The Cardinals' Customary Consistency Is Crumbling
Silly alliterative headlines aside, 2023 has started off shockingly rough in St. Louis.
I was 21 years old the last time the St. Louis Cardinals finished a season with a record under .500. The last time before that, I was 13. Since I’m now pushing 40 (😬), hopefully this gives you a sense of just how ridiculous St. Louis’ consistency has been pretty much this entire century. As a basic rule, the Cardinals never, ever have an “off” season.
That’s what makes St. Louis’ struggles this year so stunning to witness. Following Thursday’s ugly 11-7 loss to the Los Angeles Angels, the Cardinals have a 10-22 record to start the 2023 season, which is the franchise’s worst start to a season since matching that 10-22 record in 1919. It’s also tied for the team’s worst record in any 32-game stretch since Sept. 27, 1999, when the Cardinals had gone 9-23 over the preceding 32 contests.
Forget making the playoffs for a moment. St. Louis needs to go 71-59 from here onward (a .546 winning percentage, so essentially what it had in 2018) just to avoid ending that streak of consecutive winning seasons.
As for the postseason, FiveThirtyEight’s model gives the Cardinals just a 17% chance, down from 57% in preseason. In contrast to the subject of Thursday’s column, the resurgent Baltimore Orioles, St. Louis is probably MLB’s most disappointing team over the first month-plus of 2023. (Depending on whether you consider the soon-to-be-former Oakland Athletics’ descent into Cleveland Spiders territory to be unexpectedly poor or just the logical conclusion of that franchise’s long, painful downward spiral.)
Adding to the surprise around the Cardinals’ uncharacteristic stumbles, the team did not make many notable moves over the offseason to dismantle what had been a successful core in manager Oliver Marmol’s first year at the helm.
Yes, St. Louis did say goodbye to franchise icon Albert Pujols after one of baseball’s all-time great swan song seasons. But Pujols was only worth 1.9 Wins Above Replacement last season despite his great hitting, because he played sparingly, ran slowly and mostly DH-ed and pinch hit. Meanwhile, when fellow future Hall of Famer Yadier Molina retired as well, the Cardinals seemingly plugged his spot in the lineup perfectly by signing ex-Cubs catcher Willson Contreras. Ranking middle-of-the-pack (19th) in net WAR added over the hot stove, St. Louis mostly had the type of status-quo offseason you’d expect from a team that prizes continuity and consistent success above all else.
But that plan does not work when your returning talent struggles. And despite devoting the second-most share of its total playing time to holdover players (only the Tampa Bay Rays, at 90.0%, are higher than St. Louis at 89.2%), the Cardinals have only gotten MLB’s 21st-most WAR from those players, a list that includes such flagging stars as Nolan Arenado, Tyler O'Neill and Miles Mikolas.
Add in a banged-up, mostly ineffective pitching staff (with the exception of Jordan Montgomery) that has dropped from 16th in WAR to 25th — including a dip from 14th among starting rotation members to 27th, with a relief corps that ranks second-to-last in Win Probability Added — and the Cardinals are tracking for their fewest WAR per 162 games (23.2) since 1995 (22.2).
You have to believe guys like Arenado and O'Neill (who have a collective OPS of .613) will start hitting more like they did last season — or perhaps in O'Neill’s case, two seasons ago. You also have to think the bullpen will finish games at least somewhat better than it has so far. And while the Pittsburgh Pirates are 10 games up on the Cardinals, with almost the mirror-image of St. Louis’s record, it would probably be reasonable to think both teams’ winning percentages will meet somewhere in the middle over the rest of the season.
But sitting in fifth place in the NL Central, St. Louis has an awful lot of work to do — and an awful lot of teams to leapfrog — in order to get back to the No. 1 slot they occupied last season. And if they don’t start making a push for that soon, we might see that rarest of sights in the lifetimes of myself and probably many readers: A bad St. Louis Cardinals team.
Filed under: Baseball