2-3 Cardinals in the 8th.  Can they hold on?  Take my hand, and we'll make it, I swear.

I guess.

The Cards are up 3-2 going into the bottom of the fifth. Wellemeyer aka Colonel is really struggling to throw strikes but has struggled through five innings so far. Wonder what TLR's TTTCBN combination will be tonight with a one run lead. Hopefully they can hold it. In case you haven't heard, Mitchell Boggs will be starting the game tommorrow night. Not my first choice but whatever, I'm just trying to get 75 words.

Go Cards!

Sheets	Col. Wellsie
10-3, 2.88	8-4, 4.22

It only seems like yesterday when Ben Sheets was the big hero for the US Olympic team in 2000. Now he's the big stud starter looking for a big payday at the end of the season. I was hoping to see Colby get his chance to go to Beijing and make a statement. Ah well.

Much has been said about Wellemeyer's struggles as of late. But he's shown a bit of improvement in his last couple of starts (he at least went 6+ IP both times, which, as stated in the below main post, is an underappreciated factor in bullpen effectiveness), but his strikeout and walk rates still don't seem to have gotten back to what they were before his elbow went. In his win against the Padres, he had 3 BB to 2 K, while giving up five runs.

Hopefully he's relearning his control and his focus, because he's going to need everything he's got against Ben Sheets, who seems to be making a Cy bid in his walk year. No one on the Cardinals current roster has a very spectacular history against Sheets beyond Pujols (26 for 66, 4 HR 10 RBI, 1.66 OPS), and Brendan Ryan in limited at bats.

Hopefully they can stay within reach, get some chances against that somewhat weak bullpen, and avoid the sweep. I'm still mad that we didn't get a chance against Gagné last night (who was warming in the pen when the game ended).

So, that was a lovely game to pick for my lone trip to Busch Stadium this year.  CC Sabathia certainly looked incredible last night, painting his corners and changing speeds and just looking nasty.  I know that people will complain that the Cardinals didn't make him work enough, but I just don't buy that argument.  Sabathia was just throwing strikes, and throwing them hard, and throwing them on the corners.  Taking pitches against him wold have done little but generate a bunch of 1-2 counts.  Now, they generated a bunch of 1-2 counts anyway, but at least they did it trying to put the ball in play.  As it was, when Ryan got that hit in the sixth, it felt almost like a home run in the bottom of the ninth or something.

The thing that last night makes me truly question, however, is the wisdom of having Wellemeyer and Looper back to back in the rotation.  At least after Wellsie's injury, neither one of those guys really seems able to consistently go for six innings (though Wellemeyer has a two game 6.1 IP streak going, so I guess he can prove me wrong tonight).  La Russa kind of saved the bullpen for today by riding Izzy and Jíminez for two innings a piece, but that option won't always be available, and these five inning starts are murder on the bullpen.

If you don't believe me on this, I cite the following:  Look at the top five teams in the majors in IP from the rotation, it will be the Angels, Jays, White Sox, Red Sox, and A's.  Now, look at the top five in bullpen ERA.  The answer will be the Phils, Jays, Dodgers, White Sox, and A's.  Three out of the five of the first list are present on the second list.  Same thing happens if you look at the bottom five.  Some might say that it's park effects--starters in hitters parks get into trouble, and throw fewer innings, while relievers just get shelled in hitters parks.  But I'm not completely convinced, especially since the SkyDome isn't exactly pitcher-friendly. 

Anyway, I think what I am trying to say here is that I think the best trade we can make to shore up the bullpen is a trade for a starting pitcher.  We would remove Looper and his five inning starts from the rotation, which will filter down to the entire bullpen, allowing La Russa to reduce their workload and to establish clearer roles.  I have always thought that rotation stability was the key to La Russa's surprising bullpen finds.  Perhaps this season to find out whether or not this theory is accurate.

I'd offer some insightful commentary but a) I'm at work and b) last night's game sucked what little joy I had right out of me.  I'm throwing up a clean thread for everyone to comment on.  Feel free to discuss anything relevant. 

I'm not sure if another poster is going to wander in with commentary later. . . apologies for not having a morning post today.

thanks for getting up a game thread, Mr. Redbird. . . . . . be nice if the cards could get a hit in this game. 1-0 brewers in the 5th.

Cardinals vs. Brewers

Looper vs. Sabathia

The next two games are of grave importance to the Cardinals. Even though the last couple of losses were gutwrenching, with a little luck and some solid play, we can come back and be right back where we were when this series started; in the Wild Card lead by a game. As it stands right now, we're behind the Brewers by a game in the Wild Card and the Cubs by two games for the NL Central. We need to win at least one of the next two games.

Let's Go Cardinals!!

I'm tired of writing about the bullpen. I really am. It seems sometimes that it's the only aspect of this team that I ever pay attention to. I've written about the Cardinals' pen problems over at my Rundown gig until I'm blue in the face. Wrote about it Monday. Wrote about it Tuesday. Hell, I'll probably write about it today too.

But you know what? As much of an asshole as I think Tony La Russa is a lot of the time, including during last night's postgame conference, the man absolutely had a point. When Derrick Goold of the P-D asked Tony about the bullpen problems, Tony responded with a tirade about the offense. Of course, I'm sure part of it was just to try and deflect attention from a difficult situation, but there was a lot of truth in what TLR said. If the Cards' offense had been able to put more than three lousy runs on the board against an average pitcher who was making his first start since coming off the disabled list, they probably wouldn't have found themselves in the position of relying on Kyle McClellan, or any other reliever for that matter, to try and be perfect just to keep the game tied. Come to think of it, if the bats had put some more runs on the board, we may not have seen Tony so afraid to go to the 'pen that he left Lohse out there when he was struggling because there aren't any other good options.

They started off well enough, of course. They took good at bats, they knocked a few hits around the park, and jumped out to an early lead. Then, as we've seen all too often this season, the bats simply went to sleep. The offense mustered only two hits after the third inning. Look, I love Jeff Suppan just as much as the next Cardinal fan, but he's not that guy. He's tough, but you've got to be able to get something going off of him.

I thought that maybe my impression was wrong, that the Cardinals don't just give up the ghost after about the third inning. Maybe it's just one of those things, I told myself. You're frustrated that the team seems to lose a lot of these games, and so you construct scenarios that don't really exist. So I headed over to Baseball Reference to check it out.

I wasn't just making it up.

In the first three innings, the Cardinals are an absolute juggernaut. They have an OBP of .374 and a SLG of .435. That's an OPS of over .800 for the whole team in the first three innings of the game. Not surprisingly, they've scored the bulk of their runs in innings one through three, with 185 of them coming in those frames. And to be perfectly frank, almost all of the damage has come in innings one and three. The second inning is actually one of their weakest. They've only managed to post a .723 OPS in the second this year. That's the single lowest inning OPS for the Cards. It seems a little bit random, but I think you could probably attribute it to the fact that we see the 7-9 hitters in the second inning an inordinate amount of the time. Even with the weak second, though, the Cards are fantastic in the first third of the game.

Unfortunately, once the Cards get into the fourth inning, they suddenly take a pretty significant downturn. In the middle third of the game, the Cardinals' OPS drops down almost forty points, to .772. The odd thing is that their slugging % actually goes up a couple of points; the loss is entirely in on base percentage. In innings 1-3, the Cards have drawn 148 walks this season. In innings 4-6, they've only taken 109 free passes. They've also garnered almost thirty less hits in the middle innings; 350 for 1-3 vs. 322 in 4-6. Altogether that's almost eighty less baserunners in innings 4-6 than in the first three innings.

This seems very odd to me. Ordinarily, you would expect to see hitters doing better against pitchers as the game goes on. The hitters get the benefit of having already seen the pitcher that evening; they should take better swings. In addition, the weakest part of the opponents' pitching staff is always the middle relief/ mop up type guys. When do you typically see those pitchers? Right in the middle of the game. Yet somehow the Cardinals become appreciably worse hitters in those innings. Overall, the Cards have scored only 151 runs in the middle innings.

In the late innings, it actually gets slightly worse, but that's not really all that surprising. Considering that you're likely seeing the other team's closer and setup relievers, you would expect the offensive numbers to go down in the last third of the game. (Unless, of course, you happen to be facing the Cards' bullpen, but that's a whole other issue.)

Overall, the Cards' OPS in innings 7-9 is .762, ten points lower than in the previous three innings. Again, though, when you consider the constant matchups and the calibre of pitcher you're likely facing, that's to be expected. I don't have the time to go through and look, but I would bet that pretty much every team hits worse when facing the back end of their opponents' bullpens.

What I really find puzzling is that dropoff in the middle. If the Cardinals performed in the middle innings to the same standard that they do in the first three, they would have a full three pythagorean wins on their record. I would be willing to bet it would be significantly more real wins.

Unfortunately, I don't have any idea how the team should go about fixing this issue. Why do they seem to lose patience in the middle innings? Even though they should be getting better looks at the opposing pitcher, the hitters just don't seem to have nearly as good of an approach that second and third time through the lineup. Their BABIP goes down significantly after the first three innings as well, which tells me that they aren't making the same quality of contact either. Is it simply a mental approach issue? Do these hitters let up after they put a run or two on the board? Or are they trying to do something different with their at bats, rather than just looking to get on base?

Personally, I always get irritated when I see Tony go off on a member of the media. Those guys have jobs to do, just like Tony himself does, and there's no reason for him to take his own frustrations about the team out on the scribes. When it comes down to it, Tony has it incredibly easy here. The kind of softballs he regularly enjoys here are absolutely nothing compared to the way they cover sports in New York, or Boston, or Philly, or even Chicago. But when he went on his little tirade last night, Tony had a definite point.

Where did the bats go? And for that matter, where do they go almost every night, right around the fourth inning?

Let's finish this one off! 

Go Cards!