St. Louis Cardinals outfielders’ performance: 2022 is 2020

Hitters all around baseball are scuffling.  Sure, not everyone, but when the league as a whole has a .232 batting average, you know hitters are suffering.  Warmer weather should help the ball carry, and you never know what Major League Baseball may do to the baseballs at any given time.

For the Cardinals, they need their outfielders to step up.  After a few years in the wilderness, with St. Louis mixing and matching unsuccessfully to find a trio that worked, the 2021 campaign offered not just promise but strong results in left, center, and right fields.

The 2022 season has seen that promise unfulfilled thus far.  Among their staring outfielders, only Bader has a batting average above that low .232 standard, and he’s also the only one of the three to have an on-base percentage over .300.  None of them has a slugging percentage above .350.

Overall, their results to date are even worse than 2020’s poor numbers.  Unless and until things turn around, the Cardinals’ upstart outfield is living more on last year’s performances and the promise of improvement.  Sooner or later, the results need to catch up with the hope the team and its fans have placed in them.