The Solo Zone
How often have the Cardinals had meh months and does that mean anything?
This all started, as do so many things that cause trouble and inconvenience, with Kyle Reis.
Reading that made me wonder just what the history of the Cardinals’ monthly records was. Quickly going through Baseball-Reference through 2016—I figured that was a good year because it was the first year they missed the playoffs and it was the season after the 100-win campaign—I noted that the Cards had put up six months of .600 or better baseball and six months of .450 or worse baseball over that span.
My friend Jason, though, pointed out the flaw:
Context is quite important. Give me a chance to collate and manipulate data to draw conclusions that may or may not be relevant and you know I’m going to jump at it. Which is exactly what I did.
Let’s outline the parameters. As before, I went back to 2016 but I did so for every major league team. I included the full months (April, May, June) of 2023 but I did not include anything from 2020. With all the chaos around there for all teams, but especially the Cardinals with multiple doubleheaders, it seemed fairer to toss that. Besides, except for Dodger fans who are clinging to that season as proof they actually can win championships, everyone has put that season out of mind anyway.
I also included, as you often see, any March regular season games with April’s record and any October regular season games with September. There weren’t very many anyway, even with the season going a week into October in 2021 due to the lockout, and April/September tend to have more off days anyway so it didn’t really skew anything.
We also needed to put these things into buckets to really get an easy way to compare things. I tend to enjoy when buckets have fun descriptors, so here’s what I set up:
Rise (less than .300 winning percentage): A .300 month is bad, really bad. That projects out to going 49-113 for an entire season. You know what was also the worst of its kind? The Rise of Skywalker. Sure, it had its moments here and there but overall it’s not something people tend to want to revisit.
Attack (.300 to .450 WP): This group is better, ranging all the way up to a 73-89 season. There’s some good stuff in there but the negatives tend to overshadow them. Sounds like Attack of the Clones to me. (Get rid of the Anakin/Padme subplot and that movie’s quite a bit better.)
Solo (.450 to .550 WP): This is where you find your middle ground, your balance. Teams with this record would finish between 73 and 89 wins. This works out to being -2 and +2 over the course of the month. Solo was that kind of movie. It was fun and better than it gets credit for, but it’s not the outing everyone wants to see over and over again.
Rogue (.550 to .650 WP): You’d expect to find your good teams here on a regular basis, as .650 works out to like 105 wins. They aren’t necessarily legendary but they are very, very good. Much like Rogue One is very, very good.
Empire (over .650 WP): The best of the best. Extremely good months that would be historic if you ran them out the length of the entire season. Sounds like The Empire Strikes Back to me.
Before we start dumping into buckets, let’s look at the data in a more raw way. 39 months for 30 teams means that there were 1,170 data points.
The best month over this span was July 2017 by the Los Angeles Dodgers. LA went 20-3 that month, the only team to win more than 87% of their games in a month over our selection. Three other teams—Cleveland in September/October 2017, Atlanta last month, and the Dodgers in July of 2022—also clocked a winning percentage in excess of 80%.
On the other side of the spectrum, the Diamondbacks went 3-24 in June 2021, an 11% success rate. Baltimore in August of that year and Cincinnati in March/April of 2022 also won less than 15% of their games.
So that’s our range. Where do the Cardinals fit in here?
The best month they have had since 2015 was August 2018 when they went 22-6 in the first full month of Mike Shildt’s run as manager. That was tied with five others for the sixth best mark over this span. Their worst month was not April of this year, surprisingly, but instead when they went 9-18 in May of 2019, a terrible month where nothing went their way at all. Twenty-two other teams also won just a third of their games in a given month and they all tied for 97th worst.
If we take those 1,170 data points and divide them into four quadrants, you’d find the Cardinals eight times in the top 25%, 17 times in the second 25%, 10 times in the third, and four in the bottom 25%. Two of those bottom four are, of course, Mar/Apr and June of 2023. That sort of distribution makes sense, though, and probably wouldn’t be that much out of line with other teams. It does have them grouping around the middle, kinda blah zone though.
Let’s start looking at our buckets. Maybe we should look at them in graphical form.
We know that the Cardinals have been, on the whole, a good if flawed team since 2015. So it’s probably not terribly surprising that they are one of six teams that have not had a month we would classify as Rise. It’s also not surprising that teams that have been “rebuilding” over that span—the Orioles, the Tigers, the Royals—have had quite a few of them.
The Cards still do pretty well in this measure as well, though they do move up the list a little bit. Still, coming in 23rd with just seven of these pretty bad months is pretty good.
If our theory is true, that the Cardinals have been bland and mediocre over the last almost-decade, they should make a good showing here and, in fact, they do. The Cardinals have 16 months where they were at .500 or just above/below, which is good for a tie for fourth with Colorado, Toronto, and Cleveland. It doesn’t necessarily show our perceptions are right, but it’s definitely a point in that direction.
The Cardinals have been a good team, of course, so it’s not surprising there’s a decent showing in this category as well. They’ve had 11 months with a winning percentage between .550 and .650, good for 10th in the majors.
The five months that the Cardinals have been really, really good ties them for 12th in MLB along with Boston, the Cubs, and Oakland. It puts them well behind the leaders of Houston and the Dodgers, of course.
So what company are the Cardinals keeping?
You’d like to see these stats be comparable to the best teams in baseball. At worst, you don’t want to be in the same sentence as Pittsburgh and Kansas City. The charts above tell the story but there’s one more way I want to look at this before drawing some conclusions.
I went and assigned five points for every Empire month, four points for every Rogue month, all the way down to one point for every Rise month. Let’s look at the tiers, sized at 10 points.
160-150: Dodgers, Astros, Yankees
149-140: None
139-130: Guardians, Rays, Red Sox, Braves, Brewers, Cubs, Cardinals
129-120: Mets, Nationals, Mariners
119-110: Giants, Blue Jays, Phillies, A’s, Twins, Diamondbacks, Rockies
109-100: Angels, Rangers, White Sox, Padres, Orioles, Reds
99-90: Marlins, Pirates, Royals, Tigers
At 131 points, the Cardinals sit 10th in this measure. That’s top third, though just barely. Still, a lot of that is based on consistently being OK rather than having flashes of brilliance. Remember, 41% of the time, they are posting a Solo month.
I don’t know if there’s anything really telling here more than a confirmation of what we know. The Cardinals have been a team that is solid with flashes of brilliance rather than a team designed to be brilliant. They are blessed with a weak division—the Brewers and Cubs were just about their equal, the Reds and Pirates well off the pace—which has led to more postseason success than you would expect from the raw numbers.
Consistency is good and for all the gaudy numbers that Houston puts up in this study, they’d look a lot worse if we ran it back to 2012 or so. Tanking is not an option, nor should it be, in St. Louis. However, putting together more talent, talent that can win more consistently in the upper echelons rather than swimming around the meh zone, is something the club is well behind at doing and it seems to have caught up with them.
August 2018? Was that par of the Matt Carpenter salsa run?