A brief overview on what the numbers tell us about the Cardinals offense both now and moving forward.
The Cardinals offense has been bad. If you’ve watched the games you know this. Even if you haven’t watched the games you probably know this because the lack of offense might be the reason why you aren’t watching the games.
There’s no other way to put this. The Cardinals offense has been bad.
So today I want to dig into the some of the numbers that tell us this and see what kind of knowledge we can glean from them.
Should we be optimistic? Pessimistic? Somewhere in between? Let’s find out together.
The Cardinals rank in the bottom 5 in pretty much all of the important descriptive metrics. They’re 26th in runs per game (3.63), 26th in wRC+ (85), and 25th in position player fWAR (1.6) They’re also tied for last in home runs (18).
The Cardinals also haven’t been great in big situations. The team is batting just .207 with runners in scoring position and ranks 26th in wRC+ in those scenarios.
No matter how you slice it that’s just not a recipe for success. Yet the Cardinals find themselves close to .500. Admittedly that’s not great, but it could be a lot worse.
Take the teams that rank consistently rank below the Cardinals in those metrics for example. We’re looking at teams like the White Sox, Marlins, Rockies, A’s, Blue Jays, and Pirates.
That’s a pretty miserable group.
In fact, the only team that doesn’t have a losing record in that group in the 15-15 Blue Jays while 3 of the other teams (White Sox, Marlins, and A’s) are fighting tooth and nail to prove that they’re the worst team in baseball.
So while the Cardinals offensive numbers are disappointing we can take heart in the fact that the season hasn’t gone off the rails.
We can also take heart in the fact that they should be better as the season goes on. Let’s look at a few metrics that tell us this.
The first number I want to look at here is BABIP. That’s batting average on balls in play. Typically the league average hovers right around .300 with some noise at the individual and team levels. Typically, though, we see that players and teams with BABIPs well above .300 and well below .300 tend to regress to the mean.
Hopefully that’s what happens with the Cardinals this year.
St. Louis currently ranks 25th with a .271 BABIP and even if they do end the season as a bad hitting team, they would certainly be unlucky to end the year with that low of a BABIP.
To help put that number in perspective let me point out two things. The first is that .271 would be the Cardinals lowest single season BABIP since 1955 (.270). The second is that it would also be the 8th lowest single-season BABIP this century. That’s even more notable when you consider that 4 of those seasons came in 2020 when there was too short of a season to see real regression to the mean.
So all of this is to say that the Cardinals, for as bad as they have been offensively this year, are incredibly likely to see more balls in play drop for hits as the season continues. I do not expect them to continue running a .271 BABIP.
Even last year, a year in which the Cardinals won just 71 games, the team finished the year with a .291 BABIP. For a reference point, that ranked 24th in the league, which is basically where the Cardinals rank now but the difference between those two is 20 points.
Again, the Cardinals are likely to see improved batted ball “luck” (i.e. batted balls dropping for hits) as the season continues. That’s an encouraging sign.
It’s not the only one, though.
It’s time to talk about xwOBA now. Expected weighted on base average takes the exit velocity and launch angle of a batted ball (and sometimes sprint speed) to determine the expected result of that batted ball.
Plug all the batted balls in the wOBA formula and you have xwOBA. This is a useful metric because it can give us a metric that uses quality of contact to determine what a hitter or a team’s expected results should be. So that weakly hit single that squeaked through the infield for a hit and that 110 mph scorcher that got caught by a plus defensive outfielder are now assigned values that are more appropriate to the type of contact that was made.
So how are the Cardinals doing in this metric? And, perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this article, how does their xwOBA compare to their wOBA?
As you might expect, the Cardinals are due for some positive regression here.
As a team the Cardinals are currently sporting a .291 wOBA. Their expected wOBA is much better at .319. In fact, that 28 point gap is the third largest gap in the majors.
So what this tells us is that the Cardinals have hit the ball better than they have gotten credit for. What it also tells us is that the Cardinals haven’t hit the ball all that well.
Both of those things can be true. The Cardinals rank 15th in the majors in xwOBA which is solidly middle of the road but certainly disappointing for this offense. So while the Cardinals probably don’t “deserve” to be the 5th worst offense in baseball, they don’t really “deserve” to be one of the top offenses in the game either.
At least to this point in the season.
Final Thoughts
So where does the Cardinals offense stand? The numbers are pretty clear. This isn’t a good offense but it’s likely something of a mediocre offense that has experienced some poor batted ball luck. That’s slightly encouraging but this offense does need to be better if the Cardinals are going to push for a division title and a playoff berth.
Keep in mind, though, that this offense has seen Michael Siani and Victor Scott getting consistent at-bats. It’s also seen major struggles from Paul Goldschmidt, Nolan Arenado, Nolan Gorman, and Jordan Walker.
It’s the latter issue that is more concerning. That’s because Scott is already back in Triple-A and Siani won’t be a starter when Dylan Carlson and Tommy Edman get healthy. Those replacements in the lineup will lead to an uptick in production. That much I’m sure of.
The bigger issue is the performance of 4 of the Cardinals best hitters from last year. If Walker, Gorman, Goldschmidt, and Arenado are struggling to hit then this offense will have a hard time turning things around.
That’s the subject for another article though.
For now, the good news is that the team is slowly on it’s way to getting healthier, we’ve seen signs of life from Nolan Arenado, and there may be some positive regression in store for the lineup as a whole.
Thanks for reading.