As the Cardinals sink six games back of the Reds, even the most loyal fans are wondering whether the team has what it takes to get back into the NL Central race. Herein are five ways that they can.

La Runcan scraps Lohse and goes to a four-man rotation
The difference is simply too great between Lohse’s starts — in which he offers a 5.19 xFIP — and those of the other four starters — 3.21, 2.57, 3.75 and 3.82. With a four-game deficit to the Reds, the team can’t afford to handicap itself every fifth game the rest of the way with a Lohse start. With only two more off days, it’ll mean one rotation in which the other four pitchers go on four-days’ rest, but if the team wants to win this year, it’s better than the alternative.

Offense plays aggressively
The overthinking, namby-pamby bunt-in-the-first inning tactics need to go by the wayside. When the Cardinals broke out against Tim Lincecum and the Giants back on August 21, it was a Randy Winn home run in the fourth — not small-ball bunting by Jon Jay in the second — that sparked the win. That also means that La Russa needs to put a sock in in it and let Colby Rasmus play his game. The fact is that Rasmus is third on the team (min. 300 PAs) with a .364 wOBA, and it doesn’t matter if he achieves it with bunt singles or pulled home runs.

Pujols apologizes then leads
The ugly elephant in the room this season is the team’s lack of leadership, and more specifically the lack of team-orientation from its best player, Albert Pujols. Pujols has disrespected coach Jose Oquendo on multiple occasions, and he often goes his own way, whether in the field or on the bases. Pujols needs to address the issue by apologizing to his teammates and coaches, which, once it’s out of the way, can lead to a true kind of team spirit that a superficial act of group head shaving cannot.

Mozeliak makes another move
It’s not too late to add an impact player, as recent castoffs Manny Ramirez and Brad Hawpe attest. Pedro Feliz was the kind of addition that a team makes as a security blanket, not a pennant-race difference maker. John Mozeliak and company need to keep sniffing the waiver wire, even if it means replacing a regular. The team can easily upgrade in several places, if at least in their pinch hitters, where Aaron Miles and Randy Winn are their top threats.

Fans set the tone
Listen, fans: Stop freaking out over one bad inning, one loss or even a lost series. It’s baseball, and no team is “consistent,” not by Cardinal fans’ and media’s spongy definition. Even the worst teams win 40% of the time. Sometimes bad luck — such as the team’s .192 BABIP over the last two games — makes things look worse than they are. Undoubtedly, the team is playing tight and aimlessly — but fans can do their part to loosen them up and point them toward the goal. After the current road trip ends in Houston, the Cardinals will play 17 of their final 30 games at Busch Stadium. Over the years, the home crowd has taken on the tense personality of Tony La Russa’s clubs, clamming up at the first signs of demise and ganging up on their own players to jeer when they fail then mock them when they recover. For the stretch drive, the hometowners need to throw off that spirit and simply “go crazy, folks, go crazy.”

Sometimes, the old saying goes, it’s better to be lucky than good. After enduring a tough-luck loss Thursday night, such was the case Friday, when the Cardinals beat the Nationals 4-2, despite the Nationals outhitting the Cardinals 12-7.

So did the Cardinals get a bit lucky? Perhaps. Consider that in addition to the hits advantage, the Nationals also enjoyed six walks, two doubles, a triple and a home run — and still managed only two runs. In terms of an opponent’s ineptitude at converting runs — which one could measure by the difference between runs created and runs scored — the Cardinals witnessed a season-worst. Here are the "top" 10 on the year:

It’s not even close. With their 19 total bases (the Cardinals hit two home runs yet had only 13 TBs), the Nationals created eight runs but scored only two, a difference of six runs that disappeared into the ether. The reason? Strikeouts (nine), a double play, a caught stealing and other unproductive outs. The Cardinals, on the other hand, created only 3.1 runs but scored four, aided by errors.

So the next time the Cardinals lose a game they seemingly should’ve won, it’s helpful to remember that they’re occasionally the beneficiaries of fortune, too.

Now that Stephen Strasburg has landed on the disabled list for the second time this season and awaits the official results of an arthrogram of his right arm, likely ending his season, Cardinal rookie pitcher Jaime Garcia has one fewer contestant to battle for Rookie of the Year honors. Despite his consistent success, Garcia has flown under the RoY radar for most of the year due to more ballyhooed names like Jason Heyward and Strasburg soaking up all the media limelight (though Harball recently featured him). But what does reality say? NL rookies by Wins Above Replacement:

Well, who knew that El Gato has the second-most WAR, outside of St. Louis, anyway? We agree with Aaron Schafer, who writes "what I don’t understand is why Garcia isn’t even in the conversation." Schafer goes on to hypothesize that it’s because of Garcia’s low win count, which is a partial explanation, though as we’ve noted, voters have been trending away from emphasis on wins, at least for Cy Young. It’s probably as simple as the media’s knack for self-perpetuating hype.

Garcia takes the mound tonight in Washington, where the Cardinals hope to recover from their wincing extra-inning loss Thursday. It’s too early to start playing for individual trophies, of course, but if the Cardinals do fade, Garcia could be the next Bake McBride, whose Rookie-of-the-Year award was a Pyrrhic victory for a 1974 club that came in second by one and a half games to the Pirates.

Cardinal fans and first basemen were upset Tuesday night after third-base coach Jose Oquendo prevented Randy Winn from attempting to score the tying run in the ninth inning in a game they went on to lose to the Pirates, 4-3. But can they lefitimately blame Oquendo?

First, let’s reconstruct the play: Down by one run with runners on first and second with one out in the ninth, the visiting Cardinals had the heart of their lineup coming to bat. Albert Pujols grounded sharply toward third, where Pirate third baseman Pedro Alvarez dove and slowed down the ball, which rolled into shallow left field. Winn came racing from second looking to score, but, seeing Oquendo’s stop sign, put on the brakes as shortstop Ronny Cedeno retrieved the ball, giving the Cardinals bases loaded, one out and Matt Holliday stepping to the dish.

So now, some facts:

• Holliday hit a home run to give the team the lead earlier in the game.
• Holliday is the Cardinals’ second-best hitter after Pujols.
• Holliday runs well and doesn’t ground into many double plays.
• Winn runs well and is a good bet to score on a fly ball.
• Jon Jay, on second, runs well and is a decent bet to score on a single.
• The Cardinals’ win expectancy at that point was 46.3%.
• The Cardinals have been among the league’s worst baserunning teams, running into many unnecessary outs, for which Oquendo was often responsible.

Assuming that Winn had even odds of being thrown out or scoring– admittedly a big assumption — here are the win-expectancy numbers that Oquendo was dealing with, if unwittingly:

Given those numbers, the risk far outweighed the reward:

Not to mention, the team’s second-best hitter was coming to the plate. The replay seemed to show that Winn had a reasonable chance of scoring, but even so, the decision to preserve the tying run at third base was completely defensible. And that’s making a split-second call without the aid of Tango’s win-expectancy tables.

Pujols’s frustration was understandable but ultimately uninformed and yet another public insult to his coach. Oquendo has made some mistakes in judgment this year, but this wasn’t one of them.

With another hit Tuesday night, Pedro Feliz has now hit safely in each of the five games he has played for the Cardinals and is batting .381 for his new club. Have the Birds on the Bat given wing to a late-career lift for the defensive specialist?

We thought it was curious when we looked up at the Busch Stadium scoreboard during Feliz’s second plate appearance of Sunday’s game to see his batting average listed at .556. We know it’s customary for players to have their stats reset when they change leagues, but for intraleague changes? Guess that posting a batting average of .229 would unfairly bias the fans against the newbie.

So is Feliz for real? Besides the 21 at-bats being a small sample size, let’s look at how Feliz has gotten on base:

Of his 22 plate appearances, Feliz has put the ball in play 19 times. Of those 19 times, he has, as Wee Willie Keeler supposedly said, "where they ain’t" eight times — a batting average on balls in play of .421. To put it mildly, he can’t keep that up — his career BABIP is .267, and the highest he has ever sustained over a qualified season was .292. But perhaps he’s actually hitting the ball well, and his BABIP isn’t telling the whole story, or at least could be discrediting him. Let’s look at the trajectories of his balls in play:

That breaks down as follows:

Since Feliz isn’t very fleet afoot, the fact that he’s getting a lot of hits on grounders almost certainly means that he’s finding holes — and/or that he’s hitting the ball hard, just on the ground. But when Feliz was in his prime– from 2003-2007, when he slugged .437 — he hit more ball in the air, averaging around 40%, which allowed him to hit more home runs. Being at Busch, a neutral-to-pitcher-friendly space, and slowing down physically, he needs to hit more line drives (easier said than done, of course). Or, given that power is likely no longer his offensive forte, he can at least improve his on-base percentage by walking more. He showed as recently as 2008 that he can draw walks — at a modest 7.1% compared with league average of around 8.7%. For now, however, despite his exciting start, it doesn’t appear that he’ll recover that skill, having walked just once in those 22 appearances.

The good news is that, though his batting should regress to the mean, so will his defense — which is to say that he should continue to play as well as he has with the leather. It’s why the Cardinals traded for him, after all. If he can occasionally contribute with the bat, as he has in these first five games, it’s icing on the cake, even if it is of the day-old variety.