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#STLCards manager Oli Marmol said the plan for now is to have LHP Steven Matz start on Sunday vs. the Detroit Tigers.
Matz, who is 0-4, is scheduled to throw a bullpen session today and work on the shape and sharpness of his curveball. That pitch has been a problem for weeks.
— John Denton (@JohnDenton555) May 4, 2023
Going into this season there were many comments about the rotation being a bunch of #3 starters. The irony is that now we wish we had them being #3s because some of them are pitching like #7s and #8s.
I am thinking Flaherty’s shoulder/arm is hurt again and he’s just been trying to not say anything. But I think he will have to come out of the rotation. That throws a wrench into whatever the plans were to replace Woody and/or Matz.
The Memphis rotation is thin with Hudson and Graceffo on the IL and there is nothing at Springfield. Thompson will be stretched out at some point. We are an IL stint or two away from complete melt down. Maybe Mo will rake through Indy ball rosters for something to at least keep the upper levels in business. Mo’s got this thing out on the ledge.
I think they will before long. Liby’s looked better in AAA this year than he has before, but 33 innings may not tell much. 2019 in class A was the only winning season he’s ever had at any level, so we need to have sober expectations. He supposedly has some impressive advanced metrics, but his stuff doesn’t seem that great to me and wasn’t that great when he was here last hear. But that was only 30+ innings also, so who knows.
Wooster was also in the middle of these game threads the last couple years. Maybe they’re smarter than we are, knew what was coming, and have a better way to spend a couple hours.
Hope they’re okay.
BenFred: The Cardinals have 99 problems, but a self-created pitching mess is by far the biggest https://t.co/YfAh27NNEM
— STL Cardinals News (@STLCardsNews) May 5, 2023
The biggest problem with the pitching goes all the way down to a philosophical approach. They’ve spent years preaching pitch to contact which worked more times than not when they could use the shift. Now with the shift gone we are witnessing why other teams were developing pitchers with velocity and strikeout abilities. Not only this, but the strategy for pitchers seems to be all over the board. Just check out tweets from former Cardinals minor league, Paul Schwendel:
A coach pulled us aside afterwards and told us that the analysts didn't see it that way and we should be trying to punch people out. Incoherent strategy in that org on the pitching front. They had pitching coaches with no idea how to use trackman (not Peoria PC, he was great)
— Paul Schwendel (@pschwendel10) May 3, 2023
The tweet from Schwendel is in a thread started by reporter Eno Sarris where also includes this article from February 19 that essentially laid out the Cardinals pitching problems:
And, I mean, people saw it coming https://t.co/quqT1OHSrV
— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) May 3, 2023
That’s all behind pay walls, but the gist seems to be A) the pitching side of player development is a mess, and B) the pitch to contact approach is negatively affected by the shift ban (article written before the season started).
As to A, I don’t know about particulars, but as I have said, when it is everybody there is a common denominator, it is not just everybody happening to play bad at the same time.
As to B, the problem has not turned out to be a bunch of balls going through where shifted infielders would have been before the ban. Besides, pitch to contact strategies have been used by lots of teams for 100 years with virtually no use of infield shifts, so banning shifts doesn’t have to mean pitch to contact won’t work. But your team has to be built for it defensively, and pitchers have to keep it in the park. That has been been true for 100 years and still is. The shift, or lack of, has little to do with it.
The Cardinals have played a whole lot of innings this year with poor defensive outfielders out there. Pitch to contact does not work with poor defensive outfielders out there. So what exactly Mo and the rest of them are doing makes no sense. A lot was made of all the balls falling in earlier, bad luck it was called. Weak contact produces some balls falling in. It is worse when there are weak defensive outfielders out there. There have also been a lot of home runs allowed, which you cannot defend.
It takes baseball people all up and down to run a baseball organization. We don’t have that. We have guys with their nose stuck in a spreadsheet. Guys who can stay on script, or scripts, as there seems to be more than one floating around. There is also a disconnect at a higher level. Obviously, if your whole pitching approach depends upon elite defense, why are you developing and promoting weak defensive outfielders? That is not going to work. You need to be able to look at a Walker and say, this guy can work for us as a DH, but not as an outfielder. He is never going to be what a pitch to contact staff needs out there. So either make him a DH or trade him for something that will work for us. Burleson will not work for a pitch to contact staff. What are they doing there? How much sense did it make to trade Bader if your approach depends upon elite defense? Defense up the middle is vital. So they downgraded CF defense and then put very bad defenders in corner outfield a lot of the time? How does that make any sense if your approach is pitch to contact?
It is not just guys who need to play better out there. You can’t run a baseball team with number crunchers, there is more to it than that.
This correlates with what I said a few days ago regarding a shift in our draft strategy a few years ago to focus on developing power bats internally. That is a worthy endeavor theoretically but if it deteriorates your defense too much then you are going to get a lot of uneven results.
Unless I missed something, the entire focus of Sarris and Schwendel is pitching, not defense. In fact, Sarris wrote that he expected the defense would continue to be strong and left it at that. Further, the most important part of the defense as related to shifts is the infield, not the outfield.
In the tweet above, Sarris cited these defensive rankings for the Cards compared to MLB, which are not bad at all.
13th in Outs Above Average
11th in DRSI actually read the article. Its focus is on two things – the Cards’ reliance on pitch-to-contact and the lack of strikeouts among the staff.
It feels to me like the conclusions being drawn here about defense, especially as related to the outfield, are not at all what these folks are talking about.
However, I am open to be educated. Are there metrics which indicate that outfield defense has become a significant part of the problem? If the outfield defense is costing runs (and wins), let’s get the facts on the table. To me, the main problem by a lot is on the mound, which is Sarris’ conclusion as well.
More tweets from Paul Schwendel concerning Cardinals player development:
(2/2) all day and is too lazy to learn trackman/rapsodo/new age pitching techniques and training methodologies shows up to the park for a couple hours and tells a 20 year old with his career on the line "Just throw strikes, it's that easy." It's lazy and should be called out.
— Paul Schwendel (@pschwendel10) May 3, 2023
Also, Sarris brings up another good point about the baseball, which seemingly has been changed. All of this, btw, is in the same tweet thread mentioned earlier.
I think it was the park and the defense. In the last ten years, they are 21st in strikeout rate and 18th in walk rate as a staff. Now the defense is hamstrung by new rules, and the ball is flying out of every park. The league has optimized for Ks for a reason.
— Eno Sarris (@enosarris) May 3, 2023
Thanks, BHC. FWIW, we started a separate thread two days ago where the Schwendel tweets and Sarris’ comments were shared and discussed. But they are surely related to Pitching so they can fit here, too.
I agree with Brian, the problem is the pitching, not the defense. The lack of the shift has very little effect on outfield defense. Our infield defense may be suffering a little, but the recent errors is more likely the result of trying too hard to compensate for everything else that is going wrong.
The team definitely has been downgraded defensively in the outfield but not enough to be causing these problems. We had good outfield defense before because we had Bader out there and he covered a lot of ground that our current outfield is not able to do. Bader was just multiple levels better than anyone else we had, but that is water under the bridge, he’s gone.
Carlson is fine, he is an average to slightly above average CF. He could take better routes on occasion, but that can be improved. What can’t be improved is his speed, which isn’t elite. The bigger problem for him is at the plate. Playing him everyday in CF has the tradeoff of lack of production against RHP.
Regardless, as Sarris said, we have a pitching problem. The lack of offensive production can be improved by playing better, as multiple players have themselves expressed multiple times.
The offense has shown signs of life, although so far not when it matters.but pulse is better than no pulse. We have gotten the occasional descent start. We have seen good work from the pen. Sometimes. The hands guys are out there now. It will come together now and then.the they’ll be fine crowd will be able to exhale.
Whatever moves are made and whomever gets DFA’d, will get picked up by another team, coached properly and have a good career. Our coaches, are not good coaches; they mean well and try hard, but just don’t have the “it” factor for a coach. They are not getting the “Best” out of each player, instead they are content to put everyone in a bucket and say, ” ok, go get ’em.”.
Other teams will figure out what is best for the player, find little issues that turn out to be a big factor to make that player better.No doubt our pitching has been horrendous but someone is going to have to convince me that Burleson and Walker are MLB caliber OF’s defensively and both of them saw quite a bit of time in the OF in April.
I thought the pitch-to-contact philosophy went out with Dave Duncan. That was his mantra.
I wonder if our pitchers benefited a lot from Mike Maddux? Losing both Maddux and Molina may have been a bigger impact than we realized.
Maddux and Albert both just deciding to leave, without a common impetus, is as likely as 25 guys just all happening to be in slump at he same time.
No one said Burleson and Walker are even average defenders at this point. But did that cost the team April wins? Would the bad pitching results have been appreciably better if others were playing instead of them? (also remember that Nootbaar was unavailable while on the IL during part of April.)
Them being below average does not validate the assertion that the best answer to solve the team’s woes is to play the best defensive OF every day without exception, which is what some posters here have advocated.
Now with O’Neill out, who are the three best OF defenders? There is Carlson then Nootbaar and close your eyes. One of the pair of below average OFs Yepez and Burleson HAS to play. If Carlson sits against RHP, which the splits suggest would be a good idea, both Yepex and Burleson would flank Nootbaar.
Such is the mess they find themselves in.
They could play Donnie in the OF. But Burleson is ok in LF. I don’t have an issue with him there. He’s not good, but he’s ok and definitely playable.
Brian, I usually agree with you but not on this one. Our bad defense cost us a lot. There were multiple times where a ball could have been caught and it wasn’t. And then that one out made a difference in the inning where several runs scored with 2 outs. Plus a bunch of singles have become doubles. And ultimately, it’s just demoralizing as a pitcher. Yes, pitchers should be able to still make good pitches and get guys out, but it just sucks when outs aren’t being made behind you. Bader made a huge difference out there the last few years. He was able to steal outs. Carlson doesn’t steal many, but at least he does make solid plays consistently and I think that’s really important. And honestly, we’re not giving up a whole lot of OPS between Carlson and our other options so far even against RHP. It’s not ideal, but it’s consistent a way better than demoralizing. And right now, as we watch weird mistake after weird mistake sink us every night, I think that’s what we need more than anything – reliability. And playing Carlson provides that.
May runs allowed (6 games):
Runs 39 (6.5 avg)
ER 32 (5.3)
UER 7 (1.2)5 (may 2nd)
6
11
5
6
6 (may 7th)The pitching and D is a trainwreck. Nothing has changed just because the lineup bailed us out for one win.
Instead of Mo being accountable for his roster, he uses Contreras as the scapegoat. That’s a punk move.
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