Can We Trust This?

The Cardinals are on a heater. Will it keep going?

Well, this has been fun, hasn’t it?

The last two weeks have been the brightest spot of the last two seasons. The Cardinals, after being drubbed by the Brewers in the first three games of their series, salvaged a win on May 12—their first win on a Sunday. Then they went to Anaheim, where the Angels made perfect hosts, gifting the visiting Redbirds two wins in their three game series.

The Cards then returned to Busch Stadium, where they took two of three from Boston. Boston was a .500 team coming into the series so they weren’t world-beaters but it was definitely an upset for the Cards to beat them. That was only the opening act for the biggest surprise, sweeping the unsweepable Orioles, one of the best teams in baseball. Put that with a rain-shortened sweep of the Cubs this past weekend and suddenly St. Louis sits one game shy of .500 and one game shy of second place in the NL Central.

The question gets posed, then: can we trust this? Are the Cardinals becoming the team we expected they would be or are they toying with us?

As always, 2024 is informed by 2023. On May 6, 2023, the Cardinals stood at 10-24 and 10 games out of first place in the NL Central. For the rest of the month, they went 15-8 and cut 5 1/2 games off of that gap. They won two of three from the Cubs. They swept Boston and took a series from the Brewers. They won three of four from the Dodgers, twice scoring double digits against them.

They slowed down at the end of the month, splitting a four-game series with the Reds and losing two of three against the Guardians before splitting the last two of the month against the Royals. Still, there was hope. After all, this was an organization that knew how to win, a division that wasn’t strong, and much of the hole had been filled in. If they could play solid ball until the deadline when they could pick someone up, who knew what would happen?

Of course, that didn’t happen. The Cardinals lost five in a row and 11 of 13 to start June, putting them back to 8 1/2 out and turning the front office’s focus from buying to selling.

You can see some similarities in this current run. It’s about the same time of year, there is a surprising series victory over a team considered almost unbeatable, you have wins against Boston and Chicago in there. They even briefly touched third place a couple of times in it. So why should we trust that this is going to go differently than last year? After all, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice—you can’t get fooled again.

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Let’s look at the optimistic side of things first. For one thing, the Cardinals started this run in less of a hole than the ‘23 squad. After 34 games, they were 15 and 19 and just 5 1/2 off the pace. It’s not great, mind you, but when you are filling in a hole, it’s less work if the hole is smaller.

Last year, the pitching was terrible as we know. While ERA isn’t the best measure, it’s a quick-and-dirty way of comparing. In 2023, the club had a 4.70 ERA going into the run and a 3.73 ERA during it. That was unsustainable and in that terrible stretch in June, the pitchers posted a 5.05 ERA.

This year, before this stretch of winning described above, the Cardinals had a 4.28 ERA, which is pretty solid for a team, especially one constructed out of starters with significant question marks. Starting with that Brewers win, the team ERA is 4.12. Which is slightly better, but that can be somewhat marked down to the vagaries of small sample size. In other words, there’s no reason to think that what the pitching is doing in this streak is unsustainable or is out of character with the rest of the year. You can argue that Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson may see worse results going forward, but we’ve been baking that in for quite some time. The pitching staff is doing what they do, not playing out of their minds.

No, this turnaround has been fueled completely by the offense. The Cardinals were hitting .218 as a team before the last 12 games. Now they are hitting .234. They have a .284/.361/.446 slash line over the winning stretch. With 36 extra base hits, 15 of them home runs. That’s three such hits per game, contrasted to the 2.38 average before that. It doesn’t seem like a significant difference, but it has been, especially since they’ve hit more than a third of their season home runs in the last 12 games.

Going into this season, we thought the Cardinals would have one of the best offenses while having a pitching staff that would do just enough to win. The offense didn’t hold up its end of the bargain early on even while the pitching staff was doing more than expected. What we’ve seen over the last few days is much more in line with the model we all projected in March.

So all the kinks are worked out and everything is hunky-dory, right? We’d like to think so. That doesn’t make it true.

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As befitting a car with some age on it, the dashboard has a few warning lights. It remains to be seen if they are false indicators or at some point they’ll be sitting on the side of the road with smoke billowing from under the hood.

We noted that the ERA going into the last two weeks wasn’t significantly different than the rest of the season. That’s true. However, it’s probably also fair to note that the starters have put up an ERA approaching 5 in May proper, compared to 4.22 in April. More concerningly, the bullpen’s ERA has gone from 3.87 to 4.17.

We’ve seen Sonny Gray be a little more human but I don’t think anyone has any concern there. The club still needs to find a fifth starter—it seems like Andre Pallante may get a shot at it this week—and stabilizing that could help. Gibson is still being successful and even if he slips some, he’ll still likely be a solid back-end guy. Lynn’s outing against Baltimore was great but I’m still concerned with how rarely he gets past the fifth. If he can start pitching well enough and efficiently enough to get six or seven regularly, he may counteract any drop we see in Gibson. Mikolas is….Mikolas. Sometimes it’ll work, sometimes it won’t.

The bullpen, though, needs to be lock down. There’s nothing worse than getting a good start, especially from someone you didn’t expect, only to see the bullpen that is supposed to be solid cough up a lead.

The bullpen threw 39% of innings in April and 41.9% in May. In 2023, the bullpen threw…39.4% of innings in April and 40.2% in May. Now, I’m no expert in what is normal for bullpen usage. When you think about the fact that basically the best case scenario has them throwing 1/3 of every game and some games more, I’d believe that those rates might not be far out of line. However, I also know that last year the bullpen started off strong then cratered as the workload caught up with them. John Mozeliak went out and rebuilt the bullpen (in remarkable and smart fashion) and the arms out there are an upgrade over last year.

Still, over the last two weeks:

Ryan Helsley: Six innings, eight hits, three earned runs, one home run, 4.50 ERA (though 6-for-6 in save opportunities)

Andrew Kittredge: 6.1 innings, five hits, two earned runs, one home run, 2.84 ERA (though nine strikeouts)

JoJo Romero: 8.2 innings, 11 hits, one earned run, no homers, 1.04 ERA (one blown save and two of six inherited runners scored)

Ryan Fernandez: 4.1 innings, 7 hits, four earned runs, one homer, 8.31 ERA (though 5.20 FIP)

There’s no doubt the bullpen as constructed has been hurt by Giovanny Gallegos’s ineffectiveness and then injury and the fact that Kenyan Middleton still hasn’t made his Cardinals debut. The return of Matthew Liberatore to the bullpen, assuming that happens, might help take some load off. Right now, though, it feels like if there’s a lead, Romero/Kittredge/Helsley are going to be the ones locking it down. Which is great, but it can’t happen every night. (It’s also interesting that the club promoted Ryan Loutos to help the bullpen a week ago and he still hasn’t made his major league debut.)

Ideally, you’d see the Cardinals win some games by a comfortable margin. Yet even in May, with the return of the offense, these are their margins of victory:

3, 1, 5 (two of which scored in the 9th), 1, 4, 5, 3, 2, 1, 1, 1

The Cardinals finally won a couple of games without using Ryan Helsley—he didn’t pitch in the Anaheim win when the club scored the late runs, neither of the Boston wins, and the second win of the game-and-a-third doubleheader against the Orioles. With St. Louis facing the Reds starting this afternoon, it would be really great if they could win a couple of blowouts and let the main arms rest a bit before heading into Philadelphia this weekend.

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Overall, I think it’s fair to be somewhat optimistic about this team. While their loss against the White Sox shows you can’t take the schedule for granted, they have a rough patch to start June with the Phillies and the Astros (and Houston has started to dig out of its own hole, so the fact that St. Louis currently has a better record than them should in no way make you feel like the Cards would be favored), but then they get a run of Rockies/Pirates/Cubs/Marlins before the special game at Rickwood Field kicks off the set with the Giants. After that and the Braves, it’s the Reds/Pirates/Nationals/Royals/Cubs going into the All-Star Break. You’ve heard the old saying “make hay while the sun shines”. Well the sun is shining (metaphorically, after the last week) and it feels like the Cards are ready to take advantage.

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The Acolyte is just a week away (well, a week from tomorrow) and all the drips and drops of videos and information make it seem like it’s going to be a very intriguing addition to the Star Wars universe. As I noted last time, my son and I went to The Phantom Menace and after the movie there was what seems to be a scene from the first or second episode, where the Jedi played by Carrie-Ann Moss battled what appears to be the main antagonist. It was a very deft fight scene, more martial arts than swordplay, and everything I’ve seen makes it appear that will be the tone for the show. It should be very interesting to see how it plays out!

I will be in St. Louis June 7-8 to catch two games in Busch Stadium. The latter game is the annual Blogger Day (which they’ve now renamed Blogger and Podcaster Day in acknowledgement of how times have changed). The first Blogger Day was in 2011 and they’ve done it every year since except for 2020 and 2021. Even in 2020, they did a Zoom version for us as we talked with John Mozeliak just a day or two before the COVID outbreak ran through the team.

I have been to all but two of them—in 2015, my father-in-law was on his deathbed and passed away the day of the event, so I stayed home with the kids while my wife went to Ohio to be with him, and last year the date fell right between a chaotic time in our calendar with my family going in completely different directions. I am looking forward to returning this year and seeing old friends and new faces. I can’t say I’m big on the drive or being in the big city but these things have to be endured for the good times.

We’ve talked about the City Connect jerseys on both my podcasts, but I will say here that I think they are very nice and I am glad that the club didn’t get a wild hair and try to do something that really pushed the envelope. If they weren’t running $175 or so, I might get one on my trip. I am less enthused about the hats, though I understand their historical significance, but if I can find this one at the stadium it might come home with me.

Speaking of the podcasts, Allen Medlock returned to his regular hosting duties this week on Meet Me at Musial. In keeping with the theme of this week, stormy weather projected for Nashville last night kept David Jones and I from recording a new Gateway to Baseball Heaven, but we plan to do that this evening.