LOS ANGELES — Seated near his locker and about to head home, Nolan Arenado had changed out of his Cardinals jersey but still wore the same thing as his teammates — the uniform frustration of the club’s 10-game journey to the bottom.
With one RBI, no extra-base hits on the trip and a swing that, like his team, is unable to find any sync of semblance of what it wants to be, Arenado felt like he traveled a long way just to end up in the center of the Cardinals’ fog, personally shouldering the struggles, but unsure if he’s the person to offer solutions.
He sounded as road weary as the team looked.
“It’s hard to speak on what we need to do when I feel like I’m not playing my part the way I should,†said Arenado, whose batting average sank from .293 to .239 on the trip. “A lot of that falls on me. I’ve just been poor and have been really poor thus far. I think it’s just a mixture of things. Like when things are going bad, every little mistake we make — it haunts us. And we’re playing not to make a mistake, instead of playing freely.â€
People are also reading…
Swept by the Dodgers over the weekend, the Cardinals finished their long and winding road to a dour place in the standings they have not been this early in a season since 1907, the year they had a pitcher named Stoney lose 25 games and an infielder named Pug bat .222.
Ten games out of first place at the end of April, the Cardinals went 2-8 on the trip. They lost — to riff on Arenado’s description — in frighteningly familiar and varied ways. Errors doomed them one day, pitching the next, and a creeping lack of offense left other flaws exposed during their unscheduled rapid disassembly.
The Cardinals return to the Busch Stadium and try to put themselves back together during a six-game homestand that starts Tuesday night against the Angels. At 10-19, they’ve traveled all this way to show they’re nowhere near the team they promised to be.
They know where the schedule takes them.
But where do they go from here?
“The road trip is pretty self explanatory,†Cardinals first baseman Paul Goldschmidt said. “Not good. We haven’t played well on a daily basis.â€
“We didn’t play well. That’s basically it,†Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol echoed. “There’s enough talking in circles about it. We need to play better and we need to win. That’s the bottom line. I could give you three to five different things, but at the end of the day, we need to put more in the win column. That’s it.â€
Rugged road
When taking a peek at the schedule during spring training, a few members of the club privately identified two potential breakpoints, where their roster and their record would be taxed in ways that could define the season. One looms in late June on a trip that takes them to New York, Washington, and for a weekend in London before jetting home — and here’s the challenge — for one off day before facing the defending World Series champion Houston Astros and then the Yankees. The other was this trip, their longest along the Pacific Coast Highway since 1995. At 2-8, it’s also now their worst-ever trip of 10 or more games out west.
The misadventure took them from the Space Needle to the bottom of a former ravine. It began with fashionable flannel weather in Seattle and ended under Ray-Ban sunny skies near Hollywood, and not once did the Cardinals heat up.
They return home a changed team, but no better for it.
Along the way, the Cardinals regained former All-Star shortstop Paul DeJong and had him hit his way into more starts than planned. They also demoted super prospect Jordan Walker to Class AAA Memphis so that he could upgrade his swing and they could streamline their outfield choices in hopes one or two would turn assured playing time into a catapult of production. They’ll hope some more at home.
During the Cardinals’ doldrums at Dodger Stadium, LA reliever and former Cardinals’ starter Shelby Miller chatted with a reporter about the dovetailing starts of two aspiring playoff contenders. Friday night’s game was a slog, hardly a showcase for two teams who thought they were more. The Dodgers only recently surfaced above .500, pushing the Cardinals down to appear taller. The reporter pointed to the Cardinals taking infield — second-year players Brendon Donovan and Nolan Gorman, and rookie Alec Burleson — and mentioned how this was all new to them. There is a wide stretch of the roster raised on the lore of Cardinals’ contention that never has passed through this part of the standings and needs a guide out.
Marmol mentioned the same factor Sunday morning.
“That is the big leagues — guys who can bounce back from things not going their way, and we have a lot of guys experiencing that for the first time,†the Cardinals’ second-year manager said. “Are we excited about our club leaving spring training? Hell yeah. No doubt about it. But we’re excited about the (Lars) Nootbaar in his second year, the (Dylan) Carlson getting an opportunity, Gorman in a second year, Donovan in a second year, the Jordan Walker in his first year. So there is excitement. The answer is yes. Are we going to experience setbacks of guys realizing what this league is about? The answer is also yes.
“The problem,†Marmol concluded, “is it’s just experiencing it all at the same time. ... Which is the frustrating part for everybody.â€
Los Angeles scores one run with a hit, gets eight walks from the Cardinals for a 6-3 victory. Cardinals go homerless in LA for first time since 1996.
Double trouble
So much of the Cardinals’ issues to start the season stem from pitching, but also the offense, and don’t discount the defense. The Cardinals left ºüÀêÊÓƵ 12 days ago with only two quality starts from the rotation, both by Jordan Montgomery.
They return having tripled that total and the number of pitchers who authored them. But they’ve lost three of those six quality starts, and all three losses were shutouts. Two came on the road. The Cardinals have not had that dominant, take-control-of-things start like Clayton Kershaw gave the Dodgers on Saturday with his seven-shutout, two-hit innings. Montgomery was strong that game. Kershaw was better.
The Cardinals did not hit a home run and scored six runs total in three games at Dodger Stadium They finished the trip averaging 3.2 runs per game. They played the most scheduled games in the past 10 days and scored the fourth-fewest runs in the majors.
They had more strikeouts (80) than hits (79) and as many walks (24) as extra-base hits (24), and they slugged .363.
They were wonderful guests.
Rarely made a racket.
Five stars.
A misplaced compass
The Cardinals’ issues go deeper than the one-star move offseason catching up with them on the road. They’ve misplaced their compass; their fundamentals are faulty.
In the three series on the road, opponents stole 13 bases against the Cardinals without being caught. The Cardinals have committed 14 errors in their past 20 games, and errors led directly to losses in San Francisco, once undermining a lead provided by two Goldschmidt home runs. In the 6-3 loss to the Dodgers on Sunday, the Cardinals gave away the lead with six walks in a two-inning span. LA had only two hits total in the fourth and fifth innings yet sent 14 batters to the plate and chased starter Jake Woodford from the game.
Of the six runs LA scored, only one came on a hit. Three scored on groundouts, one on a sacrifice fly, and the other on a wild pitch — the Cardinals’ NL-leading 15th wild pitch.
“That team is a good example, right?†Arenado said Sunday afternoon about the Dodgers. “They work at-bats. They have Woody throwing — what? — 80 pitches in like four innings. That is what we have to do. I feel when we’re right, that’s what we do. We’re working at-bats. We’re making pitchers work. We’re doing a good job of that. Right now, it feels like we’re not doing that as an offense. And defensively, we’re not playing as clean of baseball as we’re known.â€
Most of the Cardinals flew back to ºüÀêÊÓƵ on the team charter Sunday night for a day off Monday. Marmol called it a chance to “reset,†get away, and “come ready to play.â€
Arenado had similar plans, driving to his Orange County, California, home to enjoy a day with his family and try to leave behind a 5-for-38 trip and .132/.132/.132 slash line in the Cardinals’ past 10 games. He welcomed the break from the runaway trip. Arenado described a “disconnect in my swing†and the difficulty he’s had lining everything up. He’s trying to get all of his ability to come together, work in the same direction, and take off.
Sounds a lot like the team he’s on.
“We’re better than we put out there, but we’ve got a lot of work to do,†Arenado said. “Just to sit here and say that I think we’re a good team — we have a long ways to go. That’s how I see it.â€
A World Series winner as a player and the big, booming voice of summer as a broadcaster, ºüÀêÊÓƵ native spent more than 50 years as a champion of Cardinals and baseball.