Despite all of that bccran this team was cruising in first place until our pitching cratered. This team was built to win with pitching and defense and without consistently good pitching it has no chance to win. The organization vastly overestimated our pitching depth.
I would also like to say that I don’t completely buy the argument that “every team has injuries so just deal with it”. We see this every year with the Cardinals, it isn’t just because of a covid hangover. I think they seriously need to invest more resources into evaluating and preventing catastrophic injuries. Getting hit by a pitch or running into a wall or landing on the base wrong are just baseball injuries but we seem to lead the league in muscle strains.