St. Louis Cardinals: I’m on Team Matt Adams

It seems like pretty much everyone has given up on St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Matt Adams. Everyone except for me.

It’s becoming a pretty routine thing.

Twitter blows up with disapproval, each and every time that Matt Adams gets a start at first base for the St. Louis Cardinals.

One Brandon Moss (who was the worst pickup in the history of baseball, according to some last year) is most definitely the man for the job. He should be playing every inning of every game, and Adams should be shipped out of town pronto, right?

Clearly, one month of game action is plenty to decide that Adams is never going to pan out, and that Moss is most certainly going to be the first Cardinal to hit 30 home runs since Carlos Beltran back in 2012.

We all look at numbers, see how Moss has the better stat line (at least for now), and assume that we know everything about that entire situation.

The reality is that we, the casual fan, know virtually nothing about Matt Adams or Brandon Moss, other than what they do in a three-hour window when their name is in the lineup.

We don’t know what kind of work they are getting done between games, who’s taking better swings, who’s working harder.

We watched Moss flounder for the majority of St. Louis’ stretch-run in 2015, apparently, because hip pain affects hand-eye coordination, and subsequently leads to lots of strikeouts.

Now that Moss has had his first decent month since what, 2014, there’s suddenly no reason to keep Adams around in any sort of capacity?

I know. Adams is severely limited by the fact that he can only play first base. But I’d argue that Adams still has the best feel for the position defensively as anyone we’ve got.

You all say that Matheny is playing favorites with Adams, and you are probably right. If his reasoning for doing so is the same as mine would be, it’s going to have a lot to do with what he did in the 2014 postseason.

I put a whole lot of emphasis of big playoff performances, maybe more than I should. But the simple fact of the matter is that Adams very well might have won that 2014 NLDS for us.

If he doesn’t hit that bomb off of Kershaw in the seventh inning of game 4, I’m not sure we come back in that ballgame. Going back to LA for Game 5, anything could of happened.

Does that alone mean that Matt Adams should have full-time first base duties? Absolutely not.

Does one decent month after three really bad ones in a Cardinal uniform mean Brandon Moss get’s all the action? No shot.

When it comes down to it, I am of the opinion that both guys are best used in favorable matchup’s. I think that both guys are going to see 400-450 at-bats, and when it’s all said and done, I truly believe that the numbers are going to be very similar for each.

Of course, if Adams is shipped out of town (as he very well may be), then all of this becomes moot.

I’m just worried that everyone is a little quick to hop on the Brandon Moss train, that everyone is awful quick to forget about his 2015 struggles, simply because he says that he’s so much healthier now.

Next: The 2016 power-packed Cardinal Offense

I’m loyal to the guy that did something very, very special for us a couple of October’s ago. You’re going to call me crazy, but I’d still turn to Adams with the game on the line before I’d turn to Moss.

But that’s just me.