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Excuses, myths, and real reasons for the Cardinals' awful season
Excuses
The first excuse is injuries. - They lost Wainwright, Nootbaar, Helsley, O’Neill, and others for various amounts of time. With no consistency, it’s very hard to have a winning season right? Well, the Dodgers have lost more games to injuries than any other club and they are in first place. According to Spotrac, the Blue Jays, Orioles, and Guardians are the only MLB teams to lose fewer games to injury than the St. Louis Cardinals.
The umpires don’t like the Cardinals. - We’ve seen it time after time that this manager has a problem with the umpires. I am guessing that this has been a problem since the first baseball game ever played. This doesn’t hold up either. There are several sites now that grade umpires and while several of the umps grade out poorly, there doesn’t seem to be a bias against the Cardinals. Checking Umpscorecards.com the Cardinals are right in the middle third of teams being screwed by the umps. Not enough to really make a difference.
The other night, I saw three Cardinals get ejected for arguing balls and strikes. For all the analytics the Cardinals say they use, I don’t understand how this happens. Just a quick Google search and I found out the HP umpire would be Brennan Miller. Another search and I found out he was a pitcher’s umpire. Two quick searches, and if I am a batter I know I had better swing if the ball is close to the plate. Get mad at those who sent you to the plate uninformed, not the ump.
They just can’t seem to - Fill in the blank. Can’t drive in runners in scoring position. Can’t seem to make that one last pitch to get the strikeout. Can’t win those pesky one-run games. These are all excuses that losing teams seem to have problems with.