Plus a bunch of Ferris Beuller quotes for no reason. Oh… and a little baseball analysis.
I’m back! And when I say back, I mean back. Like back back. Not the back that I was when I prematurely said I was back a few weeks ago. I was just sorta back then. And sorta back is not the same as all the way back. I was just back then. But now I’m back back. I should have been more clear before. But now I mean it when I say that I am the back back kind of back.
Until I leave again next week…
But I’ll be back back back after that.
Oh, and I also have a confession to make. While I’ve been away, I haven’t followed Cardinals baseball. Like, at all.
You know that scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when he tries to play the clarinet and it sounds like a screeching cat dying a cruel death, and he says, “Never had one lesson?” That’s me today. At least in terms of the 2024 Cardinals. I’ve never had a one lesson in this team.
I have watched exactly 3 Cardinals baseball games this season. Opening Day. Then part of another game in the Padres series. Then part of Monday night’s game, including the comeback win. That’s it.
So, even though Viva El Birdos has the high historical standards of the National Symphony Orchestra when it comes to Cardinals analysis, my knowledge level and practical experience with the 2024 version of the Cards is something closer to Bueller… Bueller… Bueller… levels.
Before you sick a rottweiler on me, at least I’m here now and trying to give you some Cardinals content. But I’ll warn you, this is going to be the “never had one lesson!” kind of content. It’s not going to be very in-depth. It’s not going to include any play-on-the-field context. It’s just some stats, some questions, and some generalities.
But at least I’ll frame that rather substance-less analysis in some interesting movie quotes and pop-culture references. Entertaining you is the least I can do today.
Plus, this process of digging into some stats for a team I am just now starting to watch should give me a chance to get back – back back – to the level of content that you expect and demand from me, your own snooty snooty snotty snotty Sausage King of… uh… Cape Girardeau.
Relax! I’m a professional.
(Give yourself 10 VEB bucks if you immediately quoted the next line.)
Apparently, the Cardinals haven’t played very well while I’ve been away. I did check boxscores and standings while galivanting around South America. (Galivanting in Paraguayan Guananese means “building brick walls.”) A loss. A win. A loss. A win. A loss. A win. Then it was more like loss, loss, loss, loss. The offense seemed to go dead. Twitter/X got cranky. And I was glad to turn off all my podcasts, shut off any reading, and dig into some brick-and-mortar building a church while listening to Paraguayan music. (Which includes a surprising amount of accordion.)
What happened? Where did the offense go?
Maybe you all have figured it out and, if so, you can tell me in the comments. But I didn’t have time each day to dig through 100-300 long comment sections on articles I didn’t write to find out. So, I’m coming in here blind to begin to answer that question myself.
I’ll use some quick-n-dirty runs scored vs runs allowed and xwOBA vs. actual wOBA data to do just that.
The offense should be pretty good. It seems like it’s been pretty bad. To jarringly switch to my intended motif, my goal today is to answer Haddaway’s immortal question: Was it love luck? Baby, don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. No more.
It’s an important question because, after living through 2023, I’m not emotionally ready for a repeat. With lingering questions about the rotation, if the offense is going to fall apart this season, the Cards might not be able to pull out of the very familiar hole they’ve dug for themselves so far this season. The Cards are riding way too close to the line established in 2023 for my tenuous comfort.
As a point of reference, the Cardinals are 10-13 after 23 games this season and in last place in the surprisingly competent NL Central.
(Sidenote: I did warn everyone in the last podcast and in my season preview articles that the Central always has good teams, even when it seems like they shouldn’t. We’re already seeing some of that. It might not hold up. But it might. It probably will.)
Last year at the 23-game mark, the Cardinals were 9-14.
One walk-off win on Monday night is all that separates this team from the previous Cardinals team.
That’s what inspired the title. (Which was briefly derailed by a random descent into 80s movie lore and an inexplicable obsession with the word back). Was it luck? Baby, don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me no more.
So far the club has allowed 4.3 runs per game. Not awesome. Not bad. They’ve scored 3.5 runs per game. Brutal. That’s tied with the Twins, Marlins, and Rockies for the 3rd worst mark in baseball, just ahead of the hapless Athletics and punchless White Sox.
The average number of runs scored in the NL is 4.6. In runs allowed, it’s 4.5.
So far, things have pretty much flipped from what I expected. The pitching has been average from a runs-allowed perspective, which is probably better than we could hope for. (Especially since Gray was out to start the season.) The Cardinal’s woes mostly rest on the offense.
What’s going on there?
Let’s look at a few individual performances and then the whole team. We’re looking for signs of real trouble and/or bad luck. That means wOBA and xwOBA.
Paul Goldschmidt: .265 wOBA vs. .295 xwOBA
Goldy entered the season slumping pretty hard. With his age and a down season last year, that has inspired more than a little dooming on the internet. But it’s not the first time that Goldschmidt has had a slow start. In his MVP 2022 season, Goldy had a .216/.310/.275 slash line with a .270 wOBA and a 74 wRC+ on April 23rd. Right now, he’s at .179/.289/.218 with a (Baseball Savant) .265 wOBA.
With a BABIP of .255 and a .038 ISO, there’s plenty of room to hope for improvement. Goldy will get better. There’s no doubt. Even if he doesn’t return to his MVP totals of two seasons ago, Goldy can only move up.
He also should be better than he is so far this season. At Baseball Savant, his x (expected) wOBA is .295, 30 points higher than his actual wOBA.
xwOBA takes a look at a batter’s rate data – exit velocity, launch angle, etc. – and assigns probability factors to it. It’s a way of saying what a batter’s performance level should be over a normal or expected (x) playing environment. It’s a useful stat. Not perfect.
But it works well enough in tandem with wOBA, which looks at the same data without adjusting it for probabilities.
wOBA is what did happen. xwOBA is what should have happened.
When a player’s xwOBA is significantly lower than their wOBA, it’s a sign of bad luck – luck that should turn around for a player once a sample size starts to even out.
Back to Goldschmidt… His .295 (expected) xwOBA isn’t great, but it is thirty points higher than his actual wOBA (.265). That thirty-point difference represents some fairly significant bad luck and has caused some very real – not hypothetical – lost runs scored and lost games in the standings.
Are there positives in Goldy’s stats? Sort of. It’s not like he’s been crushing the ball and not seeing the results. His slump is real. The stats show it. But it just looks like a typical early-season slump. When we consider his history, we would have to be very jaded and completely unreasonable to believe he’ll continue at this level. Some fans are. I’m not. Goldy has had some bad luck so far. He will get better.
Nolan Gorman: .271 wOBA vs. .301 xwOBA
Speaking of slumps, Gorman has flipped his season around from last year. In 2023, he got off to a hot start and seemed like a potential All-Star heading out of the first month or so of the season. Then he went ice cold. He rebounded with a nice first full-season campaign, landing with a 2.3 fWAR and a .345 wOBA in 464 PAs.
Gorman is streaky. That was a reality for him in the minors and we’ve seen it throughout his brief MLB career. His wOBA by month in 2023 was .370, .399, .201, .395, .288, .385. Streaky.
Baseball Savant has him with a .271 wOBA. That comes along with a painful 38.1% K rate, a 7.1% BB rate, and quite a bit of weaker-than-normal contact.
Like Goldy, Gorman’s BABIP is much lower than expected – .238 vs. .296 last year. His xwOBA is .301. 30 points higher than his wOBA.
Gorman’s been bad. But there’s some bad luck in his performance as well. Hopefully, Monday night’s walk-off get him going. When he’s on, he can carry this team. There’s not much reason to believe that Gorman will stay bad all season. He’s just streaky.
Jordan Walker: .232 wOBA vs. .304 xwOBA
The heading data pretty much gives this one away. Walker has a 72-point difference between his actual performance – .232 – and his expected performance – .304.
Walker’s average exit velocity is three points higher than last year. His launch angle is 2 degrees above last year. (Remember, he started the year pounding balls into the ground.) His hard hit % is identical to last season. He is K’ing more frequently but he’s also walking at a higher rate. He’s whiffing less, chasing less, and seeing more balls in the zone that he’s swinging at slightly more often.
If I didn’t look at his slash and counting stats, I would probably be convinced that he was having a pretty good season. Somehow, he’s not. Walker, despite 5 barrels and a higher barrel rate than 2023, doesn’t have a homer on the season. His slugging % is .273. His wRC+ is 46.
That’s the kind of stuff you expect when a player has a 70-point gap between his xwOBA and his actual wOBA. It also shows up in more traditional “luck” stats. His BABIP is .225.
Walker is doing a lot of the things that he needs to do to take a step forward this season. It’s too bad that he is not seeing the results yet, but they should come. I was pretty optimistic about Walker heading into this season. After looking at the rates behind what he’s done so far, I’m still optimistic.
Oh, and he still has a neutral OAA. Give him time. He’ll bust out in a big way.
What about the rest of the offensive regulars?
These three aren’t the only ones who are underperforming. Below I’ve listed the difference between wOBA and xwOBA for all Cardinals hitters with 20 PAs or higher. (I switched over to Fangraphs rather than Baseball Savant just for ease of access. Savant and Fangraphs have slightly different wOBAs and xwOBAs but the gaps will be about the same.) A minus number indicates they are underperforming their expected data. A positive number indicates they are overperforming.
Lars Nootbaar: -107
Alec Burleson: -90
Victor Scott: -73
Jordan Walker: -72
Ivan Herrera: -52
Paul Goldschmidt: -31
Nolan Gorman: -30
Michael Siani: +25
Nolan Arenado: +32
Willson Contreras: +38
Masyn Win: +49
This is a terrible way to approach this statistically, but the Cardinals are a combined -311 points in xwOBA. If that seems like a lot, it’s because it is. It’s like taking a league-average hitter out of the lineup and replacing him with Dirty Harry Ed Rooney.
But it’s just not going to last. We’ll have to see what happens with Gorman and Goldschmidt. Walker should be able to translate what he’s doing right now into some quality production.
Nootbaar is back and healthy and is crushing the ball but the bad luck bug has bitten him, too. Burleson deserves better than he’s received. Donovan will be better. Herrera has been good so far and will be better if his batted-ball ability holds up.
There’s a lot more room for improvement from this offense than room for continued underperformance.
The pitching? Well, after watching the D-Backs bat around on Tuesday night, I’m not feeling very confident there. But that’s another article and another kind of pain.
So… verdict time.
Was it luck? Some bad luck, yes.
Baby don’t hurt me? Hang in there. I think the team will be fine in the long run. By fine, I guess I mean watchable. This team shouldn’t lose 90+ games. I’m still not feeling great about the playoffs.
And, well, that’s it. This article is over.
You’re still here? It’s over… Go home… (Shooing motion)… Go!