We’ve got a couple weeks to show the team we really are and not the team that’s been around the last week or two. It’s unfortunate what has happened. Nobody has a good taste in their mouths. We’re sick of losing, pretty much. It’s almost a boiling point.

– Ron Villone

The Mientkiewicz kerfuffle Sunday afternoon serves as an apt microcosm for the "team that’s been around the last week or two." Rather than assertively and instantly insisting to the umpire that Doug "A-Rod" Mientkiewicz had obstructed him, Aaron Miles slunk around in dejection, while Tony La Russa made a pro forma visit to the infield and even tried to appeal to the enemy, Mientkiewicz, who stood sneering at him from second base. The bullpen and bench belatedly jogged onto the scene to defend Miles, who didn’t even stick around to defend himself. And sadly, it appeared that the most energy that the team expended was in restraining Villone from actually doing something. With 13 games left and four and a half games back in the wild-canard race, the Cardinals still technically have a life. But if Sunday’s "getaway" performance is any indication, the season is unofficially over.

With the crazed animal that Ronny is, that’s not exactly the guy you want to make mad. I went after the glove to try to knock the ball out. … We were up five, and I think we all know that a five-run lead for us is not exactly insurmountable.

– Mientkiewicz

He may have resembled Alex Rodriguez Sunday, but Minky is at least funny.

The guy swiped — he swiped it. He’s acting like he’s innocent. The tape doesn’t lie. A swipe like that — that’s a double play, that’s what it is.

– TLR

If you’ll excuse the political reference, La Russa fussing over Mientkiewicz is as pathetic as a presidential candidate fretting over his opponent’s VP pick.

That’s just terrible pitcher’s luck. But I’ve seen us have an inning like that and the other club hangs with it for nine, and if you don’t keep adding, they beat you. Clubs have beaten us [that way]. That was just tough pitcher’s luck. It didn’t describe Brad Thompson. He never gave in. That’s just the way it was.

– TLR

I just think it’s a string of bad luck — three starts in a row that have gone bad. I definitely don’t think it’s going to keep going. It’s just one of those things. We ran into a team, and they were hotter than us.

– Brad Thompson

Kudos to La Russa for recognizing the truth about Thompson’s outing: He was the victim of one of the team’s worst defense/luck games this season:

Indeed, the starting pitching this past weekend in Pittsburgh was snakebitten: the team’s DER (Defensive-Efficiency Ratio) for the starters was a bad-luck/bad-fielding .510 (the team’s season average behind all pitchers is .696; league average is .693). When only about half of the balls hit in play are turning into outs, it’s going to be a frustrating weekend.

If the season has no other positives, the silver lining is that at least some people have learned the lesson of "luck" when it comes to evaluating a pitcher’s performance. Of course, if it had been learned earlier, Anthony Reyes might still be wearing the birds on the bat.

It’s the same exact game. Believe me, I thought, ‘He’s pitching Friday, no, he’s pitching Sunday, no, he’s pitching Friday.’ I was kicking myself for that. Except I started thinking, ‘This has been his pattern.’ If that’s part of it, then I’ll take my part of the heat. But it’s happened enough to where he’s got to figure out something. We’ve got to figure it out. Because it’s not good enough.

– TLR on Joel Pineiro starting Friday

As with Thompson Sunday (55 FIGS) and Wainwright Saturday (60 FIGS), Pineiro actually didn’t pitch badly on Friday (55 FIGS) — that’s only slightly below-average for the team’s starts this season (57 FIGS). And the fact that Aaron Miles and Adam Kennedy are doing time in right field and Brian Barden playing first base isn’t going to improve matters (We did notice TLR opting to play Brendan Ryan at short and Izturis at third base in Saturday’s game).

We didn’t play good. If you want to say it was one of our worst three games of the year, if you’re looking at this series, yeah, it was pretty bad.

– Miles

It wasn’t the worst in terms of hitting, though it was pretty far down on the list of production: In the three-game Pittsburgh series, the Cardinals averaged 3.89 runs created. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the three-game series with the Brewers from July 22-24, in which they created just 1.95 runs. But then, they were facing two of the league’s best hurlers in CC Sabathia and Ben Sheets. Not to take too much away from Paul Maholm, Ian Snell and Jason Davis, but the Cardinal batters can probably take some of the weekend’s blame.

But the defensive play and "luck" are another matter. It was easily the worst three-game stretch in terms of DER for the club’s starters this year:

Notably, the bad play/luck started before the team arrived in Pittsburgh, with Kyle Lohse and Braden Looper being the victims of .579 and .500 DER in the Chicago series. The Cardinals may not be able to control the bad “luck” part of the equation, but to the extent that they do control their fate, they can start playing with some passion. It would be a shame to end such a surprising and rollicking season on such a feckless and dour note.

This entry was posted by Pip on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 5:09 pm and is filed under quotebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.