Cardinals: What it will take for Wainwright, Molina to break MLB record

What will it take for St. Louis Cardinals players Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina to break the MLB record for battery mates?

The Major League Baseball lockout has delayed spring training and is on the verge of impacting the start of the regular season. For the St. Louis Cardinals, that means it delays and lessens the time that new manager Oli Marmol will be able to work with his players.

It also jeopardizes the chance of Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright breaking the record for battery mates. The two are currently 19 games shy of breaking the current record, held by the Detroit Tigers’ Mickey Lolich and Bill Freehan, and it’s part of why both Molina and Wainwright have decided to play one more season in MLB.

So what will it take for both players to break the record? They need 20 starts to surpass the record, so they will need to stay healthy. They will also need roughly a 104-game season, as Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch points out, and that’s on minimum rest for two players who are at, or near, the age of 40.

But it’s something that both players are passionate about, with Wainwright recently telling the Belleville News-Democrat: “We need a full season,” Wainwright said. “As long as we stay healthy, there’s no reason we can’t play to break that record and set our own record that I really feel like will never ever get broken ever again. We have some cool things this year, but we need a full season, you know?”

For now, it would be an upset if Molina and Wainwright did not break the record. While there is a threat of missing some regular season games, we’re not at the point where missing 60ish games is a realistic outcome. But a shortened regular season puts increased pressure on both players to stay healthy, though they both were able to do so in 2021.

But if the season is shortened to the point where they can’t break the record, or if one of them doesn’t stay healthy, is there a possibility that they return for 2023 to break it? It’s too early to say. But it’s clearly important to both players that they break the record, so nothing should be ruled out.