Is the Cardinal offense worse than it was last year? Judging by Bernie Miklasz’s lament that the team needs to "fix the dang offense," you might think so. But check out the numbers:

• 2009: .325 wOBA, 8th place in NL
• 2010: .325 wOBA, 7th place in NL

Certainly, the offense is something less than the pride of the NL, but the same offense was good enough to win the division last year. And with two of their biggest producers having spent significant time on the DL — David Freese and Ryan Ludwick — criticism is a bit unwarranted.

Whereas Miklasz feels that "the most glaring weakness with the 2010 Cardinals is their dull offense," the worst component, by league rank, anyway, is the bullpen, which is third-worst in xFIP. So is the effort to strengthen the starting pitching misguided? After all, the starting pitchers lead the league in xFIP. But look a little deeper, and you’ll see that the Cardinal starters are only fifth in the league in innings pitched per start, at around six. so while the innings that they do pitch are high quality, the lack of quantity exerts additional pressure on the pen, which, perhaps combined with some mismanagement, may contribute to the pen’s lackluster performance. So it’s still reasonable to figure that improving the rotation will improve the team’s true weakness, the bullpen.

Wither Westbrook?
Jayson Stark reported Friday that the Cardinals "have made Cleveland Indians pitcher Jake Westbrook their No. 1 target leading into the trade deadline." After missing out on seemingly doable deals for Dan Haren and Roy Oswalt, the Cardinals are apparently "going in a different direction." In our opinion, the club needs to be careful not to overpay for a far inferior pitcher in order to not come away emptyhanded at the trade deadline. If the team wasn’t willing to pay for top talent, it needs to resist the temptation to join the fray after they’ve missed the boat. Better to wait for the next boat — as in the winter — than to do something rash as a reaction to a market they misread.

Look at me, I can be centerfield
Tony La Russa has lately given Colby Rasmus more time on the pine than on the turf. The opening-day centerfielder has started only one of the last five games, prompting Derrick Goold to ask whether Jon Jay, who has gotten the nod over Rasmus, is the better bet. It’s true that Jay has been hot since his recall. But this is a small-sample-size alert if ever there was one. Jay boasts a heady .435 wOBA, better than Rasmus’s .368, but has about a third as many plate appearances (122 to 342). To his credit, Jay has exhibited some decent plate discipline, bettering Rasmus in contact rate and swing rate. All the same, Jay has also benefited from a slightly higher platoon advantage, facing righties 82% of the time (Rasmus: 76%). That means that Rasmus has had 60 more plate appearances against lefties, no small disadvantage. The more apt question might instead be “Jay or Ludwick?”

Fishpower beats deerpower
Carp out to continue dominance of Bucs — MLB headline

Come on, Big Z isn’t that fat
Howry’s release makes room for Zambrano — ESPN headline

He’d like his money back
Phils’ Moyer hopes to return this season — ESPN headline

Takes wrist, ball and goes home
Brewers’ Hart leaves with injured wrist — ESPN headline

Special edition of "The Bachelor"
Capps happy for opportunity with contending Twins — AP headline

Vincent Van Gold chain
Tonight is Vince Coleman Bobblehead night at Busch Stadium. Coleman himself was on-hand to provide the pregame action, being interviewed on the field. We espied him in the press lobby, and, though he appears to have added some girth, his look remains relatively unchanged from his playing days. That is, he sported a v-neck t-shirt which nattily complemented his ubiquitous gold chain. It’s reassuring to know that in this world of change, some things remain as they were in 1985.

We kind of thought that Holliday was, at least tonight, swinging the bat a little bit better than Albert. It was a tough call. We were going to try to leave the ball away, make him hit it on the ground someplace and hopefully we would be able to get it. We were playing with fire and we got burned.

– Jerry Manuel

As the preseason ad said, pick your poison. With Albert Pujols featuring a below-career .398 wOBA and Matt Holliday an above-career .394, Manuel didn’t even need to limit his claim to "at least tonight" — the two sluggers are basically the same player this season.

Whereas Tony La Russa was largely responsible for his team’s loss in the 20-inning game earlier this year, this time, it was Manuel’s turn to mismanage his team, though, in fairness, it was nothing even approaching La Russa’s debacle. Credit the Cardinal manager with learning from his prior mistake by not switching the pitcher spot into the cleanup spot. But even TLR didn’t get off scot-free this time: We disliked his upside-down approach to deploying his relievers, using the inferior Mike MacDougal before Ryan Franklin. If the Mets had scored in the 12th off the recently promoted MacDougal, how does TLR explain losing a game in the 12th inning with his "closer," which we assume to him means his best reliever, on the bench?

Both managers had emptied their benches and were forced to have pitchers hit in the 13th inning. The only difference was that TLR had Wainwright, a career .259
wOBA hitter, as a final bullet. Then again, Manuel’s Raul Valdes had a .564 wOBA going into his plate appearance. In 10 career plate appearances.

I pulled back, and that’s the smart play. You can look at it a different way. You can look at it like I wasn’t hustling, but you know what? Late in the game like that, if I feel good, I’m going to do everything that I can to try to break up the double play. But when you don’t have anybody in extra innings and you feel something, the last thing you want to do is hurt yourself and be the last guy and throw a pitcher out there to play your position.

– Albert Pujols

This is a perfectly reasonable explanation. It was also the reasoning that another Cardinal first baseman once gave for what appeared as less than 100% effort: Keith Hernandez. The difference, of course, is that whereas Pujols calls the tune with the current Cardinal manager, Whitey Herzog maintained uniform discipline across his roster, such that no player, not even the team captain, multiple-time All-Star and former league MVP, was above the team.

Usually in the first inning, you’re focusing on your first-inning pitching. Not hitting. But I was up there, and I’m like, ‘I’m not just going to strike out swinging at bad pitches. He’s going to have to throw me good pitches.’ It was a huge at-bat for our win today.

– Jaime Garcia

The Cardinals ran their win expectancy as high as 92.8% in the first inning. It went as high as 96.7% at the end of the seventh inning before the Mets swung the game 60.0% points their way in the eighth.

Speaking of the win-expectancy game, the bad-running Cardinals made another unnecessary out on the bases last night, this one in the 13th inning. Jon Jay tried but failed to score from third on a pitch in the dirt. Adam Wainwright was pinch-hitting with two out and the bases loaded. Was it a good attempt? Judging by the win-expectancy table below, it was:

So the potential reward was worth the risk. Sometimes, the chance is worth it.

Coming off his second-best performance of the season last Thursday, Adam Wainwright can be forgiven for a chucker-like outing Tuesday night in New York. But while a couple of media outlets are describing it as his worst of the year, it wasn’t quite the case, as his June 9 and 24 starts were worse:

Throw in his May 15 clunker against the Reds as at least as bad, and it’s clear that last night wasn’t Waino’s worst. That’s not to say it was good, of course. But, as Bill James once wrote, much of what we perceive as pitching is in fact defense, and looking merely at the "earned" run total can mislead. Sure, Waino walked three batters, but he has done that six times this year. He struck out six of the only 24 batters he faced, and induced a helpful ratio of groundballs to flyballs (7:4).

We think it’s a little disingenuous, then, when the Post-Dispatch game story includes the tautological observation "In what has become a season defined by the Cardinals’ inconsistencies, a big constant succumbed to the trend as Wainwright allowed a season-high six runs in five innings." If there’s one constant about a 162-game baseball season, it’s that there will be inconsistencies, insofar as few things are constant over such a long period. Does the P-D think that in order to be consistent, a player can’t occasionally have a subpar game or go hitless in two or three consecutive games?

Cole Hamels couldn’t have begun Thursday’s game much more perfectly, striking out five of the first six batters he faced. He went on to strike out seven of the only 25 batters he faced over eight innings, with only a walk to mar his record.

Hamels tied Johan Santana for the third-best-pitched game against the Cardinals this season by Fielding-Independent Game Score:

(By the way, the Cardinals figure to miss Carlos Silva, who pitched the best game against them, in their upcoming weekend series with the Cubs.) Although Hamels’s mound counterpart, Adam Wainwright, yielded a few more hits than the Phillie southpaw, Wainwright was nearly as terrific, tossing a 67-FIGS game. His was the fourth-best among Cardinal starts in 2010:

Together, the Hamels-Wainwright tilt was the best pitching duel in which the Cardinals have been involved this year (defined as the top lower-pitcher FIGS):

We’ll have to see where it ranks among all games in major-league baseball this season.

Just to get through six, I kind of had to scratch and claw to get there. It definitely helps the bullpen out a little bit. Ryan and Skip up the middle, the last few games have been awesome. Skip has been playing his butt off. It helps, especially when you are not getting a lot of strikeouts.

– Blake Hawksworth

In pitching six full innings, Hawksworth faced a career-high 28 batters. In addition to yielding three walks, the reason he didn’t pitch deeper than six innings was his team’s inability to convert balls in play into outs, as indicated by their .583 defensive-efficiency rate (or, depending on your point of view, the Phillies’ BABIP of .417). The accolades notwithstanding, Schumaker mishandled a couple of balls that might’ve led to additional outs.

I think our defense we have stepped it up to a different level. We played great defense in the first half but I think over the last two weeks you can see our defense. We are on our toes, helping the pitchers and making some great plays.

– Albert Pujols

Team DER over last two weeks: .673.
Team DER previously: .696
To be sure, DER includes a lot of non-fielding noise, but it seems that the team’s improved defense over the last fortnight is illusory. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the team isn’t hustling or that that hustle won’t pay off in the long run.

I think there are guys in here who are motivated to have a very good second half. Part of it is getting a break to clear your mind and re-evaluate where you’re at. … I think there are a lot of guys in here who are really motivated to turn their season around. Whether it’s Craig or (Jon) Jay who you want to give some credit to, that’s fine, no doubt about it. But there’s a lot of (veterans) in here who want to turn their season around not only for themselves but because it’s going to better the team. We are such a better team than we showed in the first half.

– Skip Schumaker

Amid a handful of well-established stars, the team clearly has some players who are still hungry. As we wrote in our Trade Deadline Primer, Schumaker and Yadier Molina are two such players poised to regress to their normal selves. Schumaker’s BABIP has increased from unseemly low levels, due in large measure to his team-leading line-drive rate. Molina, whose BABIP is still a low .248 (career: .278) and who has a better LD% than Pujols, should follow. And Brendan Ryan is at a critical point in his career, on both sides of the ball.

But even in the case of the stars, players have significant motivators: Holliday, who lacks no job security, wants to prove worthy of his fat contract. Pujols himself, by dragging his feet on a contract extension, is gambling that his skills won’t markedly degrade and, perhaps ironically, needs to prove that he’s still the best player in baseball. And Chris Carpenter, whether because he is "a competitor" or simply proud, appears dissatisfied with his performance. Perhaps all of these factors will coelesce into a firy team dynamic throughout the second "half" of the season.

Wasn’t my best. This win is all about the guys. The lineup. The defense. It was a lot of fun to see those guys swing it.

– Hawksworth

Kudos to Hawksworth for his endurance on the field as wisdom off it. Whereas lately he had exhibited more power pitching, his performance Monday was more typical of what we might expect from him as a starter: A lot of ground balls in play (54%) and unimpressive K/BB and K/9 rates (0.33 and 1.50, respectively).

Would that Hawksworth’s view on winning were shared by others. If you’re scoring at home, or at least checking Fangraphs, you’ll note that Hawksworth — "the winning pitcher" — contributed a net negative WPA of -.170. Of course, that’s not exclusively his responsibility, but it certainly puts the idea of attributing "wins" to pitchers into perspective, doesn’t it? For the record, Albert Pujols led all players with a +.282 WPA, followed closely by Jon Jay at +.237.

When he was working out, he dropped a (weight) plate on his toe. They’re saying it may not be any longer than his ankle. I don’t really know except now he has that to deal with as well.

– Tony La Russa on David Freese’s latest injury

Let’s hope that Freese, who has a history of making bad decisions, didn’t simply forget to use a safety clamp on the end of his weight bar. At any rate, his eventual return will only benefit the team, whose September may look a little like that in 2006, when several key players returned from injury to buoy the team’s playoff roster.

Winning is the big cure-all

– Randy Winn

A veteran of 13 seasons and 1661 games, Winn should know, but not necessarily through personal experience: His teams’ won-loss record over the years is 752-909, a miserable .453 winning percentage. Here’s hoping the club’s fourth outfielder enjoys the salutary experience of a division title this year.