The 100 Year Flood

It's a year like no other. How much does that inform the future?

I imagine all of you have heard the phrase that we are using for the title of this post. For those that aren’t aware, “a hundred year flood” isn’t necessarily something that comes along every 100 years but instead something that has basically a 1% chance of happening. You could have such flooding in back-to-back years but, assuming nothing has changed in the environment, it’d be pretty rare and you wouldn’t expect it again for a long time, perhaps over a century. It’s one of those outliers that you always remember. How much you let it inform your actions, though, is not nearly as clear.

I write this after the Cardinals, after leading 5-3 with two outs and a runner on in the bottom of the ninth inning, were swept by the Giants in Busch Stadium, dropping today’s game 8-5 in 10 innings. After the game, beleaguered (I think, if you follow Twitter, “beleaguered” is actually a mild adjective) manager Oli Marmol noted one of the issues with this season—they don’t keep losing the same way.

For instance, today you have Giovanny Gallegos on the mound to start the ninth. With Ryan Helsley on the injured list—and even at times this season when Helsley’s been healthy—there was nobody else you would want on the mound. Jordan Montgomery got first out in the seventh, then turned it over to Jordan Hicks who got the next five outs. Exactly how you’d want to see it. Gallegos came into today’s game with a 3.51 ERA/4.01 FIP but that was skewed from a blowup three outings ago against Pittsburgh. Gallegos isn’t perfect, he’s had his blips (four homers already before today) but it’s how the club drew it up before today’s game. This was going according to plan.

Then Gallegos allows a two out, two strike homer to Mike Yastrzemski, which isn’t the same kind of pain David Freese inflected on Rangers fans in 2011 but you can get there from here.

Even when things are going the way the club wants them to go, the pothole knocks them off course. Marmol was right to point out that the offense should have added on—after Tommy Edman’s grand slam, the only run came in the third on a Jordan Walker RBI single—but the game was won. Until it wasn’t. It made since to go with Steven Matz for extras, hoping for length and his resurgence as a reliever, but he looked more like the starter he’s been in allowing that zombie runner and two others to score.

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Early in the season, the fix was obvious. The Cardinals needed some sort of reliable starting pitching. Yet since Matthew Liberatore started against the Guardians on May 26 (not counting today), the staff has a 4.34 ERA. Which is no great shakes, mind you, but it’s in line with what we expected this staff to have coming into the season, expecting the offense to win a lot of 6-5 games. It’s a middle of the pack ERA, but the club is 4-12 in that stretch. 4-13 now.

The offense—an offense that was supposed to challenge the 2004 team as one of the best Cardinal offenses this millennium—currently sits 12th in MLB in OPS. They are sixth in home runs but just over half of them are solo shots. Edman’s slam was so stunning because they are hitting under .200 with the bases loaded. Luken Baker was brought up in part to see if his AAA success would translate to the big leagues. He’s 4-14 since his promotion on June 4, getting just a pinch-hit at bat in the last four days.

You can blame the injuries to the outfield, if you want, though it’s hard to know how much Tyler O’Neill would be contributing if he was on the field. (Lars Nootbaar, that’s a different story and perhaps a real underlying cause.) You can blame the front office, though I think the issues there are probably more of how they painted themselves into a corner rather than the inactivity this offseason. John Mozeliak has a point when he says it’s hard to sell free agents on a place where you have five starters committed and young ones waiting in the wings, though that obviously doesn’t preclude making a trade. You can blame the manager, even though he did lead basically this same team to the division title last year. The loss of Albert Pujols (and to a lesser extent because he was so checked out last year Yadier Molina) in the clubhouse I’m sure makes an impact, but I can’t believe they were the load bearing walls that let everything crumble when they left.

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No matter where you point the finger (and it’s a good thing we have so many on our hands because there are a lot of places to point), it does raise the question: how do you react to the 100 year flood?

Let’s say the Cardinals did nothing drastic this year. They ride out the string, maybe sell off some free agents like Jordan Montgomery or Jordan Hicks at the deadline. Maybe they can beat out Cincinnati or Chicago, maybe not. However it happens, it’s a lost season.

I would venture to say, though, that if you brought this team back with a smart pitching move or two in the offseason, they’d be expected to contend for the divisional crown in 2024. Your players are another year older and more experienced, which might be bad for Paul Goldschmidt but good for Jordan Walker. Nolan Arenado probably doesn’t have a season like this again and Willson Contreras, more established in St. Louis, likely approaches the form everyone expected of him.

This is not the A’s or the Royals, a bad team of middling talent. This isn’t even a team that has a ton of overpaid, underperforming veterans at the end of the line. This is a team that is having Every. Single. Thing. go wrong for them all at the same time. Is that the time to be drastic? Do you build a very expensive wall that mars your view right after a flood of historic proportions or do you accept that there’s an insignificant chance you might get damage but one of these years that chance may hit?

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I think about this with the buzz that is circling surrounding trading Goldschmidt. I do think it’s probably a moot point—Goldy has the no-trade and I don’t know that he’d be anxious to waive it, plus the Cardinals would have to really change their world view to even consider moving him—but the logic behind it makes sense. You can move Walker or Nolan Gorman to third, get back a big return, and restock rather than rebuild. This, of course, does not factor in the success rates of teams getting prospects back for such players—seems like most often the team getting the superstar wins the trade—and it also feels like reacting to a slap on the wrist by pulling out a thermal detonator.

I get that as a fanbase—and as a front office—failure is not something we are familiar with. There’s an argument that diminishing returns over the last few years have led to this and I do think that the decline can be somewhat traced to a lack of player development but I also don’t know that we have to jump off a cliff when there’s a road down the mountain. I’d rather tinker with the timing belt than try to rebuild an engine. (Is that a good metaphor? I know nothing about cars.) While the surroundings may be unfamiliar, getting out of the car and going running through the woods doesn’t seem like the best play.

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Let’s talk about Star Wars, shall we? We’re getting closer and closer to the Ahsoka premiere, which will be August 23rd. I feel like this is going to be huge, especially now that we know that one of the upcoming Star Wars movies is Dave Filoni’s Endgame, wrapping up all sorts of things from Ahsoka, The Mandalorian, and perhaps even Skeleton Crew. If they can introduce and use Grand Admiral Thrawn correctly—and I trust that Filoni can—I think the show could be intense.

It also came out recently that Disney has moved the dates for the next Star Wars movie from December of 2025 to May of 2026. On the face of it, this is a good thing because while I’ve enjoyed the holiday time frame from the sequels (the time off allows for multiple viewing pretty easily), Star Wars is basically synonymous with May.

The kicker is that they also have placed a second Star Wars movie in December of 2026. Now, there are a lot of reasons why Solo didn’t do so well at the box office (and it’s sad that it didn’t because it’s a very fun movie), but one of them was likely because people hadn’t had a chance to let The Last Jedi settle before getting Solo on their plate. To have two movies after a hiatus of six-plus years seems a little dicey. That’s a long way out there, though, and odds are one of these will shift again to give some space between them.

It’s the other Star franchise, but Strange New Worlds starts back up tomorrow with its second season. The first one was outstanding so I’m very excited to see how that goes.

On the Marvel front, I’ve been doing a MCU rewatch—just finished the aforementioned Endgame and now in the midst of Far From Home. I don’t have the problems with Phase 4 and 5 that many people do but it’s going to be impossible to top what they did in the Infinity Saga. Seeing the callbacks, watching how the characters grew, seeing how the plot developed over 22 movies….it’s a work of art, honestly. The moments in Endgame click because of all we as an audience had invested into the series. I am interested to see how Secret Invasion works, though!