The Cardinals needed a solid #4 starter. What they got in Jake Westbrook’s debut Monday night was worthy of staff ace. The newly acquired Westbrook, sporting the uniform number of Matt Morris and the delivery of Daryl Kile, pitched a vintage game that registered a 65 Fielding-Independent Game Score. In fact, it was his best game of the season:

The former Indian, who was once traded for David Justice, relied on solid defense from his new team, but he was far from a Joel Pineiro clone, as he took care of his own business with seven strikeouts. Granted, he faced a diminished Astros team, but his stuff was clearly working. He allowed only four hits, and all four were ground balls.

When Westbrook left after six innings, though, the Cardinals became a different team, scuffling in the field and losing control on the mound. Tony La Russa didn’t help, unnecessarily pulling Colby Rasmus, whom he later needed, and sticking with the wrong relievers too long.

Other notes:

• The aggressive baserunning in the first was fun as far as it went, but Jon Jay pushed the envelope too far when he ran into an out going to third on a groundout to short. It’s a bad play when Albert Pujols does it, and so it was with Jay. The problem is that it’s hard to reprimand Jay for a bush-league move when the manager looks the other way when the team’s superstar does it. Pujols needs to lead by example of restraint.
• The offical scorer made a pair of egregious rulings, the first being his re-ruling on Felipe Lopez’s grounder that went under second baseman Jeff Keppinger’s glove in the first inning (full disclosure: We have Brett Myers on our NL-only fantasy team, though our opponent this week in our office league has him, too). We certainly hope it wasn’t a case of the urban legend that a play can’t be an error if the ball didn’t touch the fielder’s glove. It was more likely an overly generous home-park ruling, as was the passed ball wild pitch in the top of the ninth during Michael Bourn’s at-bat. We’ll say it again: Let’s just get rid of the error. We may need to combine wild pitches and passed balls while we’re at it.
• After Jason Motte yielded a leadoff line-drive single on an 0-2 count, we wondered what his batting-average-against is in such counts. When he is ahead in the count, opponents have a .206 OBP/.348 SLG split. MLB average in 2009 was .216/.310.
• Lopez made a David Freese-like play to barehand a weak grounder in the third. But the Astros still gave the Cardinal pro-tempore third baseman no respect: later in the inning, Bourn attempted a two-out bunt his way, and Humberto Quintero, a girthy catcher, tried to lay one down. Of course, Lopez proved why the Astros thought he couldn’t turn the trick twice in one game when he botched Keppinger’s sixth-inning grounder and couldn’t react fast enough to snare Hunter Pence’s ninth-inning liner.
• Speaking of bunts, the good news is that it seems that when a team is bunting a lot, it means your pitching is throwing well.
• The Cardinals don’t need a new LOOGy in Nate Robertson — they simply need to use their current ones like, well, LOOGys and limit their exposure, especially to righties. La Russa was one step behind tonight deploying his relievers, and it cost him. Heading into Monday’s game, TLR had used Trever Miller in a platoon advantage only 55% of the time. Miller has a career xFIP of 3.71 versus lefties but a whopping 5.11 against righties. TLR prides himself on putting players into positions in which they can excel — he needs to summon a righty before he lets Miller hang out to dry like he did tonight against Hunter Pence. Otherwise, Robertson isn’t going to do any better.
• Who will end up with more career WAR: former Cardinal first-base prospect Daric Barton or former Cardinal first base prospect Brett Wallace?
• How much would the Astros have had to pay another team to take Carlos Lee’s albatross-like contract?
• Second-base umpire Eric Cooper didn’t have a number on his jersey sleeve. We’re going to report him to Uni Watch.
• We have to admit that we were sad to watch the Astros toil without the iconic Lance Berkman and Roy Oswalt. They were great players that gave Astros-Cardinals games a certain classy competitiveness. There are hate-your-guts rivalries like the Mets-Cardinals of the ’80s, and then there are respect-you-because-you’re-good rivalries. The Astros of the Berkman-Oswalt era were the latter.

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at 1:04 am and is filed under recap. 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.