuring out how much they burned themselves and who
has to have their matches taken away.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
@Polly Ticks @Machiavelli @Wingnut @Weird Tolkienish Figure @DCPatriot @Jazzhead @dfwgator @Cyber Liberty @TomSea @Freya @Suppressed @Slip18
