St. Louis Cardinals: FanGraphs projects small improvement for 2021

The 2020 St. Louis Cardinals made the playoffs but underperformed offensively. For 2021, FanGraphs projects an improvement.

A contentious issue already this offseason has already been what exactly the St. Louis Cardinals are going to do to increase their performance on the field. Sure, the pitching and defense is above average, but the lack of offense can’t remain as it is.

Right now, the team has cast off three integral chips of the past decade into the free-agent market. Kolten Wong, Yadier Molina, and Adam Wainwright have all defined the past decade of Cardinals baseball. Right now, it isn’t looking great as far as the odds go for resigning the three, but that can change in a heartbeat.

For most fans, the Cardinals are not the same team without these three in the lineup. While you would be technically right, that doesn’t mean that the team is a worse team without them here.

Every year, FanGraphs does their own ZiPS projections at the beginning of the season. This year, they were spot on when predicting the Cardinals and their 30 total wins. There is rarely a time when ZiPS is proven completely wrong.

It would be sad to have a Cardinals team without Wong, Yadi, and Waino, but as the team is right now, the projections show a slight improvement for 2021.

The projections here are based solely on who the Cardinals have under contract for 2021 right now and are not the official ZiPS projections yet. This excludes the resigning of any of the current free agents and without any trades or other improvements.

By the picture above, the Cardinals are the 9th-best team in the MLB. When you look at 2020, the Cardinals generated 25.5 total fWAR with defense, offense, and pitching.

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When looking at these positional projections from FanGraphs, the Cardinals do project improvement in a few areas. At catcher, FanGraphs projects that Andrew Knizner, if receiving about 450 at-bats, should put up a 1.1 fWAR. If you get that from him, that is a definite improvement over what the team would get from Molina in terms of pure fWAR value.

In left field, FanGraphs projects a 1.3 fWAR from Dylan Carlson. This comes with a .749 OPS from Carlson, a mark you can’t be angry with for a 22-year-old in his first full season.

For Harrison Bader in center field, FanGraphs projects another strong defensive season. FanGraphs isn’t buying the offensive gains we saw from Bader in 2020, projecting his .337 wOBA in 2020 to drop back down to .310. A projected 2.0 fWAR would be about par for Bader’s career.

Outside of that, there is not much more to see. Despite small improvements, these projections are not exactly anything to get super excited about.

A small improvement in some areas of the diamond makes sense as the schedule and small sample from 2020 surely skewed the data. However, at the end of the day, this speaks to the issues with the Cardinals overall. It isn’t a projection issue, it is a personnel issue.

Thankfully, the offseason is still extremely young. There are plenty of things the Cardinals can do to improve without adding on more salary. Unsurprisingly, FanGraphs’ projections have the Cardinals finishing third in the NL Central in fWAR.

Despite this unoptimistic view on the 2021 season, the Cardinals have the pieces and the chance to change that projection before it becomes a reality.