The Search for Good News
11/05/2024 15:00
It's too nice to let these Cardinals get you too down. Oh and I play around with adjectives.
Good morning, Viva El Birdos!
I'm sitting in my office on Friday afternoon. I just had a very filling spicy burrito bowl for lunch. I've finished up most of my work for the day and it's not even 2 pm. I'm a little sleepy but I'm going to get a nap in around 3:30. Then there's dinner while we take in a concert at the park. It's 71 glorious degrees outside. It's a little overcast, but the sun has peeked out more and more as the day has gone on.
It's a great day. I'm not going to let anything ruin it.
Especially not the Cardinals.
For the past several days I've tried to come up with the right adjective to describe the state of Cardinalsdom. That's not as easy as it seems.
In some corners of the internet, everyone is always dooming. Even in the best of seasons, this is the worst of teams to that sort. These are the sort of folks I automatically block on Twitter.
In the other corner dwells those who are convinced the team can do no wrong. The club will turn around! Tonight, probably! And they'll win their way through the summer months to another division crown! That kind of cloying optimism churns the habanero salsa in my stomach.
Between these extremes are the masses in the middle, who are trying to wrestle with 7 ½ months of bad baseball. They are … here come those adjectives… frustrated. Bored. Angry, but not really certain who to be angry at. Concerned for the future of the organization. Ambivalent. Disillusioned. Despondent. Disengaged. Resigned.
I could go on. I think, though, that the adjective I want to settle on is befuddled. I think most fans are just a little befuddled.
Befuddled – according to Google's AI – means "confused, muddled, puzzled, or perplexed." The word doesn't fully encapsulate the emotions I'm feeling. It probably doesn't for you either. But it's good enough for now.
What's going on with the offense? No one really knows. It's befuddling.
If someone claims they know, don't listen to them. They don't know.
How, after all, do you explain that entering tonight's game on the 10th of May, Paul Goldschmidt, Nolan Gorman, and Dylan Carlson don't have a single hit in the month of May? It's May 10th. May. 10th! 10 days!
As of Friday afternoon, the team has 10 batters who have a 0.0 fWAR or below. 10! Another two are at 0.1 – about 1 plate appearance from being back to 0.0. That makes 12 total. To make it worse, 10 of those 12 are batters the team was definitely counting on for above-replacement-level production…
Sorry… sorry… sorry! What am I doing? I forgot how I started this. I wasn't going to let anything ruin the rest of my day! Especially not the Cardinals! It's just hard not to let this offense get to you, ya know?
Back to befuddled. I can tell you what is happening with the offense. Anyone can go read the stats. I can talk about launch angles and the lack of pulled balls and missed meatballs and the difference between wOBA and xwOBA. I can talk about BABIP and sample sizes and normalizations and aging curves and the increased difficulty in developing young hitters. I can talk about park factors and cold weather. I can give you "whats" galore. There are so many whats happening with this offense.
But they're just part of a formula that is, honestly, beyond anyone's calculations. Why are all those whats happening? It's befuddling.
No one – not I, Mo, the analytics department, Oli, Turner Ward, or Colby Rasmus' dad – can definitively tell you why this is happening to the Cardinals offense. I definitely can't tell you why it's happening to, essentially, everyone on the team. I definitely certainly absolutely can't tell you why it's happening to, essentially, everyone on the team all the same time and for nearly the entirety of the first month and a half of the season.
And it's even longer than that if you want to go back to Spring Training! If you remember – and you don't want to - it took the team about 2 weeks to hit their first home run! Pretty much no one except Victor Scott hit anything at all until the final week or so before games started to matter. (Then when the games started to matter, even Victor Scott couldn't hit anything.) I mean, it was brutal all Spring. Brutal. And normally Spring games don't mean much to me, but when you start factoring it into what we've seen so far, you can't help but to…
Sorry… sorry… sorry! Here I am back at it again. Ruining my own afternoon.
I'll just leave it there. Instead of harping on all that for 800 words (too late), let's instead just look for some positives. Let's search for good news! Inside of all the befuddlement, are some pretty interesting things that I think are worth looking at. They are, unfortunately, not defining this season for the Cards. But they won't ruin your Saturday morning, and maybe that's more important today. I'll just list some of them in no particular order.
JoJo Romero
I mentioned him in the podcast, but no one is listening to podcasts right now. (Or watching Cardinals games. Or attending Cardinals games. Or reading Cardinals articles…) Still, it's worth bringing him up twice in one week.
JoJo Romero has been incredible. Romero has a 1.52 ERA and a 2.20 FIP. It's pretty much earned, too. Normalize his HR rate and his xFIP is just 2.26. His K rate is an even 29%. He's walking just 3.2% of batters faced.
His innings are limited since we're still early in the season, but those are amazing totals. That's a K/BB ratio of 9.00 Among Cardinals single-season relievers all time, that K/BB ratio would rank 3rd behind 2024's Ryan Helsley and the immortal Edward Mujica.
I was kind of hoping the names on that list would be more impressive. No one is going to be too happy about comparing Romero to Mujica. But keep in mind, that's above relievers with truly fantastic seasons in Cardinals red, including Eckersley, Rosenthal, and Pat Neshek.
Romero has picked right up where he left off last year, which I, frankly, did not expect him to do. Last season, I kept waiting for Romero's wheels to fall off. They never did. I entered this season thinking he would be serviceable but likely displaced in a high-leverage role by either Thompson or Liberatore.
Nope. Romero just took the job as high-leverage lefty and made it his.
For now. I hate to throw that caveat in there, but this is a reliever we're talking about. They are volatile. Just ask Gio Gallegos.
Matthew Liberatore
Speaking of volatile relievers, there's Matthew Liberatore! The starter turned reliever turned swing man turned late-inning reliever turned whatever the Cardinals happen to need has had a pretty nice season. If you just look at his Fangraphs dashboard, there's not a whole lot that stands out. He looks like a pitcher who is benefiting from a smaller sample size but hasn't done much different from last season. Check under the hood, though, and you'll see a little bit more.
Liberatore has a 20% K rate on the season. Is that good? No, not really. But compared to his previous stints in the Majors, it's notable. Last year, Liberatore K's just 16.7% of his batters. In '22 he was at 17.4%. Improvement is improvement.
Where's that improvement coming from? The organization is finally letting him do what we've been screaming about for three years. His fastball rate is way down – under 46%. His slider rate is way up. He's throwing a cutter 20% of the time this season. He's getting pretty high whiff totals on his slider and cutter – 29.7% and 38.5%. And generating a ton more ground balls.
The cutter gives him another option against righties beyond his curveball, which hasn't been very effective so far. (I expect it to improve as the season goes on.) The slider is death to lefties. Lefties have a .000 wOBA against his slider on the season. That's the same as Goldy, Gorman, and Carlson's May statistics!
Sorry… sorry… sorry!
Anyway, it looks like the Cardinals are using Liberatore in a better way this season. Starter, reliever, whatever, I expect him to continue to be serviceable, and that's more than he's been in the past.
Nolan Arenado
I was planning to stay away from the core of the team with this post, but I really think we could use a little attitude shift toward Arenado. He hasn't taken the brunt of the criticism for this team's offensive struggles, but he's made himself into the voice of the club during those struggles. That puts him in the line of fire, so to speak. And he doesn't deserve to be there.
Don't look. Just tell me what you think Arenado's fWAR is on the season and what that would translate to for a full season.
If you said 1.2 fWAR and 4.8 fWAR, then you got it right.
Arenado is on pace for a 4.8 fWAR season, folks! That's pretty darn good! No, it's not his peak. Not even close. It's not even his highest with the Cardinals. But who wouldn't have said "Sign me up, sir" for a 4.8 fWAR season from Nolan Arenado at the beginning of the season? I would have! I still would!
The good news, from one point of view, is that a lot of that is defensive value. He has a +4 OAA so far on the season. Last year, he was a +5 for the whole year. He's on pace for +14 OAA; that's the same total he had during his MVP-contending '22 season. Arenado, elite defender, is back. That's very encouraging as he enters his mid-30s.
There might even be a little more offensive meat on the bone, too. In his career as a Cardinal, Arenado has a 122 wRC+. Overall he is at 123 in his career if you throw out his 513 PA, 77 wRC+ rookie campaign. He's sitting at 116 this season. His ISO so far is just .107. That's about .131 below his career norms. Hard not to imagine that inching up. If he slugs a little more, his wRC+ will climb. That fWAR will climb, too.
Then again… based on what we've seen so far with the offense… Sorry… sorry… sorry! Let's just leave it there for Arenado and move along.
There are some other things that I could look at. Sonny Gray blew up in a painful way on Thursday, but he's been pretty great. There are encouraging signs buried in Lars Nootbaar's stats that I think will begin to translate into good things very soon. Masyn Winn is still holding his own offensively despite still not having even 1 barreled ball on the season. His defense still looks a lot better to me than his OAA says. Kyle Gibson's Baseball Savant dashboard doesn't look like a steaming pile of death anymore.
The temptation is to end this with caveats. I could say, for example, that looking for good news is just a way to ignore the bad news! Or, perhaps, none of this means I think the club is going to rebound and climb back into playoff contention.
I won't do that though. Strike those sentences from the record. Sorry… sorry… sorry!
It's a gorgeous weekend. Enjoy yourself. And, if possible, enjoy Cardinals baseball. It's not ALL bad. Have a happy Saturday, Viva El Birdos.
