St. Louis Cardinals: Stop penciling in Matt Carpenter

Eighteen games in, the St. Louis Cardinals infielder just does not have it early season. It’s time for him to ride some pine.

They say the definition of insanity is completing the same activity over and over again expecting a different result. This directly applies to St. Louis Cardinals manager Mike Shildt putting Matt Carpenter in the lineup. We saw how ice-cold Carpenter’s bat was during spring training. Now we are seeing him take at-bats looking like a shell of his 2013-self.

I hate this.

I really hate this because of how valuable Matt Carpenter has been to this organization his whole career and how valuable of a teammate he’s been his whole. You can make the case he’s a Cardinals Hall of Famer to be quite honest.

But at this very moment, as the Cardinals sit dead-last in the National League Central, and Matt Carpenter has a slash line of .081/.250/.369. Folks, this is as bad as it could get.

Mike Shildt can try to throw out all of the exit velocity numbers and the expected batting average all he wants, but it doesn’t amount to actual productivity.

I don’t doubt how hard Matt Carpenter is working, and he is hitting the ball hard. I do doubt whether or not he’s going to remain a member of the 2021 Cardinals team for the rest of the season. It’s hard to comprehend how someone with an .081 batting average is in the 5th slot of a team desperate for offensive production.

Yesterday, Bernie Miklasz wrote a blog piece echoing the frustration Cardinals fans are experiencing with Carpenter’s performance this season. From Miklasz:

"Carpenter has 22 plate appearances in  the No. 5 spot in Shildt’s lineup, the most there by a Cardinal. And not counting Carpenter’s pinch-hitting assignments, he has only 14 plate appearances elsewhere in the lineup. Three PA batting second, four batting sixth, and seven batting seventh.When Carpenter is slotted at 5th in the lineup, he’s 1 for 19 (.053) with the hit resulting in a three-run homer. The home run was sweet, but it’s only one swing for a drive that clanked the foul pole in right. Carpenter has also struck out 32% of the time when batting fifth."

Mike Shildt cannot continue to bat Matt Carpenter in the every-day lineup. Carpenter may rank in the top percentiles in hard-hit and barrel percentage, but he’s not even close getting on-base at a below-average level according to FanGraphs. Even other advanced analytics show how bad he has struggled in 2021.

At a -0.3 fWAR, he cannot be in the lineup.