The same day the Cardinals released a malcontent teammate and lost again to the lowliest team in the league, the club gathered at a Pittsburgh steakhouse Tuesday for the annual season-ending team dinner.
A few who attended called the evening “relaxed.”
For a club that has been called many things, especially as it stumbled out of first place and into the worst record in the majors since mid-August, the Cardinals have never been confused for “relaxed.” In the closing weeks of the season, they have been described as frustrating, confounding, upsetting and, by one everyday player, “depressing.” They have been called overhyped and underachieving. Their manager recently settled on “mind-boggling,” “mysterious” and “weird” to characterize the free fall.
Externally, they’ve been referred to by a former player as “quitters” and by an NL scout as “clearly out of gas.”
Their architect has another description in mind.
“I certainly think that there is no positive adjective that you can attribute to this club. Anything else comes across like an excuse,” general manager John Mozeliak said. “When you look at 2010, it will be a disappointment. You have the individual achievements … but on an aggregate sense it didn’t come together. This has not gone the way it was envisioned. Forget what the expectations were. We’re just not playing good baseball right now.”
What to call a team built to contend and suddenly incapable of doing it is secondary to why that happened. “When” is clear, as they dropped out of first place on Aug. 15 and have not seen it since. “Who” is all the losing teams that the Cardinals couldn’t defeat, going 3-20 against them in one stretch. But why?
How does a team with a Cy Young Award contender, an MVP-caliber first baseman, the second-most productive left fielder in the National League and a candidate for the Rookie of the Year Award struggle so?
The answer is implied by the question.
The Cardinals were undone by depth.
Like a Hollywood set, the Cardinals had all the façades in place, glossy players and glitzy performances from Adam Wainwright, Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday and Jaime Garcia — the aforementioned award achievers, respectively. The support structure was flimsy. The roster lacked dimension.
When injuries took away two starters, the Cardinals didn’t have adequate in-house replacements, prompting the team to deal for another starter. Without a deep enough pool of prospects to pull off that deal independently, the Cardinals dealt a proven bat, Ryan Ludwick, off the major-league roster. When third baseman David Freese was lost to injury, his sub, veteran Felipe Lopez, was mostly ineffective. A lineup dotted with below-average performances was exposed as top-heavy, inconsistent and lacking the kind of bat the Cardinals just traded.
Players were miscast or struggling, or both. Attempts to add experience to the bench couldn’t mask a team that became reliant on youth and a victim of youthful inconsistency. Second-year player Colby Rasmus will finish the season with one of the highest on-base-plus-slugging-percentages in the National League, but he got there in spurts for a team that suddenly elected to rely on him as a constant run-producer.
MARGIN FOR ERROR
The Cardinals entered the season aware of their uncertain depth and, as one official put it, “a small margin for error.” The team that met and inflated expectations in May was a different team from the one that collapsed in August.
Asked about the club’s lack of depth, La Russa offered: “Injuries, slumps, whatever it is, you deal with them.” An NL scout who followed the Cardinals this season was freer to be more expansive: “They didn’t get the production from some of their complementary players. Their injuries revealed a lack of depth, especially when compared to the (Cincinnati) Reds. That was the difference in the division.”
From Aug. 14 to Sept. 15, the division-leading Reds gained nine games on the Cardinals. The Cardinals went 9-21 in that stretch, overcome by all of their flaws, especially offensively. In 19 of those 30 games, the Cardinals scored three or fewer runs. They went 2-17 in that stretch and averaged 1.9 runs per game. Of the 37 runs they scored, 27 involved Holliday or Pujols.
Roughly three of every four runs the Cardinals scored during the famine came from a two-man island. There was no depth to the lineup.
Entering this weekend’s series at Wrigley Field, the Cardinals had only three positions — first base, left field and center field — producing an OPS better than the league average. Only right field was within 30 points of average. At third base and shortstop, the Cardinals ranked 16th, last in the league, in OPS and slugging.
Third became a sinkhole for the Cardinals.
Rookie Freese made 64 starts at third before a chronic ankle injury required season-ending surgery, and he contributed 36 RBIs in those games. That’s more than half the position has offered the Cardinals. The replacements, led by Lopez, hit .242 and slugged .306 in Freese’s absence. Lopez, who was released Tuesday, was struggling before being promoted from super-sub to everyday starter and “piling more at-bats on him wasn’t working,” one official said. The Cardinals added veteran Pedro Feliz in August, but he arrived with a .221 average and has hit .208 since. Rookie Daniel Descalso’s four-hit game at third Thursday was the first for the Cardinals since Lopez’s second game as Freese’s proxy. Mozeliak called third base “a glaring spot that we missed.”
It became even more pronounced after the trade deadline. The Cardinals banked on getting Freese back from the disabled list, and they felt he would pick up some of the offense lost by trading Ludwick. Freese’s ankle didn’t comply. And one of at least two deals for a bat that the Cardinals pursued at the deadline and thought might be completed in early August never happened.
A week after Freese had surgery, the Cardinals had just swept the Reds in Cincinnati and moved into first place. The sensation in the clubhouse was that the team had finally “gelled,” that a surge was ahead.
The fall started that weekend.
“I just don’t think since then we’ve been consistently good enough as a team,” Holliday said. “We’ve had so many games that we’re supposed to win, and we just haven’t played well enough. It’s hard to pinpoint a reason. We just haven’t collectively been good enough. That’s the bottom line.”
Injuries rock rotation
The three-team trade on July 31 that brought in Jake Westbrook and sent Ludwick to San Diego had its roots in May, during an interleague series against the Los Angeles Angels. On back-to-back nights, the Cardinals lost Brad Penny and Kyle Lohse to injuries.
Penny has not thrown a pitch since straining a muscle May 21. Even without the two starters, the Cardinals achieved the second-best rotation ERA in the majors, at 3.60. As with the lineup, however, it’s due to a few. Wainwright, Carpenter and Garcia combined to go 47-27 through Thursday with a 2.82 ERA. Seven other pitchers made at least one start for the Cardinals, and not one had more than four wins entering the weekend.
Combined, they were 15-27 despite a 4.35 ERA.
Sensing that the Big Three couldn’t maintain their first-half pace, that a lack of run support would take a toll, and that the bullpen was vulnerable to abundant innings, the Cardinals sought to increase their starting depth. Jeff Suppan was added after his release from Milwaukee to absorb innings, and at the deadline Westbrook was a target. Westbrook had nine quality starts and a 3.77 ERA in his first 10 with the Cardinals. He did his part during that decisive 30-game stretch (Aug. 14 to Sept. 15) though Carpenter and Wainwright did bend a bit, going 3-9 combined and having ERAs of 4.40 and 4.73, respectively.
In the Cubs series sweep that ended that span, Carpenter and Wainwright each allowed five runs in their starts. The Big Three started all three games, and in their 201⁄3 innings they allowed 12 earned runs.
The offense provided them three runs of support.
They pitched a total of one-third of an inning with a lead.
‘The weirdness’
La Russa has settled on a way to describe the most perplexing part of the Cardinals’ tailspin: “The Weirdness.” The Cardinals have lost 10 consecutive series to teams with losing records. When the road trip that defined the season began, the three opponents – last-place Pittsburgh, last-place Washington and rising Houston – had a combined winning percentage of .399. The Cardinals went 2-8 and lost 4½ games in the standings. A large part of that was the team’s problems with high-ERA pitchers. Not only did they struggle against losing teams, the Cardinals (through Thursday) had lost 14 of their past 17 games when the opposition started a pitcher with an ERA higher than 4.50. Weirdness.
“Those are the teams you’re supposed to beat if you want to get into the playoffs,” infielder Skip Schumaker said. “The teams that are out of contention is why we’re (six) games back. It’s why we’re chasing, not leading.”
The record against losing teams has caused “sleepless nights trying to figure out what is going on,” Mozeliak said. The recent trouble, including that 3-20 record against losing teams since Aug. 14, was part of what prompted Jack Clark to call the team “quitters” and for some players to reject questions about the level of play being “embarrassing.” La Russa has chewed over those performances and has some theories that he declined to share. Preparation is one area the team plans to audit. Another is, of course, depth.
The Cardinals, in the word of one official, want to protect themselves from “the steep drop-off” experienced this season. Mozeliak acknowledged that this winter the club will look to add “a more experienced presence” to the bench and roster. That is one way the team that expected to be playing in the postseason can address another word they’ll be defined by: thin.
“The positive going into 2011 is that we have some great players, we have a core in place, and we have to complement it with a group of talented players,” Mozeliak said. “Things have to change. There’s no way we can go into this offseason thinking that everything we did this year, everything we planned to have happen, that it’s going to come together and next year it will magically be different.
“Because it won’t.”
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Cards went 1-2 in series at Pittsburgh • AUG. 23-25
The 10-game trip started out all right, with the Cardinals pounding the Pittsburgh Pirates 10-2 on Aug. 23. It was the Cardinals' 53th win in 79 games at PNC Park and featured Albert Pujols' 399th home run and righthander Kyle Lohse's second victory of the season. The Cardinals, winning their third straight after dropping five in a row, moved to 2½ games behind National League Central leader Cincinnati.
It all started unraveling the next night in a 4-3 loss to the Pirates. What proved to be the winning run scored in the seventh when the Pirates' Jose Tabata was allowed by manager Tony La Russa to steal second as La Russa had first baseman Pujols playing behind the bag with lefthanded-hitting Neil Walker at bat. Walker instead singled up the middle for two runs.
"I made the move that I thought gave us the best chance in that inning and to win the game," La Russa said.
In the series finale, Pittsburgh rookie Daniel McCutchen stifled the Cardinals for six innings as the Pirates won 5-2. "We have a very consistent philosophy of winning the series," La Russa said. "We win the first game of the series and we lost the next two. I don't care if it's home, start of road trip, middle of road trip ... it doesn't make any difference. It's a disappointing series."
--By Rick Hummel
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Cards were swept in Houston • AUG. 30-SEPT. 1
The hornet's-nest buzz and frat-house laughter of superstitious solidarity greeted anyone walking into the visitors' clubhouse on the first day in Houston. The Cardinals thought shaving their heads would change their luck.
All they got instead was a bald reminder every time they looked in the mirror of a series that cemented a lost opportunity.
Houston swept through the compliant Cardinals in a three-game series to close the Redbirds' 2-8 trip against losing teams. The Cardinals scored two runs in 27 innings at Minute Maid Park, and both came on a home run by Matt Holliday in the third game. For the second time in five weeks, and only the second time in Tony La Russa's tenure, they were shut out in back-to-back games.
"We've been stinking up the place," La Russa muttered.
The smooth-domed Cardinals left Houston with a new style, a familiar look and a label that would still sting long after their hair grew back. Astros veteran infielder Geoff Blum nailed the Cardinals in a way that resonates weeks later: "Their backs are against the wall, not ours. And it didn't look like they wanted to come out and beat us at all."
- BY DERRICK GOOLD
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Nationals won three vs. Cards in four-game series • AUG. 26-29
A four-game series against the Washington Nationals left the Cardinals 2-5 on their tell-all road trip. The opener said all that needed to be said when the Cardinals lost despite scoring 10 runs in a game started by Chris Carpenter. A night that began with first baseman Albert Pujols mashing home run No. 400 ended with him slipping from a tarp and badly twisting his right ankle.
Even a 4-2 win behind Jaime Garcia couldn't stanch the negative momentum. The Nationals chased Kyle Lohse with eight two-out runs in Saturday's 14-5 wipeout. The day featured an appearance by Pujols and manager Tony La Russa at a rally sponsored by conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck. While some cited the event as a possible distraction that coincided with Pujols' subsequent slump, damage to the first baseman's left elbow had more to do with an ensuing 12-for-55 fade.
The Cardinals went quietly Sunday, losing 4-2 to John Lannan. The hitters were 0 for five with runners in scoring position and Adam Wainwright labored through a five-inning, 104-pitch start he considered his worst of the season.
The Nats outscored the Cardinals 31-21 in the series. The Cardinals arrived in Washington trailing the Reds by 3½ games. They left down a season-most five, never again to challenge seriously.
- BY JOE STRAUSS
