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Must-see TV: One month in, the Cardinals don't look good

trey vaughan, the joplin globe, mo.
·5 min read
12

May 2—We're a little over a month into the MLB season and the St. Louis Cardinals are struggling.

The team is 10-20 so far and has only strung together consecutive wins on two occasions. The first series of the season they won games two and three with the Blue Jays and then did the same on April 11-12 in Colorado against the Rockies.

The Cardinals haven't won the first game of a series yet this year and that trend will continue after a 5-1 loss to the Angels on Tuesday night.

As the calendar turns to May 3, it hasn't been all bad. But there hasn't been a lot of good, either.

One of the stars in the batting order is Nolan Arenado, who is hitting .235

Your best earned run average from a starting pitcher is Jordan Montgomery's 3.34 while the worst is Steven Matz 6.39. Meanwhile, Jack Flaherty's 3.94 ERA is the only other starting pitcher under 4.00.

That's a recipe for losing.

As a team, St. Louis ranks in the top-half of the league in hits (fifth), doubles (11th), total bases (11th) and walks (11th). The team gets on base, it just doesn't drive in a lot of runs or hit for power. St. Louis is outside of the top 15 in runs, triples, home runs and runs batted in.

The Cardinals are ninth in strikeouts, showing that they put the ball in play more than most teams. And they can steal bases, as they rank 15th in that category.

It doesn't stop there. Through one month of play, they sit sixth in batting average (.262), seventh in on-base percentage (.334), 13th in slugging percentage (.415) and 12th in on-base plus slugging (.749).

Those numbers aren't necessarily eye-popping, but they get you inside the top-half of the league — unlike the record shows. But then, the defense and pitching can't back it up.

The Cardinals have committed 14 errors already this season for 17th in the MLB. Of all major pitching stats, the only ones in which the staff ranks top-15 are strikeouts (9th, 264), earned runs (15th, 125) and shutouts (tied for 7th, 3).

All those numbers can tell you is the staff can miss some bats at times and strikeout opponents and there's been some ability to shut down opponents with three shutouts. The earned runs sneak into the top half of the league, but the ERA does not at 4.45 and 17th.

It's been hard to watch this team to this point of the season. Especially while the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs are having some early success to separate themselves in the division.

The easy recipe to fixing this is getting some better results from the pitching staff. The difficult thing is finding out how you're going to do it.

Montgomery is off to a fine start with his team-leading ERA and four quality starts out of six total. Jack Flaherty has a quality start and has started to settle in a little after struggling with control to begin the year. After those two, it's rough.

Miles Mikolas has an ERA of 5.97 and a WHIP that nears 2 at 1.71. Maybe Mikolas has figured it out with his most recent start where he went 6 1/3 innings and didn't surrender a single run to the San Francisco Giants on Thursday last week.

Even if you're optimistic about Mikolas settling in here in the month of May, you have to find answers for Matz and Jake Woodford, who have struggled mightily.

Zack Thompson, Matthew Liberatore and Gordon Graceffo are pitchers to keep an eye on to potentially replace someone in the rotation. Liberatore has been successful at the AAA level with the Memphis Redbirds and Zack Thompson was just sent down to Memphis to prepare to become a starter after being successful out of the bullpen for the Cardinals so far this year.

Adam Wainwright is expected to return to the rotation this weekend. That could be a bright spot for St. Louis as it looks to get Waino his first MLB start of 2023 on Saturday when the Tigers come to town.

The offense hasn't been excellent, but its been good enough to win. And with bats like Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt, it's bound to get better. Nolan Gorman started the year hot and if he can get back to hitting the ball like that, he will mix well with Nado and Goldy.

Speaking of bats to mix well with the stars, why did Jordan Walker get sent down to the minors? He started the year on a 12-game hitting streak, which was something only one player in the history of the game had done before in Eddie Murphy back in 1912.

He has to be back in the lineup before May is over. The Cardinals need Walker and they have to hope the veteran and one of the aforementioned young arms can give this rotation a boost.

Because without those things, St. Louis will continue to be the opposite of must-see TV. The concern is there right now, but there's still more than three quarters of the long 162-game season remaining. If things don't look better by June, it'll be time to make some major adjustments.