St. Louis Cardinals Offense: Depth the Name of the Game

I’m officially declaring the St. Louis Cardinals’ offense as the deepest in all of baseball. When that unit is functioning properly, it can be a whole lot of fun to watch.

In a time in baseball when teams can become consumed by the pursuit of the superstar offensive talent, the St. Louis Cardinals, and General Manager John Mozeliak, have taken a very different approach to producing runs.

There is no bona fide offensive superstar on the Cardinal roster. Outside of Brandon Moss and Matt Holliday (who’ve combined for three 30+ HR seasons) not a man on that roster knows what it feels like to hit more than 30 round-trippers in a single season.

Only a handful of guys have turned in a .300 or better batting average at any point in their career, the old school statistical benchmark for hitting excellence.

There isn’t a single MVP award to boot (Holliday was closest with a 2nd place finish in 2007) and Holliday is the only former batting champ, when he did so in 2008.

Yet, through the first month of the season, the Cardinals are in the top five in baseball in pretty much every meaningful offensive category (minus the steals).

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They’ve done it in a true platoon fashion. The Cardinals have nine different guys with at least three home runs in the first 26 games.

Last night, the Cardinals got home runs from the 6-9 spots in their order for the first time in the history of the organization.

The Cardinals lead Major League Baseball in runs batted in, with eight guys posting double-digit figures in the first 1/6th of the season.

Really, you could argue that the Cardinals only have three “everyday” players in Yadier Molina, Matt Carpenter and Holliday.

At the same time, though, you could argue that they have a group of about 11-12 that would be full-time starters in many other places.

Tony Cruz, Mark Reynolds, Greg Garcia, Tommy Pham, and Jon Jay made up the St. Louis bench during last year’s NLDS.

This year’s bench, however you cut it, is light year’s ahead of where that group was a year ago.

Early in this 2016 season, that depth has afforded Mike Matheny the luxury of trying many different lineups. Obviously he’s going to need to refine that up a bit as the season goes on, but man does he have options each and every day.

He’s got the ability to play match ups with a group of 13 good hitters to pick from. When Jhonny Peralta and Tommy Pham make their returns, it’ll almost be overkill, as mentioned in my “roster conundrum” piece a few weeks back.

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If the starting pitching comes around like we should all expect it to, combined with the elite-level bullpen, you start looking at arguably the most complete team that baseball has to offer.

If the Cardinals find out they need to go after a starter, I think it’s safe to say that they’ll have the trade pieces, and plenty of them.