A National League team that won its division last year before losing to the Giants in the playoffs was touted in this year’s preseason as the best team in baseball. Barring injury, this team had no glaring weaknesses, the thinking went, and it could have an all-time great pitching staff. Some analysts predicted that this team would become the first since the 2011 Phillies—themselves no stranger to an all-time great pitching staff—to win 100 games.
But all those prognosticators had their eyes on the wrong team. The consensus favorite Nationals struggled out of the gate and were in second place in the woeful NL East as recently as June 19, while the Cardinals gained possession of first in their division eight games into the season and have held that position ever since.
Even despite scuffling to a losing record thus far in July, the Cardinals still lead all of baseball with a 56-31 record, 4.5 games ahead of second place. That record translates to a 104-58 mark over a full season; no team has won that many games over the last decade.
The record isn’t a fluke, as St. Louis holds the best run differential (+93) of any team, and the Cardinals have a winning record against every other NL contender. They haven’t been lacking for individual accolades, either: the team will send six representatives to this week’s All-Star game, the most outside vote-happy Kansas City.
Despite the Cardinals’ on-field success, they haven’t found the 2015 season an easy ride off the diamond, from the FBI’s database to the training room.
Incompetent hacking aside, injuries have played a more prominent role in shaping the roster. Trips to the disabled list have depleted the Cardinals’ offense (more on that later), but the most worrisome injury came to Adam Wainwright, who ruptured his Achilles while running to first base, sparking a week of fierce debate about pitchers batting and depriving the Cardinals of a traditional ace.
But St. Louis has responded with an ace-by-committee approach: Carlos Martinez, Michael Wacha, Lance Lynn, and John Lackey each rank in the top 16 in ERA in the NL, and Jaime Garcia, Wainwright’s replacement, would be second in the league had he enough innings to qualify.
Last weekend, facing a season-long losing streak, the Cardinals spun a quartet of stellar starts: Wacha, Martinez, Lynn, and Lackey combined to allow just three runs over 27 2/3 innings and help St. Louis suspend its slide.
As a team, the Cardinals have a 2.66 ERA, which outpaces the rest of the league by so much that the third-place team (the Mets) is as close to 14th place as it is to the Cardinals. More impressively, 2.66 is the lowest team ERA in the wild-card era, and you have to go back to 1972 to find a better one—and that year’s run output was so low that the American League installed the designated hitter the next season in response.
One more historical nugget: the Cardinals’ team ERA is 28% better than the league average, which over a full season would be the best mark since the Cubs were World Series champs.
Such a performance couldn’t have been expected even from the super-staff assembled by the Nationals, and with Wainwright succumbing to injury and Shelby Miller, traded for Jayson Heyward in the offseason, pitching brilliantly for Atlanta, it’s astonishing that St. Louis’s pitching hasn’t been talked about more.
So let’s talk about it.
Three Cardinals pitchers are All-Stars this year. From the bullpen comes Trevor Rosenthal with a microscopic 0.67 ERA and 26 saves in 27 chances. St. Louis is undefeated this year when leading after eight innings.
And from the starting rotation come Michael Wacha and Carlos Martinez, who combined will make less money than the Mets paid Bobby Bonilla in deferred payments this year.
In particular, Martinez—last seen shutting out the Pirates in 7 1/3 innings in a key division battle—has been a breakout star, and he was rightly recognized in winning the fan vote for the final All-Star spot (“final” being a misnomer, of course, because between injury replacements and replacements for pitchers starting on Sunday, at least a few more NL hurlers will get the call in Tuesday’s game).
Martinez shuttled between the starting rotation and bullpen last year, and he displayed the kind of wildness and inconsistency consistent with the careers of other such pitchers attempting to transition from bullpen phenom to solid starter. Martinez could have been another Neftali Feliz or Joba Chamberlain, both of whom were designated for assignment this month, or even a Daniel Bard, the erstwhile Red Sox setup man whose career completely disintegrated after moving to the rotation.
(It’s not particularly relevant for the purposes of this column, but the results from Bard’s last two professional stints so boggle the mind that they warrant mentioning. The good news: in the 2013 Puerto Rican Winter League and Class-A ball in 2014, Bard had seven appearances without giving up a hit. The bad: he tallied just three outs across those seven appearances and allowed 20 earned runs, with 18 walks, 10 hits by pitch, and four wild pitches besmirching his stat line.)
And Martinez’s early 2015 results were plagued by that same inconsistency, with high walk and line drive rates contributing to a 4.85 ERA and .807 opposing OPS. The low point came in early May, when he was battered for seven runs each in outings against the Cubs and Pirates.
But over his last 10 starts, Martinez has flourished, throwing six-plus innings in each start and allowing zero or one earned run eight times. Over that span, his ERA is a Bob Gibson-esque 1.20 and his allowed OPS just .568, thanks to improved control and a host of opposing line drives being replaced with harmless ground balls.
The devotion to inducing ground balls is a staff-wide feature as the Cardinals rank fourth in the percentage of ground balls allowed. Keeping the ball down has helped St. Louis keep it in the park, as well; only the Pirates (first in ground ball rate) have allowed fewer home runs. And with St. Louis rating as the best defensive team in the NL, keeping the ball in the park corresponds with more outs—and more help for the pitching staff.
At this point when writing any story about the Cardinals, it would be about the time to claim that the organization’s stability and seemingly magical ability to produce stars up and down the minor-league system were playing a key role in the team’s success, and it’s worth wondering whether Martinez would have had a smooth bullpen-to-rotation transition elsewhere.
But in Martinez’s case, the success is probably less cerebral. Instead, the young pitcher has managed to accomplish what Chamberlain et al. never did: he has found a third pitch to pair with the fastball-slider combination that was sufficient in his relief role.
Before this year, Martinez had thrown a fastball or slider on more than 90% of his pitches, but he has since added one of the game’s best changeups to his repertoire. His usage of the off-speed offering has doubled in 2015, and to great effect.
Batters whiff at his changeup more than 40% of the time—the second-best mark for any pitcher—and when they do make contact, they don’t fare much better: opposing hitters have managed a meager .120 batting average against Martinez’s change.
He has also been the best pitcher in the National League with runners in scoring position, holding opposing hitters to a .120/.213/.146 slash line—numbers slightly worse than Martinez’s own batting line. That stinginess has led to an 85.8% strand rate, the second best in the league.
But Martinez is just the most extreme of an already-extreme pitching staff. The Cardinals leave 80.9% of opposing runners on base; no team has ever reached the 80% benchmark over a full season.
When pitching with the bases empty, Cardinals pitchers are actually below average, allowing opposing hitters a .260/.313/.391 slash line, but once a runner reaches base, they become historically stingy. With men on base, opposing hitters have hit just .206/.282/.305, which is by far the best mark of any team since at least 2001 (as far back as Fangraphs’s men-on-base split is searchable).
For some perspective, the numbers that Cardinals pitchers allow with nobody on resemble Pablo Sandoval’s; with men on base, St. Louis turns opposing hitters into the equivalent of Casey McGehee. Ask a Giants fan about the stark trade-off there.
Any time a team is “on pace” for so many records—especially ones involving inordinate success with runners on base—it’s subject to some skepticism; St. Louis’s extreme pitching splits aren’t necessarily any more sustainable than was the team’s all-time RISP hitting binge in 2013, which propelled the team all the way to the World Series before drying up against Boston.
But just 16 of the Cardinals’ 75 remaining games come against the top five offensive teams in the NL, and St. Louis ends the season with 29 consecutive contests against teams outside the top five. There’s a chance, albeit a slim one, that the team is able to maintain its current level of historical success.
Which is good news for the Cardinals, because the team’s pitching has been necessary to mask—and make up for—a sputtering offense. St. Louis ranks just eighth in the NL in runs per game, Jhonny Peralta is the only Cardinal with double-digit home runs, and nobody on the team has yet reached 10 stolen bases.
Heyward hasn’t hit any better or more consistently than he did in Atlanta. Jon Jay didn’t hit at all before going on the disabled list. The trio of Matts supposed to anchor the lineup have been absent of late, with Holliday and Adams suffering injuries—the latter forcing the hacking Mark Reynolds into an everyday role.
The third Matt, Carpenter, was crushing the ball for the first month of the season, to the tune of a .333/.403/.620 slash line. Since resting four games for exhaustion in early May, though, he’s at least been getting rest by not having to run around the bases: compared to that first month, his batting average since returning to the lineup is 100 points lower, his strikeout rate has ballooned, and he has fewer extra base hits in the last two months than he did just in April.
In the playoffs, the Cardinals will likely face some combination of the Kershaw-Greinke duo, an underrated trio from the NL Central (either Pirates or Cubs), and whatever potent quartet the Nationals string together from their stable of great arms. Despite their regular-season accolades in 2015, St. Louis’s pitchers may very well be the underdogs in any one of those matchups.
But it’s hard to lose games when you don’t give up runs, and the Cardinals, through slightly more than half the season, have allowed runs at a lower rate relative to the league average than any team in the last century. If the old maxim is accurate and defense and pitching do indeed win championships, St. Louis is well suited to add title number 12 to its trophy case.