The good news for the Cardinal offense is that they have been consistent. The bad news is that they’ve been consistently bad.

The Cardinals, who have begun the season 2-4, have tallied a total of 15 runs in their first six games and haven’t scored more than three in any single game. And it’s not like they’ve been getting unlucky: They have a similarly feckless total of 17.5 weighted Runs Created.

Longtime friend and reader DaveBug asked last night about the record number of games starting a season of with fewer than four runs a game. We side with Tony La Russa on the issue of whether it’s reasonable to draw many conclusions with a mere six games in the books, but the question is interesting, all the same. Dating back to 1919, the earliest point for which the invaluable Baseball-Reference.com has data, the following teams have begun the season with at least seven games in which they have scored three or fewer runs:

Starting with those 1988 Baltimore Orioles, it’s a who’s who of pathetic teams. And that got us wondering: Does a lousy start portend a long season? To find out, here are those teams’ records:

Wow, that’s a sobering list. Only one of the 13 teams surmounted .500 — the 1963 Cubs — and that was by the thinnest of margins. The average winning percentage of the teams was .413.

Can a team’s first seven games really spell disaster for the season? History isn’t on the Cardinals’ side. However, none of those teams had Albert Pujols (though those Cubs had three future Hall of Famers in Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Lou Brock). As we noted, we’re tempted to say along with TLR that it’s too early to tell. Or is it?

Notes:

• Why did the Pirates have Ryan Doumit, their #6 hitter, sacrifice bunt? The play lowered their win probability (-.002).
• Albert Pujols cost the Cardinals a run with his overreaching play in the fourth, in which he tried to do too much and fielded a grounder in front of Skip Schumaker. His wild throw allowed Lyle Overbay to reach and later score. There’s a fine line between being aggressive and being irresponsibly rangy, and Pujols has developed over the years a bad habit of the latter. It was all the more egregious because it came just an inning after Schumaker made a diving stop even farther toward first base.
• On the positive side, Daniel Descalso made several fine plays at third. The Cardinals now have two very solid defenders at the hot corner. The difference between the last couple months of 2010 and this season is that they may also be able to hit.

Notes:

• Kyle McClellan looked like the pitcher he was while auditioning for the rotation during spring training. It was the second time in as many years that a darkhorse candidate pitched his way into the starting five in spring, leading us to wonder whether spring-training performances do matter in certain situations, like good ones for starting pitchers trying to win a spot on the team.
• Albert Pujols may have picked up two RBI, but that doesn’t mean he’s stinging the ball. One came on a sac fly; the other on a ground ball.
• Colby Rasmus continues to be the team’s key offensive player, pumping in a couple more hits and walking once.
• Ryan Franklin picked up the Save, but Trever Miller got an out in the most crucial moment of the game (leverage index of 4.13) when he struck out Pedro Alvarez with runners on first and second in the top of the eighth. Granted, he had walked Lyle Overbay to help create the situation.
• Franklin struck out two of the three batters he faced.

The 2011 Cardinals are old. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But it does have implications for the season ahead, both beneficial and detrimental.

With an average age of 32.0, the pitching staff has the potential to be the team’s oldest since the 1920s. The batters, too, are a relatively mature bunch, averaging 29.4, making the team average age 30.6 on Opening Day:

To be sure, those averages can be a bit deceiving, since they assume everyone gets equal playing time. Effectively, the team’s pitching is a little younger — the starting rotation averages 30.7 — while the starting eight batters are older than the overall group of batters at 30.2.

Like the man who wonders about the significance of the double rainbow, you probably want to know what it means. Let’s start with the good news:

• Older players usuaally make for a veteran team whose experience allows them to weather stormy stretches and not get overconfidence during smooth sailing.
• There’s reason to believe that older players maintain some residual value and that they have been undervalued by the marketplace, a potential market-inefficiency exploitation by John Mozeliak.
• With ample data, you usually know what you’re going to get with veterans (known performance expectations).

Now for the bad:

• Upside limitations; whereas younger players typically have more potential upside.
• Older players can mean fragile health. In the Cardinals’ case, they have little room for vets to get injured, given that they have at least a couple of younger players (Garcia, Freese) whose health statuses are far from certain.
• Older players may have less positional versatility, crimping La Russa’s style and forcing him to make unhelpful tradeoffs in the field. This obviously doesn’t really affect the pitchers, but in the case of Berkman and possibly Punto, TLR may find his options limited.

It’s possible, and perhaps probable, that the Cardinals will get younger as the season wears on. We’ll give Miguel Batista even odds for lasting the entire season, and his replacement is bound to be younger (at least we’re hoping so). The Cardinals start the year with some near-major-league-ready talent in Memphis, and as long as La Russa and company don’t repeat their midsummer 2010 moves in which they pulled the aging Randy Winn and Pedro Feliz off the future commentators unemployment line, their average age will regress to, well, their average.

The Cardinals have won before with oldsters. Will this group age as well and stay healthy and perform highly enough to help them do it again?

We mentioned in our game notes from Opening Day that some in the Busch Stadium press box are confident that Colby Rasmus is a horrible two-strike hitter. Based on their loud trashing of the Cardinal centerfielder, you would’ve thought this idea was as firmly established as the law of gravity. Undoubtedly, they’re not the only ones in Cardinal nation who subscribe to the notion (we would check the P-D’s fan forums for proof, but we’re not a masochist). But how does their cocksureness square with reality?

First, let’s look at Rasmus’s hitting splits with two strikes compared to his overall production:

Indeed, Rasmus hits worse with two strikes than he does in all counts, though that’s hardly news: We defy someone to find a hitter of whom that’s not true. When Rasmus hits with a two-strike count, he produces 80% of his overall OBP and 76% of his SLG. But of course the conventional wisdom implies that Rasmus must be worse as a two-strike hitter relative to other players. To see if that’s true, let’s now look at all major leaguers over the last three years:

Well, what do you know? Major leaguers overall with two-strike counts produce at only 78% of their OBP and 68% of their SLG.

So the next time someone — whether in the press box, on TV or in the stands next to you — claims that Rasmus is a bad two-strike hitter, you can politely inform him that he’s wrong. Far from being a bad one or even an average one, Colby Rasmus is actually a pretty good two-strike hitter.