Cardinals carry responsibility for the deterioration of once-prized asset

Injuries are just a part of baseball. And sometimes, certain players just struggle with more ailments than others. We all respect when players are able to push through the pain and get back on the field, but there's also a line where the player's decreased performance and the potential of new health issues are just not worth the risk.

Lars Nootbaar is the latest example of that for the St. Louis Cardinals, and recent quotes by the club's outfielder suggest that the organization has allowed him to play through pain caused by the heel issues that he finally had operated on this past offseason.

Upon arriving in Jupiter, Flordia a bit after the rest of the team due to ongoing recovery back in California, Nootbaar detailed to reporters the chronic pain he had been dealing with for years, which he said caused his athleticism to dip, and he even had difficulty walking up stairs over those years. Nootbaar did not direct any of the blame toward the Cardinals and even spoke about how he just thought it was pain that everyone pushes through, but let's be honest, someone should have picked up on how this was not a normal issue for a Major Leaguer in their mid-20s to be dealing with.

Whether or not Nootbaar truly understood how serious the issue was, the Cardinals should have picked up on that, and addressing his pain earlier in his career may have yielded better results, and frankly, better overall health, from one of the Cardinals' most prized assets during that stretch.

Nootbaar himself even seemed to acknowledge that this nagging injury both hurt his on-field performance and likely contributed to other injuries over the last few seasons in St. Louis.

Lars Nootbaar's heel issues hurt his performance and helped lead to other injuries over the last few seasons with the Cardinals

Not only did Nootbaar speak to how his athletic performance was hindered by the issues he was experiencing, but he even drew a line toward the other injuries he has experienced and how compensating for the heel issues may have led to these other injuries that caused him to miss time or drop in performance.

“I think a lot of the other nicks and bruises that I’ve had were due to this and compensating,” Nootbaar told reporters down in Jupiter. “I’m looking forward to getting fully healthy and getting back out there.”

This isn't even the first example of a foot injury causing a prized Cardinals player to fall off in performance and experience another injury due to compensation. Last year, Brendan Donovan was one of the best hitters in baseball to start the year, but after experiencing turf toe, he continued to play through the ailment until a groin issue developed that he believed was caused by compensating for the toe issue he was playing through.

Donovan's production dropped off big time while playing through the injury, and had the Cardinals just shut him down and gotten him healthy originally, he could have gotten back to hitting like he was to start the year and not had that groin issue pop up. Donovan wanted to keep playing, but this is where the difficult line of an organization needing to step in and protect a player from themselves matters a lot.

While some of that front office and training staff still remain in place, it isn't fair to attribute those mistakes or issues to Chaim Bloom and any of the new regime, so we'll see how they handle injuries moving forward. It's impossible to know how things would have panned out had they addressed this issue earlier, but I think it's fair to say the process needs reevaluation.