Jaime Garcia threw strikes, stayed ahead of hitters and took advantage of some tight defense and good luck to stick around for his first career complete game Sunday afternoon. It was also the best of his career. El Gato’s top 10 games by Fielding-Independent Game Score:

Garcia entered the game averaging about 3.9 pitches per batter. In hurling only 89 to 28 batters Sunday, he used only 3.2 per batter, allowing him to cruise through the Giants’ lineup. He relied heavily on the left side of his infield, now the team’s strong suit: new addition Pedro Feliz had four assists, and Brendan Ryan had six. Garcia also enjoyed some good fortune, as the Giants had a BABIP of only .136. Another key was Garcia’s ability to stay low in the zone, which produced 14 ground balls. He came into the game with a 55.1% groundball rate, and Sunday registered a 63.4 rate.

After the moneyballing Oakland A’s corrected the market’s understanding of the importance of defense and a few teams emphasized offense, then the sabermetric community and some clubs corrected that possible excess, is it possible that some teams — like the Cardinals — have fallen back into an overemphasis on defense?

How else to explain the Cardinals’ Thursday trade for offensively-challenged Pedro Feliz, whose name translates to "out happy"?

The 35-year-old, who by our reading should’ve been third on the Astros’ depth chart at third base, ostensibly closes the hole at third base for the Cardinals, where Felipe Lopez has been leaking like the Deepwater Horizon oil well. But like the attempts to cap the well, the Cardinals’ acquisition will only serve to create pressure elsewhere, namely on offense, where, given Feliz’s lifetime .289 OBP, they’ll continue to leak outs.

Considering that the Cardinals’ struggles lately have been more related to offense than defense — even with Lopez’s two errors Tuesday night, the team yielded only three runs — the more pressing need is improving offense, not defense.

Though it’s true that Feliz has provided objectively and subjectively above-average defense in the past, he gives aways any benefit in the field with a feckless bat. In 304 plate appearances this year — enough to base some judgments on, considered in context of his career work — Feliz has a .243 OBP (.241 wOBA). That’s not batting average, that’s the rate at which he gets on base overall.

If you’re looking for a glimmer of hope in an unlucky BABIP, you’re not going to find it. True, it’s down a bit this year at .232, but that’s not really not far from his career of .267. This harsh fact should remind us that, while Feliz may have once at least offered power, he is too slow and hits too few line drives to even give himself much chance of reaching base these days. This clearly is a player whose offensive tools have rusted and are only getting more useless.

Even if the Cardinals had traded the proverbial bucket of balls, this trade fails to improve their team. But in sending away David Carpenter, they surrendered a prospect who, if still a few years from the show, is improving.

Just two days ago, we offered what seemed to be a simple solution in moving Allen Craig to third base and Felipe Lopez to second, where he’ll cause considerably less damage. That would’ve left the reliable veteran Skip Schumaker and the unpredictable but promising Jon Jay for right field. But the Cardinals appear to have overcompensated for Lopez’s bad play at the hot corner and overvalued defense. Come October, we’ll hope that our calculation is wrong and that Pedro Feliz saves them more outs with the glove than he costs them with the lumber.

Jaime Garcia started off on the right track Tuesday night, striking out three of his first four batters — on the strength of six swinging strikes — but Casey McGehee drilled a liner off Garcia to derail El Gato’s momentum. Felipe Lopez followed with a couple of errors, Garcia with a couple of walks, and that was all that the Brewers needed as they won Tuesday, 3-2.

The turning point — McGehee’s smash off Garcia’s backside — unsettled both Garcia and his defense. After the trainer check at the mound, Garcia took a couple of wild practice throws. Then it was Lopez’s turn to throw wildly, though he composed himself and appeared to be in solid position to make the play. El Gato ultimately escaped unscathed, but Lopez’s second error led to another confrontation with McGehee that the Cardinal lefty lost again. It was a case in which the three runs that Garcia allowed did seem to warrant their unearned classification, partly because of the errors, one of which led to an intentional walk, but also because home-plate ump Tony Randazzo pinched him on low strikes, something that Garcia needs to survive but that Randazzo called few of. The first two pitches to McGehee were borderline balls, and when Garcia brought the ball up to comply with Randazzo’s high zone, McGehee smacked it out of the park.

The two blunders overshadowed some otherwise plucky defense. Even in Lopez’s case, the errors weren’t for lack of trying. Brendan Ryan, in particular, made what will likely be one of the team’s top 10 defensive plays of the year when he laid out for a ball up the middle then glove-flipped to second to start a 6-4-3 double play. Ryan also teamed with rightfielder Allen Craig to execute a textbook cutoff: With the speedy Rickie Weeks running from first, Craig charged a groundball and came up throwing to third, where Ryan cut and relayed to second a split-second too late to get Weeks, who thought better of going first to third. Craig hustled all over the place, even going hard toward the stands for a foul well beyond his reach. Which raises a reasonable question: Would the team be better off with Lopez playing second base, Skip Schumaker playing right field and Craig playing third base? As the club’s fifth-best-hitting starter (in OBP and wOBA), Lopez is clearly too good of a hitter not to start. One other option would be to flip Flip and Skip at third and second. However, while Schumaker may fit a third-base mold — less range but strong arm — a mid-season tutorial at yet another position he’s never played would likely be disastrous. Assuming that the personnel doesn’t change, we like Schumaker back in the outfield and Lopez back at a position he can handle.

In one of the Cardinals’ few scoring opportunities, Yadier Molina grounded into another double play. If Tony La Russa doesn’t take us up on our idea to bat YaMo last, he at least needs to deploy the hit-and-run, just about every time Molina hits with a runner on first. Yamo leads team and is fourth in the league in contact rate on pitches outside the strike zone (79.2%) and leads the team in overall contact rate (87.1%). In the worst-case scenario, the opponent pitches out and nabs the runner. In terms of run-expectancy, one out with none on isn’t much different from none out with a runner on first but a highly susceptible double-play candidate batting.

Other notes:

• On an evening when farm director Jeff Luhnow spoke to the media about the team’s draft-pick signings, it was encouraging to see Zack Cox’s name listed in the 40-man roster drop-down in our scoring software.
• Hitting in the #2 hole ahead of Pujols, Jon Jay showed a lot of patience — perhaps too much. With runners on the corners with two outs in the third, Jay drew a 3-0 count, then watched three strikes. Then in the eighth, with runners on, he struck out looking again. In fairness, he fell victim to Randazzo’s somewhat erratic strike zone. Hitting second ahead of the best player in the game is a plum job, but even that requires some learning. We appreciate Jay’s willingness to take pitches and give the big man a chance, but he’ll soon pick up on the fact that pitchers would rather face him than the Human Rake.
• On the other hand, Matt Holliday seemed a bit jumpy at the dish. In his plate appearances, he saw only two, three, four and three pitches each, bouncing out reaching for a 2-0 pitch in the eighth with runners on first and second. Milwaukee reliever John Axford had just intentionally walked Pujols, and it seemed he wasn’t uncomfortable walking Holliday, too. It made sense to pitch around him, since the same logic that applied to walking Pujols would have to apply to Holliday even moreso, with rookie Allen Craig on deck.
• Curiously, Ken Macha turned to his closer Axford in the eighth inning when the occasion — Jay batting with runners on the corners — called for a LOOGy. Macha went old school, realizing that sometimes, a platoon advantange doesn’t outweigh a talent advantage.
• Dave Bush showed why he was once a promising pitcher. Before the game, we wondered just how many more years in the majors he had ahead of him: Two, maybe? It’s a fun game to play — of the starters last night, we’d bet that the player with the shortest remaining career is still Bush, and the longest is Colby Rasmus.
• Molina has always been a fan favorite, but we’ve noticed even more love from the local rooters in the wake of his facing down Brandon Phillips. It’s fun to see the fans picking up on the rivalry.

The weekend series notwithstanding, the Cardinals have said goodbye to their old rivals in Chicago and Houston and are engaging a new one in the Cincinnati Reds.

Tradition dictates that the Cardinals’ natural rival is the Cubs, as much for geographical reasons as competitive. In the last decade, their more worthy adversary has been the Astros. But the Reds? Have the Cardinals ever really considered the Reds as such? Why are the two teams with so much in common — including, this year, several former players and upper management (even ownership ties) — so seldom linked?

The St. Louis and Cincinnati franchises are among the oldest in baseball, dating to their origins in the 19th century, when they competed in the American Association as the Browns and Red Stockings, respectively. Both teams changed names and leagues as the 20th century rolled around and comprised a quarter of the National League, playing around 22 games against each other every year. But though they supplied many Hall of Famers along the way, the Reds — how to put this delicately — have for the most part stunk. It took them 29 years after joining the NL just to finish above third place. When they finally did win the World Series, it was only because their opponent laid down for gamblers. The two teams simply didn’t come down to the wire with each other much.

For a long time, of course, the stalwart midwestern river cities played in different divisions: Starting in 1969, the Cardinals went head-to-head against the Mets, Expos, Cubs and Phillies, while Cincinnati — located about 350 miles east of St. Louis — inexplicably toiled in the NL West against the Dodgers, Giants and Padres. Oddly enough, during that era of Astroturf and afros, both teams experienced concurrent success, with the Big Red Machine dominating the early ’70s, while the Cardinals placed second in both 1973 and 1974. Both teams finished "first" by having top overall division records in the strike-shortened 1981 but fell victim to MLB’s scheme to split the season in two and reward first- and second-"half" division leaders, leaving the Cardinals and Reds on the outside looking in.

So it wasn’t until 2000 — seven years after reuniting in the same division — that the two teams played "meaningful" baseball against each other, finishing 1-2 in the NL Central. But in those rare instances when the two clubs have contended against each other for a title, the Cardinals have usually ended up on top: In the seven seasons in which the teams have gone 1-2 in the standings, the Cardinals have been the "1" six times.

So thank goodness for Brandon Phillips. His recent lighter-fluid comments have ignited a dormant Cardinals-Reds rivalry into a bona fide bonfire. The Cubs and Astros rivalries may be in ashes, but with the Reds, we can enjoy a real division race. May the better team win.

Sometimes, players conserve energy for the rest of the game by not going all out on a single play, like not running out a routine grounder or fly ball. Sunday, the Cardinals applied the approach on a macro level, pulling key players for rest while losing the rubber game of their series with the Cubs, 9-7, in a game they could’ve won.

After not-yet-ready-for-primetime Kyle Lohse surrendered two walks and two home runs in 18 batters, Tony La Russa led the conservation effort by serially removing his core players. In a game that the Cubs led by seven runs by the fourth inning, the Cardinal manager appeared to throw in the towel and wait for the 10-run rule to kick in. But the Cardinals were never out of it, especially after they tallied a run in the fifth. They were down six but still had four innings left — plenty of time to rally, as their five-run spurt in the ninth proved. Here were some notable white-flag moves by TLR:

• Pulled centerfielder and the team’s third-leading hitter (.366 wOBA) Colby Rasmus after only five innings, essentially replacing him with Aaron Miles
• Let Blake Hawksworth bat in the seventh
• Pulled Yadier Molina after the fifth
• Pulled Albert Pujols and Matt Holliday after eight innings
• After Lou Piniella double-switched in a LOOGy to face Skip Schumaker with Brendan Ryan in scoring position, let Schumaker hit (and strike out)
• Left LOOGy Dennys Reyes (5.38 xFIP vs. RHB this year) in to face Aramis Ramirez, who drove in the Cubs’ ninth run
• Again left Schumaker in to face a LOOGy with runners on (again, a strikeout), in the ninth

Indeed, at times, it seemed as though the Cubs were the only team trying to win. Like the player who fails to slide into second on a sure-fire double play, the Cardinals — at least their manager — conceded the short-term loss for presumably long-term gain. In a tight division race, it’s an interesting gambit; we’ll see if it pays off.

Other notes:

• Does Blake Hawksworth deserve another shot at the rotation? And does Kyle Lohse need to work in the bullpen, at least for a few games?
• Ramirez made a couple of lazy running plays that won’t show up in the box score. He should’ve been on third on Marlon Byrd’s two-out, full-count single in the fourth (he was nominally "running" on the play). In the ninth, he ran into an out trying to stretch his single into a double, then simply gave up in the rundown.
• Lohse induced only four swinging strikes in 41 total strikes, down from his career average of 12% and the major-league average of 14%.
• Okay, all of you Cardinal fans who advocated signing Xavier Nady in the offseason, please stand up. Aren’t you glad they didn’t?
• Speaking of bad deals, how much would Kyle Lohse agree to sell his no-trade clause for?