It's Always Something

Eventually things will go right....won't they?

If I’d had time yesterday, I’d have probably written a post about how some of the angst around the Cardinals is misplaced. There’s a lot of finger-pointing at the front office but the thing they tried to fix this offseason (the starting pitching) has been solid while the thing they thought was fine (the offense) has been the biggest problem.

Then they have a game like last night and it makes a writer glad they were lazy. If momentum is tomorrow’s starting pitcher, then maybe there’s a reason they never seem to have any.

Let’s get the caveat out of the way. Sonny Gray has been (nope, can’t resist it) a ray of sunshine so far this season, even with the fact that he started the year on the injured list. 23 strikeouts in 17.1 innings is a clip we’ve not seen in a while and not from anyone that didn’t have ancillary worries along with him in even longer. His Baseball Savant ledger is full of red but he’s not trying to wipe any of it out. There’s nothing on the dashboard indicating anything but a smooth riding experience. Sure, there will be a start or two that doesn’t fit the mold, but for the most part the only question every five days is whether the offense will show up.

The rest of the rotation isn’t quite as Sonny.

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Let’s look at some actual results and some expected results. Let’s start with the Opening Day starter and, in some tellings, the #2 man in the rotation, Miles Mikolas.

Mikolas has a 6.49 ERA so far this season and if you’d argue he’s not been that bad, xERA might be your only ally, but even that’s not going to get you far. His 5.86 xERA is just a tick higher than last year’s 5.44 mark, when he got somewhat lucky with his ERA. His expected batting average is in the bottom 4$ of the league. The only thing the colorful sliders say he is good at is limiting walks but even that’s down from the past few years when he was in the 90th percentile.

Of course, Mikolas is on pace to give the team 185 innings or so, which is less of a positive and more of a threat given this early start. The problem is that you can’t write this off to a bad couple of weeks, I don’t believe. We saw him be a middling pitcher last year and he’s 35 years old. This feels like less a bump in the road and more the road going down a mountain.

It’s not Mikolas’s fault but the spring of 2023 is always going to be revisited. The Cardinals had only one pitcher—Steven Matz, who we’ll get to—under contract for this season. The Cardinals decided to extend Mikolas instead of Jordan Montgomery, even though comments at the time made it sound like Montgomery was open to something like that. If Mikolas continues to falter and Monty pitches as he has over the last year or so, that decision is going to come in for more and more criticism.

Mikolas has two starts this season where he gave up two runs and three where he gave up five. When he has things working, you can get a quality start from Miles. It’s just getting to be where that “when” is much less often than it used to be. Which happens when not-that-hard throwers start aging.

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Steven Matz opened up the season with two runs allowed against the Dodgers in 5.1 innings in a game that, had the offense showed up, he might have gotten a win out of. He followed that with five scoreless innings against a Marlins team that, at the time, hadn’t won a game. Since then:

• Four runs—only one earned, but he made the key error—in 4.2 innings in Arizona.

• Five runs in five innings against an Oakland team that has an owner actively trying to ruin the franchise, both on and off the field.

• Seven runs in 4.1 innings against an Arizona team that had already seen him once this year.

Three games seems a minimum for a trend, though you’d like to think he’s not going to give up nine runs next time out against the Tigers in Detroit. He’s still having success with his fastball—he’s in the 98th percentile on fastball run value—but nothing else really is. He’s got a 24.2% whiff rate on his changeup, for instance, but it’s also hit at a .378 clip and both the homers he’s allowed have come off of it. His sinking fastball is a pretty solid pitch according to the numbers—.289 xwOBA (or .200 batting average against if you prefer) with only one extra base hit—but he’s not going to get very far with just one pitch.

We’re in the third year of the Steven Matz experience. I don’t think I’d term it a failure, because it’s an average of $11 million a year, which isn’t terrible. There’s opportunity cost, of course—the Cardinals haven’t signed pitchers because their rotation is full and wouldn’t risk the competitive balance tax threshold to get insurance—but there’s no particular reason to think the club would have been more aggressive if they didn’t have Matz’s contract on the books.

What I do feel like we can say is that the run of good starts he had after being in the bullpen was a small sample size and if the Cardinals were to be able to get a better starter, moving Matz and his sinker to the bullpen wouldn’t be a terrible thing, even if you paying him to be a starter.

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There is no question that it’s been a joy to have Lance Lynn back in a Cardinals uniform. He brings that mischievous, dry, no-cares-given personality to our airwaves and that’s something it feels the organization has been missing.

The reunion is helped by his 2.81 ERA in the early going, even as he’s dealt with some weird stuff like rain in Los Angeles. He gave up four runs in his second start (which also was impacted by rain) and that’s the worst he’s done so far. Nothing but love for the bronco, right?

That might be overstating it a little bit, though to this untrained eye there aren’t a ton of warning signs. His xERA sits at 4.10 and I think if his ERA were to be that over the entire season, it would be in line with one of the more optimistic scenarios that came out of his signing. Batters are making contact—he’s got a 13% barrel rate so far, which is in the bottom 10% of the league—but he’s allowed just four homers in his 25.2 innings, which would be on a pace for 31 over a 200-inning season but given that three of them came in one game, that’s probably a little overstated. We talked about how much better Lynn would be than last year even if he gave up 20 homers (half of his ‘23 total) and that’s coming into play here as well.

What we haven’t seen so far is the vaunted innings eater. Lynn went seven against the A’s, a team whose shortcomings we’ve already noted. He has not gone past five innings in any other start. If he’s not giving up a lot of hits, he’s walking more than you’d like. It’s probably fair to note that his xOBA and xwOBA are lower than last year’s but are still on the high end. So while the return of Lynn has been enjoyable so far, it wouldn’t be surprising if there are some bumps coming.

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Before we talk about Kyle Gibson, I do want to point you to this week’s Gateway to Baseball Heaven, the first half of which is my co-host David Jones talking with the Cardinals’ pitcher about life in St. Louis and his work with Big League Impact. If you haven’t given it a listen, it’s well worth it.

I feel like of all the starts, Gibson had the least expectation on him this season. Gray was the big signing, Mikolas and Lynn have histories in St. Louis, and Matz was coming off a strong end to the season that was cut short by injury. It reminds me of an episode in the first season of Friends. Rachel, trying to get the animal control woman not to take Ross’s pet monkey, says, “Alright. In high school I was the prom queen and I was the homecoming queen and the class president and you... were also there!” Gibson is…also here.

And yet there’s a case—and probably not a tough one—that Gibson has had the best start of anyone not named after a meteorological condition. He got rocked by the Marlins, but to some degree that’s baseball. Miami hadn’t won a game so you knew it was coming and there would probably be some frustration let out when it did. Other than that, he allowed two to the Dodgers, four to the D-Backs in Arizona, and one last time out to the Brewers in a game he deserved to win. He’s gone a minimum of six innings every time out, even the Marlins game that got away from him early. His groundball rate is excellent and his sweeper has been reliable.

Of course, the K rate isn’t there but we knew that going in. His barrel percentage is 11.8, which is a little troublesome, but hard hit balls on the ground are a lot less scary than hard hit balls in the air. All in all, though, Gibson’s doing quite well for an afterthought.

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It would be just like the Cardinals to squander some overperformances early in the year by having the offense vanish, then have the bats come around about the time the pitching staff finds its actual level. Best case is what we’ve said all along, the bats are eventually able to give the pitching staff some cushion. Worst case is they never do it, the pitching reverts, and the sell-off begins in mid-July.

I don’t truly believe the worst case is going to happen. I’d have been more confident if the Cards had followed up Monday’s exciting win with a well-played game on Tuesday. That….didn’t happen.

As I write this, Zack Thompson went to Memphis, which given his lengthy outing yesterday and his less-than-stellar results, isn’t a surprise. The fact that Jordan Walker is going with him is, though. Walker’s line isn’t great and a demotion worked for him last year, but it’s also possible he’s just had some bad luck and all this is going to do is get a little pressure off of him for a while. I just don’t think many would have thought before the season that Walker would be the star young player getting demoted in April—most would have picked Masyn Winn in that situation, but Winn has been one of the few bright spots this season.

I look forward to reading more about the Walker move but at first blush it reminds me of last year when the club waived Taylor Motter, then as soon as he cleared waivers wound up adding him back to the major league roster due to an injury, which made it feel like the front office was panicking, trying to do anything they could to stop the bleeding. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but it’s got a whiff of that in my mind.

Afternoon baseball at Busch in April is a wonderful thing, even if the Cardinals are trying to beat Jordan Montgomery for their first series-concluding win of the season. Maybe they’ll get it. Right now, though, it’s hard to imagine a string of wins with this sputtering offense and a less-than-dominant pitching staff. I’ve been charged with no imagination before though!