Wow, a lot can happen in a short time in the unpredictable world of sports.
A few weeks ago I blogged about the state of the 2012 St. Louis Cardinals in the National League at approximately the one-fifth mark of the season. The Redbirds at that time boasted a 20-11 record, one of the best in all of baseball. Rookie manager Mike Matheny seemed to be pushing all the right buttons as he guided his enthusiastic and productive team through a relatively smooth start to the marathon, 162-game season.
Fast forward to the one-third point of 2012 and the Cardinals are sputtering at 28-27. They’ve gone 7-16 since that sprint out of the starting gate and at the moment are free-falling through the National League Central standings, trailing Cincinnati and barely hanging on against the charging Pittsburgh Pirates.
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So, what happened?
A lot, actually, and very little of it is good. The Redbirds have been decimated by injuries to key players such as Chris Carpenter, Lance Berkman, Jon Jay, Allen Craig, Matt Carpenter and Skip Schumaker. Additionally, stalwarts such as Carlos Beltran, Yadier Molina, Jaime Garcia and David Freese have been saddled with sundry physical problems from time to time. If you think about it, Matt Holliday and Rafael Furcal are virtually the only regulars who haven’t been felled this season, and Furcal has a history of missing games somewhere in the six-month season.
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Starting pitching has suddenly become suspect, although that may not be too surprising. After all, Carpenter hasn’t thrown a pitch and Adam Wainwright is coming off Tommy John surgery after missing the entire 2010 season. Furthermore, Kyle Lohse and Jake Westbrook aren’t career .500 pitchers by accident. They are simply relatively mediocre pitchers in the long term.
Garcia has been problematic since his rookie season, often demonstrating patches of brilliance that are offset by sub-standard performances, particularly when the breaks don’t go his way defensively. As for Lance Lynn, he’s a second-year hurler who has been thrust into the starting rotation prematurely. He’s done very well thus far, but is he capable of keeping up this pace?
Additionally, the Cardinals have shown a disturbing trend in leaving runners in scoring position on base with less than two outs. Simply put, they’ve got to engineer and manufacture RBIs most of the time if they hope to prevail against tough competition.
The bullpen has blown several games, revealing serious weaknesses in holding leads in the late innings. Already Fernando Salas has been sent back to Memphis to find his 2010 form, J.C. Romero was released and others, such as Victor Marte, Jason Motte and Marc Rzepczynski, are trying still to achieve stability and reliability in their roles.
Matheny, too, has made his share of mistakes. Too often the Cardinals blunder on the basepaths, often at his insistence at overly aggressive base-running. That’s admirable to a point, but the goal is to score more runs, not less.
We’re now in early June. It’s a long season, of course, and the Cardinals seem to be a resilient bunch. They’ll need to demonstrate that virtue time and again in the coming months if they hope to reach the National League playoffs at the end of the season.
Evan Makovsky
HOST, THE E-MAK SHOW
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