CINCINNATI — In his postgame meeting with the media late Monday night at Great American Ball Park, it did not take Cardinals starter Sonny Gray long to diagnosis what went awry in his loss.
“I’ve got to find a way to keep the ball in the ballpark,” he said.
With the first sentence of his first answer, the veteran right-hander captured both his trouble and what is missing from his teammates’ solutions.
He aims to allow fewer homers.
To solve lefties, the Cardinals need to hit more of them.
The Cincinnati Reds got all of their runs in a 6-1 victory on three home runs off Gray. Spencer Steer hit two, including a three-run shot in the fifth inning that doubled the Reds’ scoring, on his way to five RBIs. Gray allowed the same amount of hits as the Reds starter, lefty Andrew Abbott, but the game hinged around how efficient each team was with its offense. The Reds got six runs of three swings, while it took the Cardinals three base runners to score one run, and they failed to produce any more despite having seven base runners by the end of the third.
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“If you look at it, I have given up the three-run homer a lot more than I’m used to doing,” said Gray (11-7). “I’ve just got to find a way to keep the ball in the ballpark. Everything else is fine. I’m giving up the big homer it feels like on a semi-consistent basis.”
For contrast, the Cardinals are not getting that vs. lefties on a regular basis.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the team that hit three homers galloped past the team that did not hit one. So let’s dive in on the power of hitting ’em out.
I. Homers (against)
This season, Gray has allowed 17 home runs in 130⅓ innings. It’s already the most homers he’s allowed in a summer since he spent 2021 with the Reds and allowed 19 in 135⅓. Part of it is the ballpark. One of the coziest stadiums in the industry, Great American Ball Park can sometimes play like a pinball game — and Gray dealt with it as a Red. He spent three seasons with Cincinnati (and pondered a return there this past winter), and at the Reds’ riverside park, he has allowed 29 homers in 199⅓ innings. For contrast, he’s allowed a total of six in 106⅓ innings at Busch Stadium — and only three this season.
The spike in homers allowed comes at the same time he’s been as good as ever with some other defining statistics for a pitcher.
His walk rate of 2.1 per nine innings pitched is the lowest of his career. He entered Monday’s start averaging 11 strikeouts per nine innings, which is the second-highest of his career. Both of those are better than last year’s numbers, when he finished as runner-up for the American League Cy Young Award. His K/9 in 2023 was 9.0, and this year’s 11.0 was before he went and struck out five of the first six batters he faced Monday and seven of the first nine.
By the end of the third inning, Gray had 13 swings and misses on his way to 16 for the game, and he got at least one with seven different pitches.
Also by the end of the third inning, he was trailing 3-1.
On back-to-back pitches in the third, he allowed a two-run home run to Speer and a solo homer to Elly De La Cruz. Speer connected on a sinker that was supposed to be up and in and hard to drive, and De La Cruz hit a four-seam fastball buzzing in on his hands.
“Those were fine,” Gray said. “To be honest with you, those were exactly what I was trying to do on both of those pitches. Wanted to get the ball to Elly’s hands. He swung at an 0-0 ball and got it. The same thing with Steer. We went cutter away and then we ... got to the top (with a sinker), where I wanted to throw it. I don’t know if it’s something else I need to look at it. To be honest with you, I was fine with both of those pitches. The one in the fifth was just a challenge-type situation. Maybe wrong pitch to double up there.”
Speer’s three-run homer came on a four-seam fastball.
It came at the end of an at-bat disrupted by a pitch-clock violation, a frustrating ball call and an ejection. Speer got ahead 1-0 on an automatic ball levied against Gray for not throwing before the timer ran out. Gray followed with a curveball that kissed the lower edge of the strike zone. Umpire Stu Scheurwater did not give Gray that pitch or many pitches low in the zone.
Catcher Pedro Pages slammed his mitt into the dirt. (Pages later apologized to the ump for that display.) The Cardinals dugout chimed in with some thoughts on the strike zone — and manager Oliver Marmol was thrown out.
After a delay so that Marmol could elaborate on his critique and offer some demonstrations of where his opinion differed, Gray resumed his duel with Steer.
The next three pitches were all four-seam fastballs.
The third traveled 390 feet to make the game a rout.
“His stuff was there all game,” Pages said. “It was just more of they actually started looking for pitches. Have to go back and look if the sequences weren’t right. They got to pitches that he normally succeeds with. The sinker up and in, he doesn’t usually give anything on that. It was really good swings on good pitches. His stuff was there.”
Gray became the first Cardinals starter since at least 1901 to have 162 strikeouts in his first 22 appearances as a Cardinal. He’s one of only five Cardinals pitchers to have any 22-game stretch with that many strikeouts. Two of them are in the Hall of Fame — Bob Gibson and Steve Carlton — and a third won a Cy Young Award (Chris Carpenter). The fourth to do it, Jack Flaherty, had 166 strikeouts during his brilliant second half in 2019.
Yet within that same 22-start stretch, another true outcome has complicated Gray’s outings. He came one homer shy of tying a personal worst for home runs allowed, and that personal worst was set just a few weeks ago with four homers by the Braves off him in a Cardinals win. Of the 65 runs he’s allowed this season, 27 have come on home runs. Seven of the home runs he’s allowed have come with runners on base.
Two of them did Monday.
“I don’t think it’s just been here,” Gray said of Great American Ball Park. “It’s been something that has been happening to me a little bit more.”
II. Homers (for)
During one 10-batter stretch against Abbott (10-9), the Cardinals got seven runners on base. They had six plate appearances with runners in scoring position, two with the bases loaded. Any assortment of extra-base hits, let alone a home run, would have upended Abbott’s star before any of that homer trouble Gray encountered.
The Cardinals just didn’t.
The only extra-base hit off Abbott was Paul Goldschmidt’s one-out double in the second that started a bases-loaded opportunity rather than finish it or exploit it.
This season, the Cardinals are batting .232 against lefties with a .652 on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS). Their troubles generating production against left-handed pitching was driving force behind acquiring Tommy Pham at the deadline and even promoting Jordan Walker on Monday to rejoin the team from Class AAA Memphis. They wanted to add more right-handed hitters to the lineup in hopes of doing more damage from either side of the plate against lefties.
The Cardinals got five hits off Abbott to increase their batting average against lefties, but that’s not the issue.
It’s the slug, as they say.
The Cardinals have the fourth-lowest slugging percentage against lefties in the majors (.356). Only the Marlins, the White Sox and the Nationals have a lower slugging percentage — and not one of them is within 10 games of .500. The Cardinals have the fourth-most at-bats in the majors against lefties this season, and they have the fourth-fewest home runs against lefties.
Put more individually: The Cardinals’ leading homer hitter against lefties this season is rookie Masyn Winn, who has nearly twice as many homers off lefties as any of his teammates.
How that lack of damage limits then against lefties was on display Monday night. The Cardinals scored a run against Abbott with an RBI single. The next hit was another single, but it did not push a run home. The Cardinals took a series of hits to produce a single run — like a circuit relying on three switches to break just right vs. one stroke of lightning to power the whole place.
It’s a labor-intensive way to go about scoring with limited probabilities. The more hits needed to produce a run, the less likely that run becomes.
It’s just as Gray quickly described following the loss, the Cardinals’ seventh in their past 11 games.
The right-hander was asked if it’s the runners on base ahead of the homers that has his attention as he plunges back into the lab to scrutinize adjustments. He shook his head.
“I think,” Gray said, “it’s the home run itself.”
On both sides of the game, that’s the difference.