Head vs. Heart

The Cardinals are winning at just the wrong time.

Much like everything else in 2023, the Cardinals can’t even win right.

I was going to say that if the Cards had put together a five game winning streak even in the middle of June, that might have changed the trajectory of their season a bit. They were 27-42 on June 15 so moving to 32 and 42 by June 20 might have been a sign of good things or at least given them some time to get going. However, they went 4-1 in that stretch anyway so apparently not. Scratch this whole paragraph.

Still, it’s really a shame that one of the first times we see solid, exciting Cardinal baseball comes as John Mozeliak has said the club is punting on this season. Five wins in a row (and I think there’s an argument that, without the rainout on Friday, it’s six), climbing out of the cellar with a chance (albeit requiring a sweep in Wrigley) of taking third place by Sunday and, with the Reds falling and still a significant number of games with the Brewers remaining, and it’s not hard to see 2023 as 2011 with a new coat of paint.

If you are on Twitter, you’ve seen the question posed after yesterday’s feel-good win over Sandy Alcantara and the Marlins. Should this recent surge impact what Mo and the front office do here at the trading deadline? Should they try to shore up the pitching for this year and try for a run? Or should they stick to their plan, sell off the free agents, and continue not to look at the 2023 standings?

If you know anything about this front office, it is that they stick to their plan. They have never shown urgency to make a free agent signing when a division rival makes a splash. They’ve stayed with this pitching-and-defense model even when it was clear to the outside that the pitching side of things needed to be modified in part because the defense had slipped. This is a conservative front office that is not blown by the winds of whims and the latest bit of data is added but not decisive. They aren’t likely to throw caution to the winds and dive into a heart-led and likely quixotic effort for postseason glory.

This front office likes to believe, I think, that they are rational actors. They aren’t splurging. “We have pitching at home” is basically what they told the fans this winter. They aren’t going beyond their “puke point” (man, I hate that phrase) in an effort to make a incremental upgrade. Logically, spending a lot of money for a minimal increase in your postseason chances isn’t the right move. It’s all a crapshoot anyway, right?

However, loyalty and stubbornness aren’t head traits, they are heart traits. The Cardinals have shown remarkable loyalty to certain players, such as extending Matt Carpenter before they needed to then sticking with him throughout the rest of the contract, holding on to Paul DeJong even when he didn’t look like a major league player, and making sure Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright remained forever Cardinals.

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While the front office isn’t run by robots, it still seems very unlikely that a small winning streak (part of which came against the lowly Nationals) is going to impact the club at all. Once they’ve embraced the need for change, they tend to go full bore into it. Remember, it was less than 12 months after the 2006 title that Walt Jocketty was fired. Bill DeWitt and company had embraced the future that Jeff Luhnow was selling and anyone that wasn’t on that train needed to be elsewhere.

Now it seems that they’ve finally seen the light about swing-and-miss pitching and this deadline is the best way to quickly revamp not only the majors but also give the minor leagues a little infusion of that sort of pitching. Dusty Blake was given the same sort of mandate that Jeff Albert was—to revamp the whole organization top to bottom with more modern sensibilities. It feels like his message is being heard and implemented.

This change needs to happen, even if it short-circuits a nice little run by the club. The fact is they are still 10 games under .500, still needing to go 39-27 to finish with 82 wins. That feels doable until you realize a .590 winning percentage would mean they’d have to play like a 96 win team the rest of the way. Even at the beginning of the season, when we were all fresh and not beaten down by life, few thought this was a 96 win team. And that’s just to get to a spot where they can continue their winning season streak. The winner of the NL Central is going to have more than 82 wins.

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No, this team still needs to sell, even if it feels counterintuitive given their recent surge. Does a sell, though, really short-circuit things? It depends.

If Mo, Michael Girsch, and Randy Flores make deals that bring in a lot of AAA pitchers that should be on the roster next year and fill in the rest of this year with castoffs and hand-me-downs like they did with Ryan Tepura in the bullpen, then probably.

However, all the deals that we are looking at aren’t likely to impact the offense much. Paul DeJong may go and someone in the outfield will likely not be wearing the birds on the bat come August 2, but you can imagine the lineup being relatively unscathed by these moves. In fact, clearing the redundancies could help people get regular playing time and help them be more consistent.

If the Cardinals were able to go get, say, a Logan Gilbert, even losing Jordan Montgomery and Jack Flaherty the rotation might be able to hold together, especially if Adam Wainwright is not just blowing smoke about how well he feels after the cortisone injections. (That said, Waino is a relentlessly upbeat man and we’ll need to take his proclamations about his health and effectiveness with a bit of salt.) Given a weaker schedule, it’s not completely out of the picture that with the right trades this team improves over the last two months and stays in the playoff hunt.

Whether they do or not, most of us made our peace with a lost season a while back and while this run has stirred some embers, it’s really too little, too late for it to turn the organization’s focus from the future to the present. Which is how it should be.

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In other Cardinal news, the club designated Genesis Cabrera for assignment. The move was not surprising because of Cabrera’s performance, more so the timing. Tell me Cabrera’s DFA in the offseason and I don’t really bat an eye. Two weeks before the trade deadline, though? That’s interesting.

It would appear that nobody had much interest in Cabrera, even though he can be a power arm from the left side. The stretches of dominance were enough that I thought there would be a nibble or two on him. That doesn’t seem to have been the case, though, and Cabrera’s an instance of where we don’t know all the human relations part of a story when we comment regularly.

Cabrera was obviously disgruntled here, perhaps thinking more highly of himself than others did or the statistics would indicate. Still, the Cardinals have a need for arms to cover innings. We’ve seen why Tepura was not on a major league roster, for instance. The club also added Jacob Barnes to Memphis yesterday but that’s not going to be any panacea either. Cabrera could have stayed and pitched whether he was happy or not but the Cards decided the clubhouse didn’t need that.

It’s a little ironic that Mo said they weren’t giving people away only for his first move after the interview to be drop Cabrera so he could go anywhere without the Cards getting a return. I imagine Cabrera had worn out his welcome, though, and this might have been a case of addition by subtraction.

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We are just shy of five months until Christmas. I have an order of Christmas lights coming today to start prepping for the decorating season.

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Rise of the Red Blade, the latest Star Wars novel, came out yesterday. I’ve only gotten a few chapters into it, but it’s the first tie-in media that I can think of that follows the Jedi as they get ready to go to and arrive at Geonosis for the climactic part of Attack of the Clones. Usually we’ve seen these stories start at Order 66 so this is a welcome change, though I imagine we’ll get an Order 66 scene later on.