Of the Cardinals’ several players with strong but unpredictable influence (among them Lance Berkman and David Freese), Jaime Garcia is their no-1 X Factor because of his rookie campaign featuring a superb 2.70 ERA but an xFIP of 3.73, an uninspiring spring, and the rotation’s need for him to perform in the wake of losing ace Adam Wainwright.

Which Garcia will the Cardinals get in 2011? If he comes anywhere close to his rookie ERA — his Marcels projection is most favorable, with a 3.36 ERA — the team will be in great shape. But that full point gap between his 2010 ERA and expected FIP represents a lot of room for variance — as in a much higher ERA. Although spring numbers are notoriously unreliable, El Gato certainly hasn’t inspired confidence in Jupiter, posting Barry Zito-like rates of 1.00 K/BB and 3.18 K/9.

Sophomore slumps happen, but, given that the Cardinals are asking all of their pitchers to bump up a slot in the rotation without Adam Wainwright, this would be a particularly bad time for Garcia to have one. The stakes therefore are heightened: If he succeeds, the Cardinals will contend; if he fades, the Cardinals will have hard decisions to make at the trade deadline in order to keep up with the Brewers and Reds.

Nearly as vital as Garcia to the Cardinals’ hopes of a division title are Berkman, Freese and even perhaps Jason Motte. If he’s the Big Puma of as recently as 2008, when he pumped in 7.5 WAR, the Cardinals boast one of the most potent offenses in the league. But if he misses time to injury and his righthanded hitting renders his dual platoon advantage half-useful, the lineup begins to depend on unproven talents like Allen Craig. Ditto Freese, who if healthy could improve on his .341 wOBA from 2010 but also could just as easily find himself on the shelf again. And Motte could be an X factor. As Nathan Grimm notes, Kyle McClellan’s move to the rotation ups the ante for the eighth-inning reliever, and Motte will have a chance to make a big impact there, or even as close if Ryan Franklin falters.

[Fellow SweetSpot blogger Austin Swafford at Austin's Astros 290 Blog is running a series of NL Central team season previews. The following is our comparison of how the Cardinals stack up against the Astros.]

The Astros are typically like the Cardinals in that they seldom go into a dedicated rebuilding mode. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, Houston was a near-perennial contender in the NL Central. But with the departure of their competitive core over the last few years — Craig Biggio, Roy Oswalt and Lance Berkman — the’ve fallen into a prolonged rebulding program. The Cardinals, of course, continue to reload, and are the superior team again for 2011.

That’s not to say that the Astros don’t have some competitive, well, not exactly advantages, but similarities. Take their starting rotation, which, with the Cardinals’ loss of Adam Wainwright, is now comparable to the St. Louis starting five. Wandy Rodriguez, Brett Myers, J.A. Happ, Nelson Figueroa and Bud Norris — or Budchuck, as he is known to Cardinal fans after his uncanny success against them and Albert Pujols’s unwitting reference to him as "Chuck" — may surprise some people this season. The rotation was also one of the Cardinals’ strengths, but without Wainwright, they are merely middling. Chris Carpenter, Jaime Garcia and Jake Westbrook pose a reliable if not uniformly dominant or risk-free front three, while Kyle Lohse and erstwhile reliever Kyle McClellan are wild cards. But assuming a bump of .50 in ERA for McClellan as he moves to the rotation, the two staffs project (by Marcels) to be statistically even, with a 3.92 ERA for the Astros and 3.91 for the Cardinals.

That’s where the comparison ends, however. The Cardinals have a hitting advantage at just about every position otherwise (Marcels projections):

Quite simply, the Astros are going to have a tough time getting on base and therefore scoring runs. The Cardinals may give up something on defense, namely at second base and right field, but they should have a potent offense, probably the best in the division. The benches and bullpens don’t offer any significant edge for either team.

The Cardinals may eventually face the same fate as the Astros of the last few years and be forced to rebuild. For 2011, at least, the Astros — and Bud Norris — may find a way to keep their head-to-head games interesting, but the Cardinals, with that ancient Astro avatar himself, Berkman, should resemble Houston’s success of the early 2000s. The only problem is that the Astros won’t be around for the rivalry.

Erstwhile reliever Kyle McClellan is looking more and more like he’ll win the fifth spot in the Cardinal rotation. He has put up increasingly attractive numbers in his three spring starts and as of March 15 had compiled nine strikeouts against only three walks spanning 12 innings of work.

Despite some in the local media who mistake spring-training statistics for the real thing, spring numbers are, for one thing, a measly-sized sample when it comes to projecting regular-season performance. One look no further than the 2010 spring line from Adam Wainwright, the man whose injury is allowing McClellan to audition for starter: 6.14 ERA and a 1.59 WHIP. Then Wainwright proceeded to go out and finish second in the Cy Young voting. Of course, it works the other way, too: Last spring, Kyle Lohse (whom we might add is having another excellent spring) boasted a decent 3.81 ERA in 13 innings but in the regular season turned in a ghastly 6.55 ERA over 18 starts.We’ll let the reader decide whether Lohse’s 2011 campaign will look more like his career ERA of 4.79 or his 2011 spring ERA of 1.38.

So before you look at McClellan’s stellar spring stats and think how great it would be to have a fifth starter with a 0.75 ERA (consider that McClellan isn’t exactly facing full-scale major-league lineups, either), rein in your expectations using some bigger samples. For instance, we might first consider McClellan’s career performance to-date: A nifty 3.23 ERA, 7.2 K/9 and 2.61 K/BB. But that has all come in relief. You can expect his ERA to increase as a starter. But by how much?

To get an idea, let’s look at Cardinal pitchers who have already done what McClellan is trying to do. Since 2000, the team has had five pitchers relieve and start at least 30 games each: Matt Morris, Adam Wainwright, Braden Looper, Brad Thompson and Jason Simontacchi.

In all cases but one — Wainwright — the pitcher posted a better ERA in relief. This is not news, of course. But if we use the best-case scenario, worst-case an average-case scenarios applied to McClellan, we see some reasonable numbers.

McClellan is a talented pitcher, and we applaud his efforts at transcending roles (always to be commended, whether it’s Braden Looper or Skip Schumaker), but we can safely assume that he’s not the pitcher that Adam Wainwright is. So we’re left with something between that worst-case and average case. And, if we’re betting on the optimistic end, it looks pretty good. In fact, a 3.83 ERA from K-Mac would catapult him into the No-4 starter slot or even better, since Lohse, his spring numbers notwithstanding, projects at anywhere between 4.54 and 4.81, and Jake Westbrook isn’t likely to crack a 4.00 ERA.

McClellan still has at least three more spring starts, which is as many as he has had so far. We of course hope he continues his spring success. Fans (and media) would be wise to temper their expectations based on March numbers and what we know about the reality of pitchers performing as starters. McClellan does appear to be successful starting in the regular season, just not as successful as his spring.

Derrick Goold claimed last week that the Cardinals were gambling on the defensive spectrum by playing Lance Berkman in right field on the premise that Bill James, the creator of the concept, has reconsidered one of his strategies related to the spectrum. But James left unchallenged the core concepts, which are:

• True shortage of talent almost never occurs at the left end of the defensive spectrum.
• Rightward shifts along the defensive spectrum almost never work.
• The defensive spectrum looks like this:

  [ - - 1B - LF - RF - 3B - CF - 2B - SS - C - - ]
  with the basic premise being that positions at the right end of
  the spectrum are more difficult than the positions at the left
  end of the spectrum. Players can generally move from right
  to left along the spectrum successfully during their careers.

So lest anyone think that James is repudiating the bigger picture of the spectrum, James specifically doubted one related personal strategy that he seems to be less than clear about: That his idea to push players as far right on the spectrum as possible is only helpful to bad teams.

For when James puts it that way, it is a relative statement masquerading as an absolute. Bad relative to what? How far is too far? Remember, James is coming from the context of the Boston Red Sox, who are one of the few teams who can afford the luxury of not having to sacrifice one skillset for another. As is frequently the case, the trick is finding the sweetspot or breakeven point, which, even in this era of increasing quantification of fielding, is really hard to understand. Is it a mistake to play Skip Schumaker at second base? It depends. The Fans project that he’ll be worth 0.7 wins above replacement at second. Do the Cardinals have anyone better? Sure, he could play rightfield, but in his best season in the outfield, he had 2.3 WAR, and that included a bonus for playing 500 innings in centerfield, so it’s unlikely he would top that playing only right field. And Berkman, despite his defensive limitations, projects at 2.3 WAR there.

So there’s a lot more to it than simply saying that Schumaker and Berkman shouldn’t be pushed rightward and that the Cardinals aren’t a bad team. Mozeliak and company need to optimize the roster, which can indeed putting someone like Schumaker or Berkman to the right of where they’re most effective defensively in order to realize an offensive gain.

James also recently discussed the percentage importance of hitting, baserunning, pitching and defense. Let’s visualize that:

That puts things into perspective. General manager John Mozeliak said of the team’s offseason moves that "We wanted to add to the depth [of offense]. Did we do that at the expense of some defense? A little.” That’s an about-face relative to what the team did last year, when in perhaps the turning point of the season it acquired a no-hit, good-glove third baseman in Pedro Feliz, and earlier opted for versatile but popless utilitymen Aaron Miles and Randy Winn. Mozeliak might’ve given up "a little" defense for some offense, but it’s likely that it’s better than the converse. We like that the Cardinals seem to have heeded the truth of James’s original observations, regardless of James’s own lack of confidence in one of his strategies based on them.