Matheny, St. Louis ‘on the clock’
BALTIMORE — The St. Louis Cardinals don’t do rebuilds. They don’t do teardowns or roster overhauls or fire sales or salary dumps. They don’t sell off pieces at the trade deadline. They don’t punt on seasons in June or July.
Perhaps alone among major league teams — during an era in which even the Yankees are in transition, and the safest path to sustained winning is to lose big first — the Cardinals haven’t been through a true get-lean period in a generation or two.
The Cardinals haven’t won fewer than 86 games in a season since 2007, haven’t finished worse than second place in the National League Central since 2008, haven’t drawn fewer than 3 million fans since 2003 and haven’t had an Opening Day payroll in the bottom half of baseball this century.
That’s one reason it was so jarring to see the Cardinals last week arrive at a self-imposed crossroads, with their general manager, John Mozeliak, saying the team had “four to six weeks” to turn its season around or face the sort of drastic measures that no Cardinals team in ages has faced.
“I don’t think we would ever look at [tanking] as a strategy,” Mozeliak said last week at a hastily arranged news conference. “But there might be assets on the team we could arbitrage and it would make sense for us … Do I think we have the pieces to be a playoff team? Yes. Do we have to start playing better, and fast? Yes.”
That came June 10, at the end of a disastrous 0-7 road trip that left the Cardinals at 26-32 and closer to last place in the NL Central than to first place. At first, the tough talk from their general manager — which came with real teeth, in the form of the release of veteran third baseman Jhonny Peralta and the reassignment of third base coach Chris Maloney — seemed to light a spark under the Cardinals, who won their next four games, two of them by shutout.
But that was followed by three consecutive losses against the Milwaukee Brewers, which brought the Cardinals to Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, where they lost two of three. They head to Philadelphia with a 3137 record through Sunday, 5 ½ games behind first-place Milwaukee and two games ahead of cellar-dwelling Cincinnati.
“It’s not like we’re getting scorched. We’re losing lot of really close games,” veteran pitcher Adam Wainwright said Friday, a day before St. Louis, with Wainwright starting, lost 15-7 to Baltimore. “But the fact of the matter is, good teams find a way to win those games.”
The Cardinals, at this moment, are simply not a good team. After Sunday’s games, they are 11th in the NL in runs scored per game (4.29), 11th in team OPS (.741), 13th in runs allowed per game (4.47) and 12th in bullpen ERA (4.70). What’s worse, their fundamentals — long a point of pride in St. Louis — have been awful. Their base runners have been picked off 10 times, second-most in the majors.
“I don’t think any team in the majors has messed up on the bases more than the Cardinals have this year,” Cardinals analyst and former catcher Tim McCarver said on a recent FoxSports Midwest telecast. “They are not a good fundamental team, period.”
Wainwright also brought up fundamentals, unprompted, when talking about the state of the Cardinals.
“In this clubhouse we know we have to get some things ironed out,” he said. “We have to play the game better, play a smoother, crisper game, fundamentally. That’s what we can be doing better. There’s nobody in here who doesn’t know it. We’ve talked about it. We’ve gotten it out in the open. It’s just up to us to make it happen.”
When Cardinals Manager Mike Matheny was asked Friday if he had seen any improvement in the quality of play since Mozeliak put the team on notice, he at first rejected the premise of the question.
“We’ve been on notice,” he said, “since February.” But then he paused and highlighted the 43 runs the offense had scored since June 10: “In general, our team has gotten into a better run offensively, with better at-bats. Offense seems to cover a lot of other things not going well. But overall, think the guys are playing at a much better level right now.”
One interpretation of Mozeliak’s comments last week was that Matheny himself was on notice — or “on the clock,” as one column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (which also included the words “hot” and “seat” in the same sentence) put it. Tellingly, Mozeliak gave only the most tepid vote of confidence possible when asked about Matheny’s status.
“I want him to feel confident we trust him to do his job,” Mozeliak said. “But we need to do better.”
On Friday, Matheny shrugged off such speculation as distractions, best ignored, that have no impact on the way the Cardinals will prepare or play.
“I think the organization understands very well that we’re right in the middle of where we need to be,” he said. “We haven’t played great, and we’re still right in the mix.”
It’s true. This rare bout of internal turmoil in St. Louis comes against a backdrop of a Central division that — contrary to most preseason predictions — appears wide open and winnable. The defending World Series champion Chicago Cubs, rather than putting a second level on the dynasty they were supposedly constructing, are 34-34 and have spent only two days this month in first place. The Brewers, meanwhile, were holding down first place with a record of 38-33 through Sunday. That is the worst among the game’s six division-leaders.
“Everyone in our division is around the same record. It’s anybody’s ballgame,” Wainwright said. “We win the next seven games, nobody’s going to be talking about what we did in the past. It’ll be how everything turned around. It only takes a week.”
But if Mozeliak is true to his four-to-six-weeks ultimatum, that leaves only three to five remaining. In most every other season, the Cardinals’ day of reckoning comes in late September or October. This year, it could come in July.