St Louis Cardinals: Is Matt Carpenter coming around at the plate?

The St Louis Cardinals had no expectations for Matt Carpenter coming into the year. After an ice-cold start, he is waking up at the plate.

2021 will be the final year for Matt Carpenter under his current contract with the St Louis Cardinals. To a lot of fans, this is good news and in reality, the $18.5M the team is paying the 35-year-old could go to help the team in other areas.

However, Carpenter is here, and there is no way the Cardinals are going to get out of paying the man his money. Therefore, we might as well root for the guy.

Up until recently though, Carpenter has been a tough player to root for. After the team traded for Nolan Arenado and committed to Tommy Edman as the everyday second baseman, Carpenter had nowhere to play. Despite the lack of a position, Carpenter got plenty of playing time in the spring and at the start of the year.

After a very rough spring training, Carpenter hit a combined slash line of .152/.292/.304 in the first two months of the season. While this was two months of play, Carpenter appeared in 47 games and still sat at fewer than 100 plate appearances. Like most fans agreed, it looked like Carpenter was dead weight on a roster that needed help in the form of a better bench bat.

However, Mike Shildt and the Cardinals have stuck with the former MVP contender, and slowly Carpenter has started to come around.

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Starting with just the past month, Carpenter’s OPS is above the .800 mark. Move up to the past 14 days, and Carpenter is slashing .333/.429/.542, and in the past week, he’s up to a slash of .385/.500/.615.

His season slash line of .185/.323/.324 is still putrid, but Carpenter has been playing more with Harrison Bader on the IL, and he’s made the adjustment to be a valuable hitter for the team again. It remains to be seen if this is just a hot month, or if Carpenter can make at least some step back in the right direction after two subpar years, but during this recent time where the team has scuffled, Carpenter has had some key hits that have won the team games.

Carpenter does have a vesting option for next season, but it is nearly impossible at this point for him to get to the number of plate appearances he would need to automatically go under contract for next season. Even while Carpenter has surged recently, there have still been detractors hating on him as he helps the team.

Nobody is arguing for another extension, nobody is arguing that Carpenter is “back,” we are just acknowledging that a player is helping.

When Bader returns from the IL, it will be interesting to see how the team balances playing time for Carpenter. At the amount that Carp is playing right now and the value the team is getting from him in the spots that he is in, there should be nothing but relief that those $18.5M are not going to waste.