Stumbling and Bumbling
They've had their moments but so far 2023 is fairly forgettable.
Thank goodness for Jordan.
Montgomery, that is. Though you’d be just as accurate to believe we were referencing Walker, The Chosen One that has set a new standard for young rookies. We’ll get to him, but I was referring to the pitcher acquired last year at the trade deadline.
Without Montgomery’s seven strong innings on Saturday night, we could easily be looking at a Cardinals losing streak that has stretched to seven games. A seven game losing streak at any time of the year is not great, but it really stands out when you’ve barely gotten out of the single digits in games played. As it is, after another disappointment Monday night in Colorado, the Cardinals stand 3-7. They are already four games behind Milwaukee for the divisional lead and a game and a half behind the Reds for fourth. The only teams in the bigs with fewer wins are Detroit and Oakland, and Kansas City, at 3-8, has a worse winning percentage.
That’s not a group of teams that you want to be associating with. None of those were expected to do much this year. Oakland has actively sold off any players with a pulse, Detroit and Kansas City weren’t going to contend even in a weak AL Central. For the Cardinals to be in that group, normally it would be a rousing game of “One of These Things Is Not Like the Other.”
Yet that’s where they stand because, frankly, nothing really is going right. You might be able to say the bullpen on the whole has been pretty good. Jordan Hicks has struggled mightily, of course, with a 10.80 ERA, and Andre Pallante stumbled in his last time out to inflate his number, but we’ve seen good work from Ryan Helsley (after Opening Day), Drew VerHagen, Patron Pitcher Packy Naughton (before he had to be placed on the injured list), Zack Thompson, and others. If the Cardinals could get a lead, they might be well suited to hold it.
That if is a large one, though. Here’s how the game has stood when the starting pitchers have left in the first 10 games:
Down 1 (with two runners on, one of which scored)
Up 3
Up 6
Down 3
Down 3 (with a runner on)
Down 5
Down 2
Up 6
Down 2
Down 2 (with two on, one of whom scored)
You’ve got Miles Mikolas with a 9.64 ERA and a 2.14 WHIP. Steven Matz is 8.18 and 2.00. Jake Woodford 9.00 and 1.89. Jack Flaherty has the nice ERA (1.80) but his walks are so plentiful the WHIP is 1.70. I know that the team wants Adam Wainwright to feel useful but they didn’t have to go overboard proving that they needed him back.
This offense was touted as a deep and potent one, and there’s no reason to really think it isn’t, but you can’t keep expecting them to climb out of large holes every night. It’s just not going to happen, as we’ve seen.
Of course, this offense isn’t necessarily clicking the way we thought it would. I wrote about it yesterday over at the main blog so I won’t rehash the numbers (that have slightly changed with another game played) but so far there’s been a lot of contact, a lot of hits piled up, but not a lot of power. Ten hits in a game (the Cardinals are averaging 9.8) is a nice thing, but you’d like to be averaging more than 14 bases per game if you are getting that many knocks.
If Jordan Montgomery has been the standout on the pitching side, Jordan Walker has been on the hitting side. Walker’s single up the middle last night gave him hits in all 10 of his major league games, breaking a tie with Ted Williams for second place in streaks to start a career by players 20 or younger. The only guy ahead of him did it in 1912 when it is safe to say the game was a bit different.
Walker isn’t leading the team in average (Paul Goldschmidt has him by about 20 points). He’s not leading in on-base or slugging either. However, he’s in the top 3 in all of those categories. He’s off to a stronger start than Nolan Arenado, who’s not been shabby. He’s tied for the team lead in home runs. There’s not much else you could ask from the kid in the early going.
It’s not fair to make the comparison, but we’re going to do it anyway.
Walker’s first 10: .342/.390/.553, two doubles, two homers, eight RBI, a walk, eight strikeouts, one steal.
Pujols’s first 10: .389/.436/.722, three doubles, three homers, 11 RBI, three walks, five strikeouts, two caught stealing.
So he isn’t Albert Pujols, because nobody is, but he doesn’t suffer too much in the comparison. Of course, it’s whether he can keep it up for another 3000 games is another story.
Enough of that. Hopefully tonight they play more like they can and we start to put this whole mess behind us. (If you want more in this vein, though, Rusty Groppel has a post up at the Conclave this morning.) Let’s talk about the news from a galaxy far, far away. We’re putting the baseball away, so if you want to check out here, that’s fine.
There was a lot of stuff that came out of Star Wars Celebration in London, but nothing fired me up more than this.
Seeing what looks to be the next season of Star Wars Rebels, just in live action, is incredible. Picking up from one of the last shots we see in the show and translating it with real people? Outstanding. It’s tough to translate animated characters to the big screen but Natasha Liu Bordizzo seems to have captured the essence of Sabine Wren, at least from what we see in the trailer, even if the look is slightly different. (I’m not sure Mary Elizabeth Winstead is going to be as good as bringing Hera Syndulla to life. If it’s not a large role, I wish they’d stuck with Vanessa Marshall.)
We’re obviously getting Grand Admiral Thrawn in this, but I wonder just how much of a role he’s going to play given some of the other news from the convention, namely that Dave Filoni is going to direct a feature that has been summed up as “Mandalorian Endgame”, tying up all the threads from The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and perhaps even Skeleton Crew and The Book of Boba Fett. That sounds to me like where Thrawn’s defeat is, so it may be like Thanos, getting hints here, moments there, but not a full reveal until at least closer to the movie.
Still, it should be a fun movie. The trick is going to make it feel like a movie and not a extra-large TV episode, especially with all these characters that have been introduced on the small screen. Plus it’s Dave Filoni, who my son has termed his generation’s George Lucas, so you know that the lore is going to be good.
The other two movies are also intriguing. I’m not sure how Dawn of the Jedi is going to go over with the casual audience, but as a guy that has written over 500 devotionals with that filter, I can’t deny that hearing it termed as a “Biblical epic” is pretty interesting. It also sounds like that one will be out first, in December of 2025, so we should start to hear more about casting, etc. soon.
The final movie has Daisy Ridley bringing Rey back, so that should be fun. Say what you want about the sequel trilogy, and you can say quite a bit, it was well cast. I have to think that John Boyega will make an appearance, even if he’s not overly enamored with returning to Finn. We never got the Luke Skywalker Jedi Order movie that we should have (though I think it’s still a great idea for an animated series) so this may be the next best thing.
Finally (I mean, there was more but this is already running way long) the Bad Batch will be returning for one more mission. Given the way Season 2 wrapped up, it would have been malpractice not to have another year. It may not be a happy one—there’s got to be a reason Rex isn’t calling on them when he returns to duty in Rebels—but it should be a good one if they can keep the focus on one storyline instead of going here and there for one-offs. The final episodes of Season 2 showed that focus and I think we’ll get it for the majority of Season 3.
If you need more Star Wars thoughts, hit me up on Twitter. It’s more fun talking that than the Cardinals right now!