Slow start does not have St. Louis Cardinals panicked. But should they be?

One of the things that drew the St. Louis Cardinals to Paul Goldschmidt in the winter of 2018 was the known stillness of his heartbeat.

Goldschmidt, even as a team’s most important player, even at the center of a baseball-mad market, was someone who could be counted on to avoid the excessive highs and lows which can trip up a team’s progress in the midst of a season.

It’s not surprising, then, that he expressed confidence about the state of his current club, which enters a three-city west coast trip with a record of eight wins and 11 losses. But it is worth noting he left a little wiggle room concerning how the season’s remaining months might play out.

“I think the rest of the year is going to kind of tell us,” Goldschmidt said Tuesday night following a loss, prior to Wednesday’s 14-5 drubbing of the Arizona Diamondbacks. “If we ... play well the rest of the year, this will be defined as a stretch that just wasn’t our best or the breaks didn’t go our way or whatever ... If we don’t play well, this will probably be described as something that was foretelling of the future.

“This is a very fair game. The scoreboard doesn’t lie, especially over the long run.”

Conversely, one of the characteristics which drew the Cardinals to Willson Contreras was his willingness — necessity — to wear his emotions in full view of all watching. Contreras is at his best when his fire burns so brightly that it gets in the eyes of opponents.

Ask Madison Bumgarner, for one, whose fiery Wednesday exchange with the Cardinals catcher ended with a demonstrative bat flip following a walk and Bumgarner’s designation for assignment by his team Thursday morning.

Or ask Contreras himself, who was asked if the club had a reason to panic yet, and screwed up his face in a way that suggested a full bite down on a particularly tart lemon.

“Panicking? For what,” Contreras retorted. “Things haven’t gone our way so far this year. We have a great team and a great pitching staff, and I know that we can do good offensively. Things haven’t clicked in our way, (so) we just have to keep battling and keep making adjustments.”

No reason for all doom and gloom

With just over 10% of the season complete, there are plenty of reasons for optimism. Even without getting into the underlying batted ball data defining the firmness of the team’s contact, the most cursory examination of offensive statistics tells a cheerful tale. Heading into Thursday’s off day, the Cardinals were third in the National League in batting average and led the league in both on base percentage and on base plus slugging percentage.

If you prefer a fancier calculation, they have the third best wRC+ in all of baseball at 118, or 18% above league average. By that measure, designed to neutralize statistics based on ballpark effects, they trail only the white hot Tampa Bay Rays and the upstart Baltimore Orioles.

Concerned about the pitching? Entirely fair — except the club also has the fifth best expected fielding independent pitching in all of MLB. Of the top seven clubs by that measure, only the San Francisco Giants, with six, have fewer wins than the Cardinals. They’re the only other team in that group that also has a record below .500.

Some of the frustration fans feel with the way baseball is discussed in a modern context can be traced back to a reflexive desire to scoff at expected rate statistics and the way the infinitely divisible numbers that spring from the game can be manipulated to tell whatever story wants to be told.

Cardinals care

Or, put another way: Who cares what the expected numbers say if the standings say the Cardinals have won three fewer games than they’ve lost and they’re already six games out of first place in the NL Central?

Well, teams care. The Cardinals care.

If there seems to be a perceived lack of urgency from those in a position to make decisions, it’s because nearly every measurable variable of on field performance is telling them that results will come from their current process. That is, simply, how math works, just the same as one and one equal two.

The problem is baseball. Manager Oliver Marmol has a few rhetorical flourishes he returns to in his daily meetings with the media, and one of the most applicable to the team’s current predicament is one that he always lets loose with his tongue in his cheek and a smile on his face — baseball is stupid. It doesn’t always make sense.

When Goldschmidt says baseball is fair, what he means is that a good process yields good results. When Contreras says the team just has to keep battling, he means winning the battle in their own minds and committing to methods which so far have been maddening, but certainly won’t always be.

Unless, of course, they are.

A statistical outlier is not a statistical impossibility. The Cardinals remain convinced the timeline of a 162-game season is long enough that they’ll improve to their mean and beyond. It’s a big bet, but it should be a safe one.