’Bring on the Rain’. How much worse can things get for struggling St. Louis Cardinals?

Jo Dee Messina and Tim McGraw released a song called “Bring On The Rain” in September 2001, which would eventually climb the country charts and reach no. 1 among US Hot Country Songs in early 2002.

The first two lines of the song read, “Another day has come and gone/Can’t imagine what else could go wrong.”

It was the first song that played through the overhead speakers in the Cardinals’ clubhouse on Thursday morning when it opened for media availability. It’s such a perfect coincidence that it would be too hackneyed to write as fiction.

Reality around Busch Stadium in the season’s first month has been much more grim than most could have imagined.

Wednesday night’s whipsaw loss which saw a one-run lead flip to a two-run deficit left the Cardinals with a season-high five-game losing streak and a 10-21 record, good for sole possession of last place in the National League. Following Thursday afternoon’s loss, the losing streak reached six games and the record dropped even further to 10-22.

On Wednesday night, Manager Oliver Marmol was left to explain his deployment of his two highest leverage relievers, having turned to Ryan Helsley to escape the seventh and handle the eighth and leaving Giovanny Gallegos to secure the ninth.

Gallegos, who had been all but unhittable in the early going, suddenly wasn’t. An elementary decision from the perspective of leverage spots and reliever usage found itself under scrutiny. It was another day and another way found to lose, sprouting up through the spring soil like dandelions, blowing away and popping back up just as easily.

There’s not much fun to be found around the ballpark these days.

“You think they’re more frustrated than us? I can tell you right now they’re not,” Marmol said Wednesday night when asked about the shockingly voluminous rain storm of boos which showered over the team’s ears as the game went south. “That clubhouse is extremely frustrated.

“To sit here and think that other people are more frustrated than the people in this clubhouse is insane. Absolutely insane. I can tell you that every coach that’s in that clubhouse wakes up and loses sleep over how to improve what’s going on at the moment, and that’s the only thing that crosses your mind every minute of the day.”

Pillars going from cracking to crumbling?

The prospecting for answers has been ongoing but has yet to strike oil. If one of the team’s flaws – inconsistent offense, unreliable starting pitching, random bullpen blowups — was frequently repeated, it would be simple enough to zero in on those solutions and lean on the pillars of the game the team could otherwise count on.

Those pillars are showing stress damage, and if cracking becomes crumbling, there’s no way of knowing how far things could fall.

“Right now, we’re trying to balance finding production anywhere,” Marmol said Thursday when asked about the run of starts Dylan Carlson has received in centerfield over the last week. “At some point, you have to do something well.”

“You start breaking down how it’s happened,” he added, “there’s some interesting ways we’ve lost some ballgames.”

There are no available excuses in the Major Leagues. In a high pressure environment where high dollar decisions are made on the basis of winning and losing, there’s a limited amount of accepted explanation before serious changes have to be made to the process which created those conditions in the first place.

Bring on the rain

Perhaps to a fault, the Cardinals are committed to a system and a way of thinking into which they’ve invested their time and capital. Probability brings with it a wide array of potential outcomes, and it’s not much solace to the people in charge of correcting course that the disastrous start to this season was on the extreme negative end of that potential.

“It takes a hell of a lot of courage to be patient, I’ll tell you that,” Marmol said. “I can’t look at one guy in the eye that’s in that clubhouse and ask for more because of the way they’re going about it with their preparation and overall intent during the game.

“It hasn’t amounted to wins, and that’s the part that’s frustrating. But I can honestly look at each one of these guys and know that they’re putting in the work.”

Thursday, with a chance to stop the bleeding and reverse some of the negative energy, the Cardinals allowed 10 runs to the Angels in the series finale before they recorded their seventh out. They ultimately lost 11-7.

Bring on the rain.