St. Louis Cardinals: It’s not time to full-on freak out…yet

It was clearly a rough weekend for the St. Louis Cardinals against the Milwaukee Brewers. While ground was lost, it’s not time to freak out yet.

Weeks like the one the St. Louis Cardinals just had can make fans boil with rage and forget a lot of how the team has done for the past month and a half. After winning or splitting nine straight series, the Cardinals now have lost two straight to the Colorado Rockies and the Milwaukee Brewers.

Sadly, this stretch has resulted in the Cardinals falling from a 4.5 game lead in the NL Central down to just a two game lead as of writing. The Cubs have gotten hot again winning four straight and the Brewers, with one swing by Ryan Braun, made the weekend a lot less fun for nervous fans.

All this being said, it is not time to freak out yet. Not even close.

If you read the receipt on when this was tweeted by my friend and contributor to Redbird Rants, Josh Magee, it was directly after the Cardinals lost the game yesterday. It may have been in jest, but there were plenty other reactions similar to this one.

A loss like the one yesterday stings extra bad for sure and it very well could be called the worse loss of the season. Battling back multiple times and getting a lead only to give up a grand slam with one strike to go is never fun, especially against the division rivals in mid-September.

A downturn was due to come eventually. No team can win forever and after nine straight series wins or ties, two straight series losses, especially when the game yesterday was easily winnable, is nothing to worry about.

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It’s concerning that the team is getting their lead chipped away in the Central, but they still have a 2.0 game cushion and have plenty of chances to grow the lead with seven games against the Cubs coming up.

The schedule doesn’t get any easier with the Nationals coming into town on Monday for a three game set before the team travels to Chicago, but it’s not time to grab the pitchforks yet or to be sad. The team will bounce back. A team with a pitching staff like the Cardinals won’t collapse.

The season is still 100% in their hands. If the team was down in the division standings, they would require other teams to lose for a chance to win the division. With the 2.0 game lead with two weeks left, the division is clearly going to come down the wire but the Cardinals are in the best spot of any in the race!

It certainly doesn’t feel like it after the past six games, but if the Cardinals take care of their own business, nothing else matters. Focus on the games ahead and where the team currently is. It’s fair to call me out for phony positive talk sure, but if you had asked fans if the team would be up 2.0 games in the central with two weeks left to go back on June 30th, would anyone be mad?

The Brewers are playing out of their minds right now but eventually they will realize they no longer have Christian Yelich. The Cubs just lost Javier Baez and even though recent call up Nico Hoerner is lighting the world on fire, he’s a rookie in a stiff playoff run. That’s a lot of pressure for a rookie.

The Cardinals may very well collapse like they did last year in which case grab all the pitchforks and I’ll join you outside of John Mozeliak’s office. Nevertheless, as a team who’s strengths are pitching and defense, those tools rarely slump like bats can.

Nobody thought this would be easy and from a long way out, fans and the team could tell that the division would likely come down to the last 10 games which is holding true. The Cardinals are in the best spot of any team in the Central and their future is in their own hands. Don’t freak out yet.