The Chris Moeller Archives

Tired of the Cardinals

The baseball media is clearly bored with the St. Louis Cardinals. On websites, on television, on talk radio, in snail media (newspapers and magazines), reporters and bloggers have moved on to fresher topics than the year after year dominance of the best-run organization in baseball.

What’s not to hate about the Cardinals from a journalistic standpoint? They will have no 20-game winners this year, no pitchers in the top 15 in strikeouts, WHIP, or strikeout-to-walk ratio. Their pitching staff defies all conventional SABR-metric wisdom about pitching to contact. No Cardinal hitter will slug 30 home runs, or possibly even 25, in 2015. None of their base runners will swipe 30 bags. No Cardinals are in the top 10 in batting in the National League, nor is any Cardinal likely to drive in even 90 runs. (The lead-off hitter leads the team with 60.) There are no Cardinals being promoted for the MVP Award or for the Cy Young. The Cards had six players named to the National League All-Star team but all but two went missing during the game. The team hasn’t peeled off any double-digit winning streaks during the season, like the Cubs or the Blue Jays. They acquired no marquee players at the trade deadline, like the Blue Jays or the Royals. Their team payroll is lower than ten other clubs including the Blue Jays, the media's new flavor for August.

Yet the St. Louis Cardinals, as a weekend series commences at Busch Stadium tonight against the Miami Marlins, are 73 up and 41 down, seven full games in front of both the most dominant division in the game and any other team in the majors. If they win only half of their remaining 48 games, they will be boasting a 97-win season. No team in MLB has won 100 games since the 2011 Phillies.

How do they do it? Mostly pitching. They had baseball’s best team earned run average in April, then again in May, then June, then July. Their starting rotation is, by ERA, the most dominant in MLB since the 1985 Dodgers, and their bullpen has been just as good. Even though we read and hear constantly about a budding new era of pitching dominance, and about the blazing young pitching staffs of teams like the Mets and the Nationals, the Cardinals’ tossers, if the season ended today, would win the ERA title by the largest margin of any team in thirty years. Their staff is just as young, if not younger, than these others. They had three pitchers (Michael Wacha, Carlos Martinez, and closer Trevor Rosenthal) named to the All-Star team that are each under the age of 25. I may have forgotten to mention that the ace of their rotation went down to a season-ending injury in April after only four starts.

The team scores just enough to win. Everybody contributes. No plate appearances are given away. The best rookie hitter in the National League, measured in true production, is named neither Kris Bryant nor Joc Pederson. He is Randal Grichuk, traded by the Angels as a minor-leaguer for David Freese two years ago. He roams the outfield as a plus-defender for St. Louis. The team bats solidly with men on base, but only at .264. The BA drops to .251 with men in scoring position. Their defense is very sturdy, but not flashy beyond the general supremacy of Jason Heywood in right field and Yadier Molina behind the plate. In this paragraph, I may have forgotten to mention that their third place hitter, Matt Holliday, is missing his 52nd game of the season tonight due to injury, and their clean-up hitter from a year ago, Matt Adams, has taken only 144 at-bats.

They are 32-18 against their own division, a circuit that has been bruising every other division with regularity, one that has three of the four best team records in either league. The third-place Cubs in the NL Central are 7 1/2 games out, but would be in front of the AL East by three games and the NL West by two-- while playing the tougher, unbalanced schedule.

Where’s the ink? Where’s the love? What does it take to get a little attention around these parts? And here’s another disadvantage the Cardinals have overcome, with the traditional one already being that they play in the fifth-smallest TV market in the league. Consider now the parity problem the league suffers from. What, you ask, dumbfounded? There is no parity problem. Every team in every market has a shot at a title now. This has been well-documented. Correct. And therein lies the problem. Five to twenty-five years ago, the recently-flourishing Royals and Pirates were complaining that they couldn’t compete in their financially-disadvantaged home markets, yet that whole time the equally-disadvantaged Cardinals were competing—and thriving. This entire narrative was a scam. “Parity” has been improperly equated with fairness.

The amateur draft is the biggest reason why it’s a misnomer. “Parity” has been promoted since 1969 by a draft structure that rewards teams for being the worst in the league. These bad teams were just too stupid to realize they were being given a hand up. They sacrificed draft picks for bigger names and for satisfying immediate needs. They have gone out and signed free agents at the expense of draft picks. Contrast the Cubs and the Cardinals. The Cubs of Chicago, Illinois play in front of the fourth largest urban population in North America. They have a national fan base and every resource available to them under the sun—and have had for decades. Yet, they have constructed the club they currently put on the field, principally, by intentionally biffing it for six years, and gathering the top-end draft picks that come with that strategy. Their farm system is now generally considered to be the most-well-stocked of any in the game—although the facts on the field suggest that the distinction belongs still to the Cardinals.

Herein lies the difference. The Cubs did their well-documented “expert” building by claiming the 9th overall pick in 2011, the 6th in 2012, the 2nd in 2013, and the 4th in 2014. The Cardinals have not drafted higher than 13th in the draft since 1998, and not higher than 19th since 2008. The Cubs did not finish higher than fifth in their six-team division in any season between 2009 and this one. The Cardinals, you might be surprised to find out, have finished with the worst record in their division (or before expansion, their league) only one time since 1918. That was in 1990 when they finished sixth out of six teams in the old incarnation of the National League East and still managed to win 70 games.

The Cardinals organization clearly teaches the game better than any other. Internally, it’s referred to as the Cardinal Way. It’s an actual teaching guide that exists as a tangible, bound manual written by a baseball lifer named George Kissell, who was originally signed as an infielder in 1940 by Branch Rickey, and who later mentored Sparky Anderson, Joe Torre, and Tony LaRussa. The most recent results of the Cardinal Way have been laid out for you in the paragraphs above, and your doubts only add to its power. The Cards would probably be on track to win 120 games this year if they had the draft slots the Cubs have taken on for intentionally putting a non-competitive team on the field every year since this decade began.

Is this the system of competition Major League Baseball should be sanctioning? And which team should be considered the underdog? Is it the “cursed” team whose historically-bad winning percentage and championship drought (in a world where curses do not actually exist) has actually been the result of bad baseball decisions and a lack of winning attitude despite breathtaking financial resources? Or is it the little red engine that defies the odds every year despite less money, no lottery picks, and insufficient media attention for its remarkable ongoing success? A lot of you probably took the Vegas odds on the Cubs back in March, but you should have taken the Cardinals. I don’t even know what those odds were, but I know the Cardinals were a longer shot to win it all on Opening Day than were the Cubs, according to Vegas handicappers. Cards fans don’t flood the sports books with our wages. We spend our disposable income on game tickets because we know that the unbalanced fan support we offer becomes a valuable resource. That's not a glossy media story, but it's a system that works.

posted by CM @ 9:10 PM