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Did Mr. Walton talk about the pending loss of Taylor Motter? He has declared for free agency now.
What is 1td and Pugs going to do without Motter leading the way in 2024???
You can rest assured that both Johnny and Billy Jr. are all too well aware that if they hope to ward off a huge decrease in season ticket sales for the ’24 season they have no choice but to go all in with the pocketbook blazing in a go for broke attempt to resign the great Manny Motter. If he’s allowed to slip away to another team, we can all expect a substantial push-back from the Redbird fan base. Let’s simply face facts…folks come to the ballpark to watch Manny Motter take his rips and flash that mitt all over the IF and the Cardinal brass knows this to be the case. Along with the Redbird manager, Manny’s the face of this storied franchise…
Yeah, Brian should have held out for a two segment commitment. Maybe with an opt out after one in case something better comes as long.
Miklasz sure threads the needle on his assessment regarding the shabby treatment of Contreras by the Cardinal brass this past season. Now the whiz-kid manager’s making mention of players he considers as selfish and not committed to winning championships. No one’s going to want to play in StL. before too long. It’s out of hand to point of being metastatic.
“Miklasz sure threads the needle on his assessment regarding the shabby treatment of Contreras by the Cardinal brass this past season.”
I don’t know whether I agree about shabby treatment, Andujar. Unless I’m mistaken, what happened was in early May the duo of Wainwright and Flaherty approached Marmol/the front office and let them know that there was something drastically in need of fixing, re Contreras’ work behind the plate. It was specifically in response to their two-man appeal that Willson was removed from behind the plate for the next 10-12 games or so.
Then as now, I assumed that Contreras was somehow tipping pitches, or at the very least he was showing extreme tendencies to call for certain pitches in certain situations, i.e. telegraphing probable pitch selections. Contreras was removed from behind the plate on May 6. The extraordinary team pitching splits at that point were:
Low Leverage .683 (MLB avg. .720)
High Leverage .925 (MLB avg. .758)Late & Close .990 (MLB avg. .682)
And one more set of splits:
Redbird pitchers with Contreras behind the plate, 5.16 ERA and .824 OPS allowed (200 IP).
Redbird pitchers with Knizner behind the plate, 3.53 and .690 OPS (80 IP).Something was dreadfully wrong, and Contreras certainly appeared to have a lot to do with it. Then as now, removing Contreras from behind the plate until the club could figure out how he was tipping and how to fix it, was the most responsible move by the manager/front office.
I went ahead and looked up Monty’s catcher splits.
With Contretas
ERA 2.74, OPS .651With Knizner
ERA 3.62 OPS .761Looking further, K/BB, BA against, all of it better or equal with Contreras. It might have been better for Marmol/FO to apply a few grains of salt to the complaints of pitchers throwing garbage and looking for someone to blame.
I’m not going to spend the winter looking in the rear view mirror. We only lost one pitcher I wish we had back. And I’m glad we have Contreras and didn’t trade half of our young core for Murphy.
Well, Bob Reed, there’s 26 players on a Big League roster and all fingers were pointed at Contreras for the early season failures that continued to be present for the entire 162 regular season games. Wainwright got slapped around all year and Flaherty continues to get slapped around in Baltimore. It’s glaringly obvious to me that the gutless Cardinal brass saw an opportunity to deflect their own dismal failures onto Contreras, and they pounced on that opportunity. The pitching was horrendous across the entire board all season long and I feel it’s now crystal clear that Contreras had almost nothing to do with lack of a solitary pitcher either in the 5 man or the BP that had the ability to consistently record outs. In my view, both Molina and Bench could have been situated behind HP and the pitching on the ’23 edition would have still been worse than lousy. My conclusion is that the leadership of this team that both allowed and promoted the placing of blame on Contreras are entirely without anything that constitutes simple decency.
I think Wainwright’s and Flaherty’s problems had way more to do with themselves than Contreras! They both stunk and it was nobodies fault than there’s! The fact that any pro pitcher would go and tell on the catcher so he could take the blame for at least some of their failure is really hard to believe! This explains why we are in the shape we are in!
It sure does, Steve 60, and now the gutless Cardinal manager is pointing fingers at phantom players in the clubhouse who he feels are selfish. This guy’s a genuine twerp.
By the way……
Joey Votto has announced that he intends on playing in 2024. Not sure if the Reds exercise his buyout and then agree on a new lower contract so they don’t have to pay him $20M.
Contreras on the whole was fine. He pretty much did what was expected…pluses for the bar and meh on the defense, framing and game calling. I’d hardly call him the biggest failure of the year. The lack of guys to throw to him was by far the biggest issue and the one that the Cards front office should be held accountable for.
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